We have seen our small strikes smached, our brave girls battered by the goones and their own New York policemen. We are a new union not yet strong . Not strong enough for victory. 

Lozt mir epes zogen.

-       Excuse me miss but you are not listed on this programm, in an event like this we must proceed…

-       It’s Clara Lemlich, she had been beaten by the goones and the police of Leiserson. 

-       Let her speak.

-       Ich mouz epes zogen, 

-       I am sorry miss…

Hear me , hert mir aus, hert mir aus.

Ich bin an arbeït maïdle, aïne foun die vos striken gegen die unmenschleche bedigungen. 

What does she said ? I am a working girl, one of those in strike against the terrible conditions of work.

Ich bin mid fun heren die alle redes fun die rednes.

I am tired of listening to all these  speeches.

Ich leig fur a resolutzie, fur an algemeïne strike zu rufen yetz.

Yetz. Yeah.

Allright, Allright. 

Will you all of you take the old hebrew oath ? if I turn treator to the cause, I now  pledge. May this hand wither from the arm  I raise; 

Strike, strike, strike, stike……

Rita :

This is a photo-album. I haven’t looked at it in a long time. There’s lot of dirt on there. This is a carton full of old photographs of my mother, her family, It will be very interesting to look at those, and I am glad of the opportunity now to finally look at them again and share them with my daughters, and to share them with you, so that together we can picture what life must have been like for mother when she was a young woman.

Clara’s diary 

I was born in 1886 in a small shtetl near Kishinev, in the Ukraine. My family  background was very modest.  My mother, the breadwinner of the family, kept a grocery store.

In the house we spoke Yiddish and despite my parents forbade it, I learned Russian from a young peasant. After the great pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 our family, like so many thousands of families, decided to emigrate. I was 16 when I left for America with my parents.”

Rita

……….Evey thing that is in here you made me a copy. So every thing is dupplicated. Except this I don’t know where it comes from. We don’t have a copy of them. Allright .So where are we ?

Clara’s diary

"Two weeks after we landed I went to work in a clothing factory. We worked from morning to night seven days a week. Those who worked on machines had to carry them to the factory in the morning and home every night. There were two kinds of work, regular that is salared, and piece work. Most girls did not do  salary work, most did piece work and they brought the work home with them. 

Adela

Most of the shops at that time were located in cellars, in the back of stores, in old dilapidated buildings on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Most of the shops were dark and very crowded. 

Clara’s diary

The roaring of the machines, the hissing of the powerbelt and the yelling of the foreman was unbearable. We had no permission to talk and no time to think. The bosses hired these people to break us. The factory was like a legal form of slavery.It was not only our arms and time we sold but our souls too.”

"If we talked we risked getting fired. At the end of the day they searched us as if we were thieves."

Adela 

This discrimination, these practices undermine conditions for all workers, and only all the workers together can change this. 

We have to learn from these young girls of yesterday. 

I am happy to be alive and pay tribute to those heroic and valuant strikers of long ago. I personally receive retirement benefits from our union, for which I am very thankful. Clara Lemlich-Shavelson. »

Fille : It is so powerful. It’s still very true.

Rita : Unfortunately it is very true, but that was a very important part of the whole history of the labour movement, because so much followed after, so much became better. I don’t know how much better it is today, because unions are not longer as strong as they used to be. 

Clara’s diary 

I was fired from two shops for organizing strikes, then I was hired by Leiserson, where a strike broke out in September 1909. It was led by the cutters, who were skilled workers, the elite of the factory.

We girls understood nothing of economic problems. All we knew was the bitter reality of working 60 to 80 hours a week for wages. 

It seemed normal that girls should earn less money and get less consideration than men. Most of the girls  were lured by the golden dream that marriage would  blow all  their problems into thin air.

I began to think that women would have to organize, but it was hard to get them to understand. 

