Clara Lemlich
Encyclopedia
Clara Lemlich Shavelson was a leader of the Uprising of 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York's
garment industry in 1909. Later blacklist
ed from the industry for her labor union work, she became a member of the Communist Party USA
and a consumer activist. In her last years as a nursing home resident she helped to organize the staff.
village of Gorodok to a Jewish family. Raised in a predominantly Yiddish-speaking village, young Lemlich learned to read Russian
over her parents' objections, sewing buttonholes and writing letters for illiterate neighbors to raise money for her books. After a neighbor introduced her to revolutionary literature, Lemlich became a committed socialist
. She came to the United States
with her family in 1903, following a pogrom
in Kishinev.
Lemlich was able to find a job in the garment industry upon her arrival in New York. Conditions there had become even worse since the turn of the century, as the new industrial sewing machine allowed employers to demand twice as much production from their employees, who often had to supply their own machines and carry them to and from work. Lemlich, along with many of her co-workers, rebelled against the long hours, low pay, lack of opportunities for advancement, and humiliating treatment from supervisors. Lemlich became involved in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union
and was elected to the executive board of Local 25 of the ILGWU.
Lemlich quickly made a name for herself among her fellow workers, leading several strikes of shirtwaist makers and challenging the mostly male leadership of the union to organize women garment workers. She combined boldness with a good deal of charm (she was known for her fine singing voice) and personal bravery (she returned to the picket line in 1909 after having several ribs broken when gangsters hired by the employers attacked the picketers).
Lemlich came to the attention of the outside world at the mass meeting held at Cooper Union
on November 22, 1909 to rally support for the striking shirtwaist workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and Leiserson Company. After the leading figures of the American labor movement and socialist leaders of the Lower East Side
spoke in general terms about the need for solidarity and preparedness, Lemlich demanded the opportunity to speak. Lifted onto the platform she demanded action:
The crowd responded enthusiastically and, after taking a traditional Yiddish oath — "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise" — voted for a general strike. Approximately 20,000 out of the 32,000 workers in the shirtwaist trade walked out in the next two days; this would become known as the Uprising of the 20,000
. Lemlich took a leading role in bringing workers out, speaking at rallies until she lost her voice. The strike lasted until February 10, 1910, producing union contracts at almost every shop, but not at Triangle Shirtwaist.
Triangle Shirtwaist became a synonym for "sweatshop" the following year, when nearly 150 garment workers were either burned to death or died jumping to escape the flames. Lemlich searched through the armory where the dead had been taken to search for a missing cousin; a newspaper reporter described her as convulsed by hysterical laughter and tears when she did not find her.
and Pauline Newman
, Lemlich portrayed women's suffrage as necessary for the improvement of working women's lives, both inside and outside the workplace:
Lemlich, like Newman and Schneiderman, also had strong personal and political differences with the upper and middle class women who led the suffrage movement. Mary Beard
fired Lemlich, for reasons that are not entirely clear, less than a year after hiring her to campaign for suffrage in 1911.
Lemlich continued her suffrage activities, founding the Wage Earners League, a working class alternative to middle class suffrage organizations, along with Schneiderman, Leonora O'Reilly and two other women garment workers. Yet while the League admitted only working class women to membership, it was dependent on non-working class women for support and, in deference to its supporters' wishes, affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association — the organization to which it saw itself as an alternative — rather than with the Socialist Party
Women's Committee.
The Wage Earners League passed out of existence, however, after organizing a successful rally at Cooper Union at which Lemlich, Schneiderman and others spoke. Lemlich continued her suffrage activities for the Women's Trade Union League
, while Schneiderman, who quit the WTUL at that time, went to work for the ILGWU before returning to the WTUL several years later. Other activists, such as Pauline Newman, worked under the aegis of the Socialist Party, which supported suffrage even though many in the leadership considered it a distraction from the more urgent business of class struggle.
, Martha Shavelson Schaffer and Rita Shavelson Margules. Moving to the solidly working class neighborhood of East New York, then later to Brighton Beach
, she did not return to work, other than on an occasional part-time basis, for the next thirty years. Instead she devoted herself to raising a family and organizing housewives.
