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46 | 2 The Revolutionary and Gendered Origins of Garment Workers’ Education, 1909–1918 Many of the Jewish women who immigrated to New York during the volatile years surrounding the 1905 Russian Revolution immediately joined the fight for justice in their communities. Mass movements involving thousands of Jewish women on the Lower East Side included a koshermeat boycott in 1902, a rent strike in 1904, and food riots in 1907. As they had done in Russia, Jewish women engaged as economic actors in what Paula Hyman calls “the public secular sphere.”1 They organized committees, made demands on powerful men, appointed leaders, spoke publicly, negotiated , went on strike, picketed, built alliances, provided mutual support, and harassed those who violated the strikes and boycotts. The Jewish institutions of the Lower East Side, especially the Jewish Daily Forward and the Jewish branch of the Socialist Party, supported these actions without reservation, in large part because women were acting militantly in the role of consumers. When women acted similarly as producers, it was another story. Jewish men were more reluctant to support women’s activism in the unions, where men viewed leadership as political and, therefore, as a male preserve. Jewish and Italian women organized as class-conscious workers en masse in the late fall of 1909 in the shirtwaist industry of the Lower East Side. In the strike and its aftermath, we can detect moments in which organizers were successful in reaching across ethnic and racial lines, extending Yiddish socialist traditions in a new environment. We see the early intersection of national cultural autonomy and mutual culturalism and the birth of the American union education movement. This process is not always visible because it came from the bottom up, in spite of the indifference and hostility some ILGWU leaders demonstrated toward other ethnic groups. From 1902 through 1912, successive iterations of the ILGWU constitution explicitly barred Chinese and Japanese workers from hold- Origins of Garment Workers’ Education | 47 ing membership in the union.2 Italian workers were often reluctant to join the ILGWU because of what they perceived as neglect or lack of interest, opting at times for locals affiliated with the rival Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).3 But Jewish immigrants of the 1905 generation brought with them both a heightened militancy and a more sensitive strategy of multiculturalism in reaching out to other ethnic groups than did the conservative male leaders who came before. Almost from the beginning of the ILGWU, male leaders of the International union constructed a dichotomy between young, radical immigrant women and older, seasoned, and what they termed “conservative” men. John A. Dyche, secretary-treasurer of the International union, reported to the 1906 ILGWU Convention on the children’s cloak and reefer makers’ local union in Philadelphia. He remarked that the industry was “naturally invaded by fresh arrivals from the old country” who spontaneously began to agitate. He acknowledged that these young women organized a union on their own and approached the ILGWU after having enlisted three-quarters of the industry’s workforce. “No organizer took a hand in this work,” he reported. “It was a sudden out-burst of revolt against intolerable conditions.” He warned that this sudden growth brought with it “danger and weakness” because the new “recruits were untrained and undisciplined in the movement”; they “understand the power of the union, but cannot understand its limitation.” He complained that they expected too much too soon and did not comprehend “the need for diplomacy and tact in dealing with employers.” Finally, Dyche reassured the convention that the “joint executive board, together with the more conservative members of the union . . . have succeeded in keeping the members in check and avoiding unnecessary friction with the employers.”4 Before the 1909 strike, women’s membership and activism in the fledgling union was limited. Just as in the Workmen’s Circle, a few local unions with relatively sizeable numbers of women held separate meetings for men and for women, and some established separate women’s branches.5 While this arrangement seemed to reinforce these women’s marginal or secondclass status, Nancy MacLean argues that women in these branches saw the meetings “as a necessary measure so that women could then fight their common battle with working-class men as their equals.”6 When the ILGWU had only a few thousand members centered around local unions representing the most skilled and stable job categories, the number of women remained relatively small. But by 1908, Bundists and other revolutionaries began...

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