The union leaders were all men and during the meetings at cafes late in the evening  they monopolized the discussions about a thousand subjects girls were exlcuded.  We didn’t dare to speak about our preoccupations. How could a man understand the indignities, the abuse,  and the sexual harassment, that we were subjected to every day in the shop?

Rita

This is an old picture ; I don’t know what it represents.

Jane : I don’t think I’ve ever seen these.

Rita : It’s a parade, a labour parade of some kind. Here is my mother on a horse as a young girl. Did you see this ?

Adela : She said : « Twenty was a good age to begin to think of serious love, but that I didn’t need my mother or grandmother’s approval. »

Rita : My mother said that ?

jane : Yes.

Rita : Oh boy !

Adela : She talked a lot to me about like having a relationship in life.

Rita : Jane, these are copies of what you took, I guess.

… And this is my mother and father in steeple chase.

Jane : What’s that ? Coney Island ?

Rita : July.

Rita : This is the fiftieth anniversary the ILGWU put out things. There is a chapter on my mother.

Clara’s diary

"On. Nov. 23, the day after the meeting at Cooper Union, 15,000 women went out on strike. They spilled out of all the shirtwaist shops of Manhattan and Brooklyn and headed for the narrow streets of the East Side.

"They poured into the strike headquarters at 151 Clinton Street and filled 24 smaller halls nearby. It was as if a powerful army had risen up out of the night, demanding to be heard.

Yiddish song 

Fathers, mothers and little children

Are building barricades,

The workers’ brigades are out

Patrolling all the streets.

Clara’s diary

"Clinton Hall was like a boiling cauldron, ringing with voices of men and women, in Yiddish and Italian.

"Amid the clamor of thousands of excited people, bearded Jews peddled apples or pretzels. You could buy yourself lunch for a penny or two.

"Behind a line of tables, the organizers of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) were signing up all those who wanted to join the union. They tried to keep order amid the chaos, to channel the forces the movement has unleashed.

"Union speakers were in demand at all the other meeting sites and on the picket lines that sprung up spontaneously in front of the shops, where the bosses sent scabs and gangs of thugs.”

"Hundreds of policemen were called out to keep order."

Rita : This is in the New York Evening Journal.

And here is some other things. It must have been terrible to work then.

Adela :  Ma, When were you born ?

Rita : I was born in 1924. I’m 80 years old. Remember ?

Fille : Did she talk about this ?

Rita : No.She did not realy talk about the uprising and she did not realy talk much about a lot of other things. All this came out later.

Jane : She talked to me about it a couple of times.

Adela : What did she say ?

jane : She wanted me to know that her ribs were broken, and the way she was telling me, I knew it was really important to her ot her and that she was proud of it and proud of the fact that it didn’t stop her

Adela

Did she talk about politic ?

Jane

Yes she wanted me to know her politics and her experience. And those were important things to remenber.

Adela :  She gave me a lot of inner strenght that I still carry with me . I think a lot of what I do is from sort of what she instilled in me. 

.Rita : To me, she was my mother, gave me a lot of love and taught me lots of things. And I didn’t see her as an activist, I didn’t see her as being so consumed with the world. And yet, that’s what she was and I’m very proud of her. But growing up, I knew she wasn’t home on certain days. I hated to come home from school on wednesday cause my mother was never home. Wednesday was her day to be in Manhattan with her organizations. It was a great experience being her daughter.

Adela: Even better being her grand-daughter.

Rita

This is where the immigrants came in the early 1900. When they came to New York with the idea  that the streets  of New York  were paved with gold.  And my mother  lived here during the uprising of the 20 000 wich was in 1909 and the triangle fire which was in 1911. 

In 1912 she met my father and in 1913 they moved to Brooklyn where my brother was born, my sister was born and I was born. The neibourghood is very different to day from what it must have been in 1905.

Clara’s diary

". In summer, the sidewalks, fire escapes and roofs were all turned into bedrooms so we could catch a breath of air. The shops were cold and dark in winter, stifling hot in summer, dirty, stuffy and unswept. In the evening we left to go home, but what kind of home? I lived in two rooms with my parents. The toilet was in the yard and the bedroom had no window…We had no future to look forward to..."

