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

Karen Pastorello’s new book is both a throwback and a welcome innovation. It is a throwback in the sense that it offers a biography of a labor leader through a lens trained rather narrowly on the public dimensions of a life. But it is a welcome innovation in the sense that it restores Bessie Abramowitz Hillman to a photographic panorama that has far too long focused on male leaders to the exclusion of women, the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) to the exclusion of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW), and New York to the exclusion of Chicago. That Pastorello, working with admittedly limited resources, manages to use Hillman’s experiences as an ACW founder and lifelong union organizer to illuminate the evolution of labor feminism is an accomplishment indeed.

The outline of Hillman’s life in some ways parallels the stories of other Jewish women who became labor leaders. Born in eastern Europe, she emigrated rather than face an arranged marriage, began working in the needle trades shortly after arriving in Chicago, and was politicized by the conditions of her work environment. In 1910 she participated in a major strike at Hart, Schaffner, and Marx, a strike initiated by women, and in the aftermath of the successful settlement became first an organizer for the United Garment Workers and then a founder of the ACW. A roughly similar story could be told of Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Rose Pesotta, and Pauline Newman, all of whom worked within the ILGWU in New York. All these leaders struggled with similar problems. Union executives were almost exclusively male and usually hostile to any perceived encroachment of women into the ranks of leadership, despite the predominance of women workers in some sectors of the needle trades. Like her ILGWU colleagues, whom she knew and with whom she cooperated, Hillman depended, at least to some degree, on the kind of middle-class female allies she had first met at Chicago’s Hull House. All the women labor leaders were constantly confronted with a choice between prioritizing their gender and class identities. Their refusal to make that choice (most of the time) yielded a particular strain of labor feminism that sustained them all over many decades.

There were important ways in which Hillman’s path diverged from those of other women labor leaders, however. At the time of the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx strike, she was already involved with the ACW’s first president, fellow Chicago striker Sidney Hillman, whom she married in 1916, moving to New York to join him at the union’s headquarters. The Hillmans had two children, owned a home, and experienced at least some upward economic mobility. For the thirty years of their marriage, Bessie Hillman worked tirelessly as a union organizer and education director, starting many of the programs that made the ACW such an important union, but she never accepted a salary during her husband’s lifetime. The other Jewish women labor leaders supported themselves and their families and fought bitterly to be paid what their work was worth. Though her family life was far from perfect and she spent a substantial amount of time on the road, Hillman does not seem to have experienced the devastating loneliness and weariness of Cohn, Pesotta, and others. Nor does she seem to have relied quite as heavily on a network of female friends.

It is difficult to know how to evaluate the role these differences played in Hillman’s life because, unlike the most prominent ILGWU women, she did not leave behind substantial personal papers. Pastorello reconstructs her public life in some detail and provides plenty of contextual information, sometimes to the point of repetition, but the kind of sophisticated, interior landscape of women labor leaders that other historians have managed to map is missing here. The biographer cannot be faulted for a...