A Power among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (review)

This is a book that, at first glance, is easy to dismiss. Given the overflow of articles and books on gender and working-class feminism, a biography of a female labor leader—and a seemingly secondary one at that—seems, at best, like a minor addition to the literature. Karen Pastorello's biography of Bessie Abramowitz Hillman, however, is well worth historians' attention. In this finely textured study of Hillman's life, Pastorello succeeds in bringing her subject from under the shadow of her husband, prominent labor leader Sidney Hillman. It places Bessie Hillman at the center of the history of industrial unionism beginning with the Progressive Era and extending to the emergence of second-wave feminism. While not breaking any new conceptual ground, this story of Hillman's long and productive life offers a window through which to view the significance of gender on the changing shape and character of the labor movement over much of the last century.

Pastorello traces the source of Hillman's devotion to workplace justice to her Russian Jewish childhood in the late nineteenth-century shtetl. The practice of arranged marriage and women's inequality clashed with new and often radical ideas leading Hillman and other women of her generation to leave the shelter of the close-knit community and seek a new life abroad. Inspired by socialist and reform political currents swirling around her in the bustling industrial Chicago of 1905, Hillman immediately became an important force in the founding of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). Although her experiences as a newly arrived immigrant were not unique, Hillman's life following her marriage to Sidney Hillman was unusual: where most working-class women relinquished their union activism and, often paid employment outside the home, Hillman persisted, often on an unpaid basis. Despite the occasional stress on family life (and in the face of her husband's long-term affair with his secretary), she employed a trusted housekeeper to handle many of the domestic chores and help look after her children while she was away.

Most of the book focuses on Hillman's public, not private, life. We learn that Hillman's work for the ACWA was far ranging and included developing the union's education programs and organizing workers in "runaway" shops in small town Pennsylvania and elsewhere. She was especially effective at winning over reluctant African American workers. Although passed over for acknowledgment in these decades of the 1930s and 1940s, Hillman understood the importance of her contribution. "I was Bessie Abramowitz before he was Sidney Hillman," she commented late in life (pp. 193-4).

Drawing on the work of Dorothy Sue Cobble and others, Pastorello argues that Hillman embraced a "social feminist ideology." This was a practical feminism that sought worker solidarity but drew as well on the Progressive-inspired notion that women workers needed protective legislation to address the worst excesses of industrialism. It was an unwieldy, sometimes contradictory, ideology in which women labor leaders not only sought cross-class alliances with upper-class reformers such as Jane Addams (a early mentor of sorts for Hillman) but also defended the labor movement as a crucial institution for working-class Americans. When a small but influential group of upper-class and professional women organized in the National Women's Party began to promote the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1920s, Hillman and her union allies demurred, arguing that it would deliver a hollow equality by robbing women workers of their hard-fought protective laws. They supported alternatives to the ERA including the "Women's Status Bill" in the post-World War II period.

Hillman's life became most compelling in the decades following her husband's sudden death in 1946. As a tribute to Sidney Hillman, and an acknowledgment of Bessie Hillman's...