Erika Swanson (Guide )

This is the home and workshop of Harris and Jenny Rubin. They immigrated from Poland in 1890 ; On average, five or six people lived in one of our apartments, which is three rooms. But it was pretty crowded in here. On this block alone, between Delancey and Broom, there would have been twenty-three small garment shops. 

Many people, once they arrived here, they joint the Mutual Aid Society that was made up of people that were also from their home-country. And they would introduce them to jobs in the neighbourhood. The garment-industry, a lot of people who came over  knew how to sew ; so that was one easy way for them to get in. Otherwise, if they didn’t know English yet, they could go into a government factory, probably with somebody who speaks their native language and they wouldn’t have the stress of trying to learn a new language and a new skill at the same time. And probably sixty percent of the people living in our building were working in the garment industry in some way or another

Guide : We actually love the idea to have this dress recreated from 1898.. But it wasn’t for – women living on the Lower East Side never could have afford it to buy this dress. So the two women, young women that were working in here, they were making dresses that they would never get to wear.

- Did they call them « designers » in those days ? Because my mother was a draper

Guide : Was she a draper ?

Rita :  and she took the fabric and draped it on the dummy. and created a garment that somebody had maybe drawn a sketch of. But they didn’t have a finished garment that a designer made the way they do them today.

-Joel : Rita, what kind of place did grandma live when she was nineteen ? Was it like this ?

Rita : I wasn’t with her, I don’t know.

Joel : - Did you hear any stories.

Rita : No. Couple of stories about in Brooklyn when she was already married, when your mother was alive and she had recently been born, when my Julia, your father was alive. But most of them were hear-say.

Joel : - So she must have been living with friends.

Rita : She lived with her family. 

Joel :- So they probably all lived together.

Rita : They probably lived together, yes. I’m assuming that they did. You know, my uncles and my aunts didn’t come into being… until I was a child.

Joel : - Did you know them ?

Rita : Of course I knew them.

Joel : - How were they like ?

Rita : Different from me. There was my father’s side of the family which was very different from my mother’s side of the family. My father’s side were revolutionaries who came from Russia. My mother’s side were different ; they didn’t approve my mother… her theories and her ideas. They called her the muschuggene, because she wanted an education. And my grandfather was a very religious man ; he didn’t think women should be educated.

Clara’s diary

After my 12 hours work stitching shirtwaists, I would go to the East Broadway branch of the New York public library. There I read all the Russian classics, I studied with passion. 

I would come home late and eat the food my mother kept warm for me. Then I went to bed and slept a few hours before I had to get up and go to work. For me studying was more than a distraction, it was the dominant force in my life.

It seemed to me that to talk to women workers we would need to have women who understood women's problems. I set up a study group with other young women from my shop and we decided to form a union.

I had absolutely no experience in politics. The first time I heard about socialism it was at a meeting about trade unionism.

Yiddish song

I shall cry to god

With a great lament :

Why was I born

To be a seamstress ?

The needles break 

Fifteen every minute,

My fingers get pricked,

And blood flows from them.

Suzanne Conwell 

 The ILGW was founded in 1900. It was founded by representatives from locals around, most of the North-East part of the United States. They were all men and they represented the more skilled part of the industry. It was more the nineteenth century industry in some respects : the cloak-makers, the skilled workers who made the heavy coats et suits and that sort of things. But the girls who entered into – particularly into the mass-production, the shirt-waist industry who were the cheaper labour, began to organize in a periode going up to the start of the shirt-waist strike.

And for the first time, people really saw young, immigrants – girls really in many cases – walking in picket-lines months after months in the winter who experienced a lot of violence. It was a pretty extraordinary experience in New-York history and American history.

Clara’s diary

My first experience of organizing a strike was in the Weisen and Goldstein factory in Manhattan. We were protesting against the work speed-ups.