Others had organized in this area before Lemlich: Jewish housewives in New York had boycotted kosher butchers to protest high prices in the first decade of the twentieth century and the Brooklyn Tenants Union led rent strike
s and fought evictions. After joining the Communist Party
, which largely disdained the notion of consumer organizing, Lemlich and Kate Gitlow, wife of Benjamin Gitlow
, attempted to organize a union of housewives that would address not only consumers' issues, but housing and education as well. The United Council of Working Class Housewives also raised money and organized relief for strikers in Passaic, New Jersey
during the bitter 1926 strike.
In 1929, after the Communist Party created a Women's Commission, Lemlich launched the United Council of Working Class Women, which eventually had nearly fifty branches in New York City, as well as affiliates in Philadelphia, Seattle, Chicago
, Los Angeles
, San Francisco and Detroit. The organization recruited among CP members but did not identify the Council with the CP or press non-Party members of the Council to join the party as well.
The UCWCW led a widespread boycott of butcher shops to protest high meat prices in 1935, using the militant tactics of flying squadrons of picketers that shut down more than 4000 butcher shops in New York City. The strike became nationwide and the UCWCW won support outside the Jewish and African-American communities to which it had been limited in New York.
The UCWCW renamed itself the Progressive Women's Councils the following years as part of the Popular Front politics of the day. The Party withdrew support for the councils and discontinued publications aimed at women, however, in 1938. Lemlich continued to be activein the PWC, however, and was a local leader in it after it affiliated with the International Worker's Order in the 1940s. The Councils organized even broader boycotts to protest high prices in 1948 and 1951, before accusations of Communist Party dominance destroyed it in the early 1950s. The IWO was ordered dissolved by the State of New York in 1952.
Lemlich continued her activities as part of the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs, which raised funds for Red Mogen David, protesting nuclear weapons, campaigned for ratification of the United Nations
' Convention on Genocide and against the War in Vietnam, and forging alliances with Sojourners for Truth, an African-American women's civil rights organization.
Lemlich was also active in Unemployed Council activities and in founding the Emma Lazarus Council, which supported tenants' rights. The Emma Lazarus Council declared in 1931 that no one would be evicted in Brighton Beach for inability to pay rent, then backed that up by rallying supporters to prevent evictions and returning tenants' furniture to their apartments in those cases in which authorities attempted to effect eviction.
Lemlich remained an unwavering member of the Communist Party, denouncing the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs. Her passport was revoked after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1951. She retired from garment work in 1954, then fought a long battle with the ILG to obtain a pension. After the death of her second husband she moved to California to be near her children and in-laws in the 1960s, she entered the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles. As a resident she persuaded the management to join in the United Farm Workers
' boycotts of grapes and lettuce, then prodded the workers there to organize.
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
garment industry in 1909. Later blacklist
Blacklist
A blacklist is a list or register of entities who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. As a verb, to blacklist can mean to deny someone work in a particular field, or to ostracize a person from a certain social circle...
ed from the industry for her labor union work, she became a member of the Communist Party USA
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
and a consumer activist. In her last years as a nursing home resident she helped to organize the staff.
Early years
Lemlich was born March 28, 1886 in the UkrainianUkraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
village of Gorodok to a Jewish family. Raised in a predominantly Yiddish-speaking village, young Lemlich learned to read Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
over her parents' objections, sewing buttonholes and writing letters for illiterate neighbors to raise money for her books. After a neighbor introduced her to revolutionary literature, Lemlich became a committed socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
. She came to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
with her family in 1903, following a pogrom
Kishinev pogrom
The Kishinev pogrom was an anti-Jewish riot that took place in Chişinău, then the capital of the Bessarabia province of the Russian Empire on April 6-7, 1903.-First pogrom:...
in Kishinev.
Lemlich was able to find a job in the garment industry upon her arrival in New York. Conditions there had become even worse since the turn of the century, as the new industrial sewing machine allowed employers to demand twice as much production from their employees, who often had to supply their own machines and carry them to and from work. Lemlich, along with many of her co-workers, rebelled against the long hours, low pay, lack of opportunities for advancement, and humiliating treatment from supervisors. Lemlich became involved in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union
International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union
The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union was once one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first U.S. unions to have a primarily female membership, and a key player in the labor history of the 1920s and 1930s...
and was elected to the executive board of Local 25 of the ILGWU.
Lemlich quickly made a name for herself among her fellow workers, leading several strikes of shirtwaist makers and challenging the mostly male leadership of the union to organize women garment workers. She combined boldness with a good deal of charm (she was known for her fine singing voice) and personal bravery (she returned to the picket line in 1909 after having several ribs broken when gangsters hired by the employers attacked the picketers).
