Remembering the Uprising of the 20,000

On a cold November morning one hundred years ago today, more than 20,000 immigrant workers--mostly young Jewish women--took to the streets of the lower east side of New York, kicking off an eleven-week general strike of the shirtwaist industry knows as the Uprising of the 20,000. The strike exploded the assumption of most union leaders that women workers were too capricious to be organized or to be effective strikers, and led to the "needle trades" becoming one of the best organized fields in the United States.

Though often described in popular accounts at the time and since as a spontaneous uprising, the industry-wide strike was actually the culmination of three years of intense organizing by young Jewish women like Pauline Newman, Rose Schneiderman, and Clara Lemlich. These women were farbrente Yidishe meydlekh (fiery Jewish girls, or Jewesses with Attitude, as we might call them), but they were by no means hotheaded. Rather, they were committed activists with years of work experience, a clear political grasp of the garment industry, and audacity to boot.

A series of smaller strikes in the summer of 1909 led up to the massive November walk-out. Garment workers were fed up with the low wages, long hours, unsafe working conditions, and sexual harassment they faced on the job. Out on strike, these young women faced additional threats--thugs hired by the companies beat strikers on the picket lines; police arrested them on trumped-up charges; and judges railed against them in court, fining them and sentencing workers as young as ten years old to the workhouse.

By November, with union strike funds nearly depleted, it seemed as if the workers might lose. But the small Local 25 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), which represented shirtwaist makers, instead recommended a general strike that would shut down the entire shirtwaist industry. Thousands of women came to a meeting at Cooper Union on November 22 to discuss the proposal. After hours of inconclusive speeches from (mostly male) union leaders, Clara Lemlich--a leader of one of the small walk-outs--demanded to speak and cut through the rhetoric. "I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are here to decide is whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared--now." Her words ignited her fellow workers, and the crowd took the traditional Jewish oath "If I forget thee O Jerusalem..." (replacing "Jerusalem" with "union") to support the general strike.

Like other important female activists whose calculated political actions are rewritten as spontaneous and accidental (Rosa Parks, for example), Lemlich was described in contemporary accounts as an anonymous hero, "a wisp of a girl, still in her teens," without any political context. In fact, she was 23 and had been working and organizing for 8 years. For years, she had been arguing to older, male union leaders that the ILGWU would never succeed without the inclusion of women. She served on the executive board of Local 25 of the ILGWU, and was likely recognized by many workers when she took the podium at Cooper Union. In the months leading up to the Uprising of the 20,000, Lemlich had already suffered six broken ribs and been arrested 17 times. (After the Uprising, she went on to a life-long career as a community organizer, suffragist, communist, and peace activist, as well as wife and mother.)

The strike was only partially successful. Workers won some of their demands, such as a 52-hour week, at least four paid holidays per year, and no discrimination against union members; membership of the ILGWU swelled; and a five year wave of garment strikes spread across the country. The demands for safer working conditions, however, were not met--to tragic ends for many women, most notably the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York, which burned in 1911, killing 146 workers.

Despite these mixed results, the Uprising of the 20,000 taught garment workers, and the labor movement in general, some lasting lessons. Its leaders learned the importance of building coalitions--with union men, who still held most of the leadership positions; with women workers of other racial and ethnic backgrounds; and with progressive middle- and upper-class women, who were important allies in the strike. Members of the Women's Trade Union League protected garment workers on the picket line with their presence, which tended to discourage violence from police and thugs and to attract media attention and some sympathy when violence did erupt. (Much like the white volunteers of the civil rights movement's Freedom Summer in 1964 brought national attention to the daily brutality of life in Mississippi for blacks.)

The strike also became both a "symbol and catalyst," as scholar Annelise Orleck put it, of working women's politics, shaping an integrated class and gender consciousness into what came to be known as "industrial feminism"--a model of social change that grew out of the interactions of working women and feminist activists and the impact of shop floor experiences on women's political lives.

One hundred years ago today, Jewish women changed the shape of the American labor movement. But while the world has transformed in the century since then, the garment industry actually doesn't look all that different. It is still peopled by immigrants, mostly women, many working in sweatshop conditions. It is still strengthened by coalition building and by a political approach that melds class and gender consciousness. We would do well not only to remember Lemlich and the women of 1909, but to honor their memories by taking their hard-won lessons out of the history books and into the 21^st century labor movement.