This factory was called a model workshop. The rooms were light and airy. What a difference from the dark, dirty little rooms of so many sweatshops. But any advantages these new factories offered was offset by the tension produced by mechanization.

I was elected to the executive board of Local 25 of the ILGWU and for three years I went from one shop to another trying to organize the women.

I felt that gradually we were building a kind of collective identity.

Suzanne Conwell : Local 25 was the shirt-waist local, so it represented the workers in that industry which was the industry which was slower-wage where more the women worked. Interesting in that local, it evolved over the years, it evolved into the sportswear local. It was always the local that most represented immigrant workers coming into the least skilled and lowest paid part of the industry. 

My first big assignment was to help organize a general strike of workers in Chinatown who ran local – it was then 23 and 25 – worked in the sportswear industry, worked in small contracting shops, very much like their sisters back in the early years, a very similar kind of industry, similar kind of economic pressures in the industry. It was a very exciting period cause these were new immigrants who spoke almost no English, who in 1981 walked out of their shops on mass, putting their jobs at risk to defend their union and their health benefits. And the fact that it was the same union was something, I think, was inspiring both to the leadership and to some extent to the members, even though their culture was very different and wasn’t part of their own history. It was an inspiring tradition.

Clara’s voice  : It is easier to be a radical than be an anarchist.

Why ?

Why ? because you find people more among radicals than you find among anarchists. 

Anarchist think they are exceptions. You see. 

With radicals it is enterely different. 

Joël : You know, for me it’s about future in the past. Where am I anchored and where am I going ? I can remember when I was beginning to make those tapes. Here I am a senior in college : who I am ? what I want to do ? And thinking about : what do I owe my grandmother and my parents for what they did to get me what I am. And how do I know what’s right ? It’s so hard in this world today to know what to do, what’s the right thing to do, what’s the moral thing to do, what’s the ethical thing to do, how do you live a decent live. And I think Clara gives me some inside it how to do that, and how to take on the sacrifices and fight the good fight, because that’s what’s worth doing. Whether you’ll win or loose, it’s what’s worth doing. There is nothing else that really matters.

Your parents lived a life of sacrifice and struggle for working people. My parents did the same thing. I can just say to Clara : thank you so much for giving me this.

Julia : Grandma and grandpa paid a price, our parents all paid a price for having activists parents –. And then certainly in the fifties in this country, during Mac Carthy, my family paid a horrible price under Mac Carthy. My father was blacklisted, he had a long period he couldn’t find work, and it ultimately drove us from the East coast to the West coast. It was a frightening time. People today dont understand the kind of sacrifices in many different areas that the activists made and chose to risk everything for change and for justice. They don’t understand the sacrifices that people made, and there were a lot of sacrifices.

Joël : So I think that she had a tremendous influence on my mother, least of which is, I learnt from my mother that you can walk into any store, any place, any location and find someone you could talk to. And I think that was something Clara taught her, that there was nothing wrong with going up to a complete stranger and saying : « Have you read the latest leaflet about the house-strike, about the union ? You should come, it is a very important meeting because it’s good for you. And if you dont think it’s good, you come over to my house and tell you why it’s good for you. »

Julia : It’s interesting that you would say that, because I’m thinking back – I’m thinking about my father, and not so much in that particular context. It was very common for us to have lots of different people over at our house. When my father sat down to talk to someone, within five minutes he practically knew everything about them. 

And I think Clara had the same kind of hunger to learn and hear new things. I dont think she ever shade away from – she was not afraid of new ideas

Joël : I remember, there was a… at college… and my father said : « What do you want to be when you’re grand ? » And he says : « It’s easy, I want to be a revolutionary. » And he says : « That’s nice. That’s nice. But you should be a revolutionary something. A revolutionary carpenter, a revolutionary lawyer… » And, you know, I remember this… I asked about grandma, I asked her : « So grandma, when is the revolution gonna come ? » And she said : « There is an old jewish sentence: when the Messiah kummt. » I said : « Grandma, what does that mean ? » She said : « When the Messie comes. Keep working. » 

Clara’s diary

"A march was planned for Dec.3 to present a petition to the Mayor at City Hall. - 10 000 striking women, marching in formation four abreast. Miss Marot, the spokeswoman of the demonstrators, submitted to Mayor MacCullan the petition signed by 30,000 women."