Lemlich came to the attention of the outside world at the mass meeting held at Cooper Union
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
on November 22, 1909 to rally support for the striking shirtwaist workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and Leiserson Company. After the leading figures of the American labor movement and socialist leaders of the Lower East Side
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
spoke in general terms about the need for solidarity and preparedness, Lemlich demanded the opportunity to speak. Lifted onto the platform she demanded action:
- "I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I make a motion that we go out in a general strike."
The crowd responded enthusiastically and, after taking a traditional Yiddish oath — "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise" — voted for a general strike. Approximately 20,000 out of the 32,000 workers in the shirtwaist trade walked out in the next two days; this would become known as the Uprising of the 20,000
New York shirtwaist strike of 1909
The New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, also known as the Uprising of the 20,000, was a labor strike primarily involving Jewish women working in New York shirtwaist factories. Led by Clara Lemlich and supported by the National Women's Trade Union League of America , the strike began in November 1909...
. Lemlich took a leading role in bringing workers out, speaking at rallies until she lost her voice. The strike lasted until February 10, 1910, producing union contracts at almost every shop, but not at Triangle Shirtwaist.
Triangle Shirtwaist became a synonym for "sweatshop" the following year, when nearly 150 garment workers were either burned to death or died jumping to escape the flames. Lemlich searched through the armory where the dead had been taken to search for a missing cousin; a newspaper reporter described her as convulsed by hysterical laughter and tears when she did not find her.
Suffrage
Blacklisted from the industry and at odds with the conservative leadership of the ILGWU, Lemlich devoted herself to the campaign for women's suffrage. Like her colleagues Rose SchneidermanRose Schneiderman
Rose Schneiderman was a prominent United States labor union leader, socialist, and feminist of the first part of the twentieth century...
and Pauline Newman
Pauline Newman (labor activist)
Pauline M. Newman was an American labor activist.Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, Newman was the daughter of Jewish-American immigrants and was raised in New York City. Like many poor immigrants, she went into the workforce at a young age. In 1901, she started working in a shirtwaist factory, the...
, Lemlich portrayed women's suffrage as necessary for the improvement of working women's lives, both inside and outside the workplace:
- "The manufacturer has a vote; the bosses have votes; the foremen have votes, the inspectors have votes. The working girl has no vote. When she asks to have a building in which she must work made clean and safe, the officials do not have to listen. When she asks not to work such long hours, they do not have to listen. . . . [U]ntil the men in the Legislature at Albany represent her as well as the bosses and the foremen, she will not get justice; she will not get fair conditions. That is why the working woman now says that she must have the vote.
Lemlich, like Newman and Schneiderman, also had strong personal and political differences with the upper and middle class women who led the suffrage movement. Mary Beard
Mary Ritter Beard
Mary Ritter Beard was an American historian and archivist, who played an important role in the women's suffrage movement and was a lifelong advocate of social justice through educational and activist roles in both the labor and woman's rights movements...
fired Lemlich, for reasons that are not entirely clear, less than a year after hiring her to campaign for suffrage in 1911.
Lemlich continued her suffrage activities, founding the Wage Earners League, a working class alternative to middle class suffrage organizations, along with Schneiderman, Leonora O'Reilly and two other women garment workers. Yet while the League admitted only working class women to membership, it was dependent on non-working class women for support and, in deference to its supporters' wishes, affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association — the organization to which it saw itself as an alternative — rather than with the Socialist Party
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
Women's Committee.
The Wage Earners League passed out of existence, however, after organizing a successful rally at Cooper Union at which Lemlich, Schneiderman and others spoke. Lemlich continued her suffrage activities for the Women's Trade Union League
Women's Trade Union League
The Women's Trade Union League was a U.S. organization of both working class and more well-off women formed in 1903 to support the efforts of women to organize labor unions and to eliminate sweatshop conditions...
, while Schneiderman, who quit the WTUL at that time, went to work for the ILGWU before returning to the WTUL several years later. Other activists, such as Pauline Newman, worked under the aegis of the Socialist Party, which supported suffrage even though many in the leadership considered it a distraction from the more urgent business of class struggle.
Consumer advocacy
Lemlich married Joe Shavelson in 1913. She was the mother of Irving Charles VelsonIrving Charles Velson
Irving Charles Velson was an American who had a long career in the Communist Party of the United States secret apparatus and who allegedly worked for Soviet Military Intelligence . He was the son of Clara Lemlich Shavelson and changed his name to Velson by 1938...
