Industrial Feminists and Other Communities of Workers

In 1954, sixty-eight-year-old Clara Lemlich Shavelson retired from her job as a cloakmaker and applied to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) for a pension. Lemlich Shavelson is best known to students of history as the young woman who, in 1909, delivered a fiery speech at Cooper Union’s Great Hall of the People and thereby triggered the “shirtwaist uprising” of thousands of Jewish and Italian garment workers in New York’s Lower East Side. Yet Lemlich Shavelson’s career as an organizer and political activist extended far beyond that fateful evening. In the 1920s and 1930s she helped to coordinate rent strikes, protests against unemployment, and housewives’ food boycotts in her Jewish working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. In 1944, her children grown and her husband disabled by a heart attack, she went back to wage work, to the same shop floor that she had helped to organize three decades earlier, and labored full time for another ten years. Nevertheless, the male union officials who considered her pension application in 1954 informed her that she had to work for fifteen consecutive years in order to qualify. They were reluctant to bend the rules for this outspoken Communist. In effect, the union that owed its existence to organizers like Lemlich Shavelson now refused to provide her the benefits that were the hallmark of its existence.

Lemlich Shavelson was eventually granted an honorary lifetime membership, and supposedly the pension benefits that went with it, but after five years her meager monthly checks from the ILGWU stopped coming, and in the early 1960s she was informed that she had been awarded only a lump sum to be paid in installments. She protested, received another small lump sum, and at the age of seventy-eight found herself struggling to get by on only her Social Security check. In the words of Annelise Orleck, “Shavelson was unceremoniously cut off by the union that would continue to celebrate her name on every major anniversary of its founding” (p. 276).

The story of Clara Lemlich Shavelson is a long and fascinating one, for as she grew older she retained her youthful militancy and energy. As a grandmother, she was happy to babysit for the children of her son and his wife, but insisted on being paid so that she could donate the money to the Communist party. In her early eighties, she pressured the owners of the California nursing home where she lived to boycott grapes and lettuce in support of the United Farm Workers, and she was an active supporter of the union-organizing attempts of nurses and orderlies in that same home.

Common Sense and a Little Fire provides a compelling, sweeping account of the struggles of Lemlich Shavelson and three other union activists—Fannia Cohn, Louise Newman, and Rose Schneiderman—to promote what Orleck calls “industrial feminism” during the first half of the twentieth century: “Their brand of feminism was deeply imbued with class consciousness and a vivid understanding of the harsh realities of industrial labor” (p. 7). All four women served as ILGWU organizers during the formative period, 1909–1915, a time that spanned not only the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” (and more) but also the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (in 1911) and the active involvement of the cross-class Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) in labor organization. After that period, the careers of the four women diverged. Lemlich Shavelson married and turned her attention toward the founding of radical neighborhood grassroots associations. Fannia Cohn remained “married to the union,” and devoted her entire life to the cause of workers’ education, especially women workers’ education. She helped to create a national movement that yielded institutions like the New York Women’s Trade Union League School for Women Workers, the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, and the Southern Schools for Women Workers. Rose...