 "On Dec. 5, 1909, the Hippodrome was the site of the first meeting of the "Association for Political Equality.

"The movement was led by the ladies of high society, whom the strikers nicknamed the "Mink Coat Brigade.

Baskets were passed around to collect funds."

"On Dec. 6 the headquarters moved into Beethoven Hall. This is where the first meeting was organised by the WTUL. All the girls who'd been arrested came here to report the aggressions, the beatings they got on the picket line. 

"On Dec. 9, at the Thalia Theater, a meeting was held in support of the strike by the New York socialists. Mother Jones, the famous Irish labor leader spoke of her own experience, pointing out that all the strikes she had taken part in were won by women.

"On Dec. 12, Emma Goldman, the anarchist leader, made a speech condemning the reign of money and supporting the strike.

Alice Kesler : One of the most interesting factors of the strike was that almost all of the parties were Jews : the employers were Jews, the unionists, the male unionists were Jewish, and about 80 to 85 percent of the strikers were Jewish. It wasn’t that there were not some Italians and some other groups within the garment industry, but most of those who went out on strike, went out on strike against their landsmen, against their kinsmen. Part of the difficulty then of women striking is that on the one hand they were striking against their fathers, against the uncles, against the cousins who had given them jobs and therefore helped them to come to America. And they were also struggling against maile trade unionists who believed that women’s place was in their home. 

One result was that women were not taken seriously, their ideas weren’t taken seriously, their struggles weren’t taken seriously, and they turned for support therefore away from the male unionists to the Women’s Trade Unions League which consisted mostly of middle-class allies : that is women, some of them German Jewish women, some of them not Jewish at all, but middle-class women who thought it was their job to help improve the working conditions of poor women, largely because they wanted those women to work under conditions that would enable them at some point to resign from their jobs and to become healthy mothers. 

Alice Kesler : It may be something of a misnomer to call Clara Lemlich the leader of the strike, although she was certainly the spark that ignited it, once the women had walked out. Clara Lemlich, like Pauline Newman, was one of the number of women working in the factories, working in the shirt-waist industry, who hoped that by organizing in the union they would be able to have a voice in their working-conditions, and especially in their pay. Lemlich, along with hundreds of other women, met at the Cooper Union meeting as they sort of walked out of their work-places. And it was then of course that Clara Lemlich played her great role. 

Had she be alone, had she suffered these in dignities in a vaccum, had other women not felt exactly as she was feeling, there could of course have been no successful strike. But it was Lemlich who was the spark, who struck the tinder-box that was ready and waiting for her.

Clara’s diary

I remenber the meeting on Dec. 16, at New York's exclusive Colony Club, on Madison Avenue, an unusual meeting to say the least. 

"Imagine 400 of the richest women in the world seated in the splendid gym of this elegant club. In contrast with the profusion of jewels and furs, lace and beautiful dresses, Miss Mary E. Dreier, president of the League, had brought along a dozen of strikers, some of them still children. Imagine these women discovering  the life of a working woman, who worked from morning till night for $3 a week, 

Clara’s diary

In the last week of December the cold of winter and the  strike were extended to Philadelphia. 

On Dec 27 when the draft agreement negotiated by the trade unions was submitted to the strikers it  was received with shouts of disapproval,  indignation and unanimously rejected. 

"Hundreds of voices screamed in protest: "Send it back. We won't sign. We refuse to vote. We want recognition of the union. We'll go back to prison and we'll win. We'd rather be starving union workers than well-fed scabs.