, Martha Shavelson Schaffer and Rita Shavelson Margules. Moving to the solidly working class neighborhood of East New York, then later to Brighton Beach
Brighton Beach
Brighton Beach is an oceanside neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. As of 2000, it has a population of 75,692 with a total of 31,228 households.-Location:...
, she did not return to work, other than on an occasional part-time basis, for the next thirty years. Instead she devoted herself to raising a family and organizing housewives.
Others had organized in this area before Lemlich: Jewish housewives in New York had boycotted kosher butchers to protest high prices in the first decade of the twentieth century and the Brooklyn Tenants Union led rent strike
Rent strike
A rent strike is a method of protest commonly employed against large landlords. In a rent strike, a group of tenants come together and agree to refuse to pay their rent en masse until a specific list of demands is met by the landlord...
s and fought evictions. After joining the Communist Party
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
, which largely disdained the notion of consumer organizing, Lemlich and Kate Gitlow, wife of Benjamin Gitlow
Benjamin Gitlow
Benjamin "Ben" Gitlow was a prominent American socialist politician of the early twentieth century and a founding member of the Communist Party USA. From the end of the 1930s, Gitlow turned to conservatism and wrote two sensational exposés of American Communism, books which were very influential...
, attempted to organize a union of housewives that would address not only consumers' issues, but housing and education as well. The United Council of Working Class Housewives also raised money and organized relief for strikers in Passaic, New Jersey
Passaic, New Jersey
Passaic is a city in Passaic County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city had a total population of 69,781, maintaining its status as the 15th largest municipality in New Jersey with an increase of 1,920 residents from the 2000 Census population of 67,861...
during the bitter 1926 strike.
In 1929, after the Communist Party created a Women's Commission, Lemlich launched the United Council of Working Class Women, which eventually had nearly fifty branches in New York City, as well as affiliates in Philadelphia, Seattle, Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, San Francisco and Detroit. The organization recruited among CP members but did not identify the Council with the CP or press non-Party members of the Council to join the party as well.
The UCWCW led a widespread boycott of butcher shops to protest high meat prices in 1935, using the militant tactics of flying squadrons of picketers that shut down more than 4000 butcher shops in New York City. The strike became nationwide and the UCWCW won support outside the Jewish and African-American communities to which it had been limited in New York.
The UCWCW renamed itself the Progressive Women's Councils the following years as part of the Popular Front politics of the day. The Party withdrew support for the councils and discontinued publications aimed at women, however, in 1938. Lemlich continued to be activein the PWC, however, and was a local leader in it after it affiliated with the International Worker's Order in the 1940s. The Councils organized even broader boycotts to protest high prices in 1948 and 1951, before accusations of Communist Party dominance destroyed it in the early 1950s. The IWO was ordered dissolved by the State of New York in 1952.
Lemlich continued her activities as part of the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs, which raised funds for Red Mogen David, protesting nuclear weapons, campaigned for ratification of the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
' Convention on Genocide and against the War in Vietnam, and forging alliances with Sojourners for Truth, an African-American women's civil rights organization.
Lemlich was also active in Unemployed Council activities and in founding the Emma Lazarus Council, which supported tenants' rights. The Emma Lazarus Council declared in 1931 that no one would be evicted in Brighton Beach for inability to pay rent, then backed that up by rallying supporters to prevent evictions and returning tenants' furniture to their apartments in those cases in which authorities attempted to effect eviction.
Lemlich remained an unwavering member of the Communist Party, denouncing the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs. Her passport was revoked after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1951. She retired from garment work in 1954, then fought a long battle with the ILG to obtain a pension. After the death of her second husband she moved to California to be near her children and in-laws in the 1960s, she entered the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles. As a resident she persuaded the management to join in the United Farm Workers
United Farm Workers
The United Farm Workers of America is a labor union created from the merging of two groups, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee led by Filipino organizer Larry Itliong, and the National Farm Workers Association led by César Chávez...
' boycotts of grapes and lettuce, then prodded the workers there to organize.
External links
- Life in the sweatshops
- Video: Clara Lemlich, A Strike Leader's Diary
- "Remembering the Waistmakers General Strike, 1909"
Further reading
- Orleck, Annalise. Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1995
- Shavelson, Clara Lemlich. "Remembering the Waistmakers General Strike," 1909, Ed. by Morris U. Schappes, Jewish Currents (November 1982).