From Chronicling a Life to Illuminating a Movement: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman’s Labor Feminism

I “met” Bessie Abramowitz Hillman for the first time in 1995. I was perusing the labor history archives at Cornell University’s Kheel Labor-Management Documentation Center pondering a topic for a seminar paper on the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, the largest union of men’s garment workers in the country. As I browsed through the official Guide to the Records of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, I came across her name. She was the only woman whose papers appeared under the heading of “General Executive Board Officers.” I was immediately intrigued. Two questions emerged almost simultaneously. Who was this lone woman, and why, despite my familiarity with this particular union, had I never heard of her before?

I learned from the archivist that although Hillman had died over two decades ago, her oldest daughter, Philoine Fried, would be open to sharing her knowledge about her parents’ careers. Hillman’s husband was Sidney Hillman, the first president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. I could not get her phone number fast enough. Over the course of the next few years, Fried provided what would amount to invaluable help by consenting to numerous interviews that proved essential in recounting Hillman’s life story.

In the meantime, the preliminary research that I conducted revealed that although Bessie Abramowitz Hillman seemed to be a prominent figure in the American labor movement, her sixty-year career as an activist remained virtually undocumented outside Cornell’s labor archives. It would be years before I learned the full extent of Hillman’s activism. In short, she not only led the 1910 Chicago Men’s Garment Workers’ strike that resulted in the founding of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and assured that her future husband would be installed as its first president, but also she helped to shape the union’s industrial democracy for more than half a century. As philosopher Horace Kallen has observed, Bessie Abramowitz Hillman waged a lifelong battle for “workingmen and women, especially for working women, for equal liberty, and equal power as human beings.”¹

Compelled by the first hints of Hillman’s significance, I began to explore the life of the person who would become the topic for my doctoral dissertation and ultimately my first book. I initially wondered if I could overcome the obstacles inherent in writing about a woman relegated to the shadows for much of her life. The exclusionary treatment she experienced at the hands of the male-dominated Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was ironic for two reasons: first, Bessie Abramowitz Hillman was one of only a small core of workers present at the inception of the union, and secondly, because the majority of Amalgamated members were women.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty that I faced was the lack of documentation by Bessie Hillman about her own life. Philoine Fried had it right when she proclaimed, “My mother was a doer and not a writer.”² Hillman never took the time to write about her life or even to record her daily activities. How would I ever come to know her well enough to write about her? More importantly, how would I ever know how she evaluated her own life? How would I fulfill the obligation of a feminist biographer to acknowledge both private and public activities despite such gaping silences in the records?

Attempting to reconstruct Hillman’s life meant creatively probing sources. For instance, when the file marked “Bessie Abramowitz Hillman—Personal Papers” yielded no more than seven or eight receipts for items ranging from fur coats to property taxes, I knew I had my work cut out for me. I thought long and hard about why the folder contained so little and then turned to considering what clues it did provide. The nature and diversity of these sparse transactions indicated that Hillman was indeed the manager for her family and for the entire household. Despite the missing pieces, the puzzle began to fit together.

The dissertation that I wrote concentrated on the momentous events in Hillman’s life—her immigration, strike...