Alice Kesler : The strike ended, it was formally brought to a close as it were in the middle of February in 1910. Many employers settled, especially small employers. Some workers went back to work without union-recognition ; a few employers decided to recognize the women’s effort and to recognize the new local which had been established for them – local 22, local 25. But by enlarge, perhaps half of those who would have originally gone out on strike drifted back to work after February, without any settlement, without any contract at all and with the vague promise that some form of recognition might be worked out in the future. In that sense, it was not a successful strike, but it was enormously successful in the sense that it had proved that women could be successful strikers, that they could be good union-members, that they could hold fast the way men could hold fast. And partly as a result of that, the newly formed locals became the foundation of a large and growing and prosperous female unionism.

Clara’s diary

Dec. 29 and 30 those were thrilling days.

The 'New York Call,' the only leftist daily, devoted to the interests of the working class,' put out a special edition in English, Yiddish and Italian, sold by the strikers for the benefit of the strike.

 I remember the emotion everybody felt when the girls marched out with their white sashes across their chests, at various strategic points of the city, selling the 'Call' for five cents, or more if people wanted to give.

The papers sold like hot cakes. They had to have another printing. In all, 45,000 copies were sold.

Clara’s diary

“The night of Jan. 2, 1910, was the last big evening that brought together strikers, the public and speakers from different walks of life. On the stage, standing behind the speakers, 350 girls who had been arrested and sentenced. 

How surprised they were to learn they had the right to join a union and that a picket line was legal, that the treatment they got was unacceptable in a country that for them represented liberty for all the oppressed." 

Maria Reyes 

I came to the United States in June 1944. I worked in a lot of clothing shops here. I worked mostly at night, in different shops in the Bronx. In 1995 I found a job in Brooklyn, where I was working with silk. Then a friend of mine told me about a job in Manhattan. The conditions were very rough : the windows were always closed, we had no masks or gloves, no protection at all. We knew that at any minute we could be put on the machines, or on ironing or cleaning… That’s how the day went. It was like that for everyone, because there was no specific job for each person. I decided to do something because in the different shops I had seen the working conditions, especially for women, in what I call the sectors of exploitation. I couldn’t believe that such a degree of exploitation existed in the United States ! I never imagined that for us immigrants, especially for women, and colored people and Hispanics – people who didn’t speak the language -- the working conditions could be so awful..

Yiddish song :

Working women, suffering women,

Women who languish at home and factory,

Why do you stand at a distance ? Why don’t you help

Build the temple of freedom, of human hapiness ?

Help us carry the red banner

Forward, through storm and dark nights.

Help us spread thruth and light

Among unknowing, lonely slaves.

Clara’s diary

"In March 1911 a fire destroyed the building of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company, one of the firms that had refused to recognize the Union, and took the lives of 146 workers. The security conditions were deplorable and the women were trapped behind locked doors in the burning building. 

I went to the scene of the fire, along with hundreds of others who had come to see if they recognized friends or relatives among the victims. They wandered helplessly through the crowd, among firemen, policemen and onlookers. The sight of the charred bodies piled up all around and the rivulets of blood on the pavement were horrible to see."

Rita : I feel like I’m copying my mother, I’m impersonating her. I’m playing the role of my mother when she was a young woman and she came here with the other women that she worked with. And when all the major labour leaders got through talking, my mother got up. – and she was a little woman, probably not much bigger than I am – and said. 

 And my mother was a doer all her life, whatever she was involved in. She didn’t believe in just saying something ; she followed up everything she said with action. And I think probably her greatest legacy was that she taught us the same way, the same thing. You can’t just say you have to do. Translated in English venacular: you have to put your money where your mouth is. You have a plan, you have a program, you have something that you are very interested in, you have to follow it through. You can’t leave it for someone else to do ; you have to do it. And you have to bring others with you who believe as you do, who want to share whatever your dream is.

Clara’s voice

I suppose you have your dreams. Yes, sure.

It’s good to have dreams, nice dreams.

But that dream that I have was so real.

It lives you up, 

Then when you wake from it,

And when you look back, you see,

Oh yes, that it’s right, it was like that.