IN the 34 years since Temple University Press published A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike: Women Needleworkers in America, the global apparel industry has suffered several horrific tragedies that remind us of its long history. As protectionist tariffs were removed beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, American clothing companies increasingly sought to outsource production to destinations across the Global South, including Mexico, China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. At the same time, clothing factories in America shuttered their doors.
In September 2012, a fire blazed through a Karachi garment factory. Dozens of young women jumped from windows, just as 62 young immigrant women workers did a century earlier in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City that ultimately took the lives of 146 garment workers. Three hundred workers lost their lives in the Karachi garment factory fire. Just a few weeks later, in Savar, Bangladesh, another fire in a garment factory took the lives of more than a hundred workers, mostly women. Then, on April 24, 2013, just 20 miles from Savar in Dhaka, Bangladesh, an eight-story building that housed multiple garment factories, most of which supplied top global clothing brands, collapsed. The death toll climbed as rescue turned to recovery. In the end, more than 1,100 clothing workers were killed. Consumers and workers across the globe were outraged. In the wake of the industrial accidents in Pakistan and Bangladesh’s clothing industry, media headlines in the West immediately drew connections between the tragedies that took place a century apart and a half a world away from each other. It is in this moment, as we struggle to account for the human cost behind the clothes we wear, that the history of the clothing industry seems more relevant than ever.
The essays in A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike remain remarkably relevant today because they highlight two important threads that run throughout the clothing industry’s history: the persistent exploitation of women workers and women garment workers’ similarly persistent pursuit of dignity and safe working conditions. Joan M. Jensen and Sue Davidson carefully curated a collection of articles that explain how the very origins of the clothing industry rested upon a gendered vision of labor. A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike manages to provide both a comprehensive overview of the clothing industry from the perspective of its workers and in-depth analyses of important moments in the history of the garment industry. The origins of the decentralized structure of the clothing industry receives much attention, in which “inside” and “outside” work models were employed simultaneously. In the earliest years of the clothing industry, manufacturers employed some women stitchers in house, but most often also worked with several other outside contractors. Unlike the histories of the industry that preceded it, A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike aimed to tell the story of women workers themselves, not that of the companies, the factories, or the unions.
The decidedly unsentimental perspective of the essays results in a frank assessment of patriarchal union and apparel-company leadership in the clothing industry. It was New Labor History’s focus on workers and their communities that made it clear that our understanding of the working classes wasn’t complete unless we looked at women’s work. Perhaps the essay that best illustrates how women’s voices disrupt standard historical narratives is Laurie Coyle, Gail Hershatter, and Emily Honig’s “Women at Farah: An Unfinished Story.” Together, Coyle, Hershatter, and Honig demonstrated the value of oral history in uncovering the voices of ordinary women workers. By focusing on Chicana workers at Farah manufacturing in El Paso, Texas in the 1970s, Coyle, Hershatter and Honig reveal the contours of a feminine work culture quite distinct from that of the more familiar immigrant women garment workers of generations earlier in the northeast. Chicana workers recounted their experiences on the strike lines in El Paso. They remembered the support they received from the Catholic Church and the way the strike divided families. N. Sue Weiler, Lois Scharf, and Jensen reveal the complexities of the strike lines in the early clothing industry in Chicago, Cleveland, and Rochester respectively. Ava Baraon and Susan E. Klepp remind us that the sewing machine did not create the feminine work culture that gave rise to the uprisings of garment workers in the early twentieth century. Rather, the abundance of female labor in cities created conditions ripe for exploitation. The volume concludes by bringing the lens back to New York City, where discriminatory practices against Hispanic workers within the clothing unions threatened to destroy the solidarity they had worked so hard to create.
When I first became interested in studying women’s work, Professor Robert H. Zieger, my mentor at the University of Florida, suggested I look at the needle trades and immediately pointed to A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike as essential reading. He was right. No other study of the apparel industry achieves the scope of A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike. Published just as historians were eager to shed the trappings of Old Labor History, Jensen and Davidson’s collection tells a different history about women clothing workers who were divided by race, region, ethnicity, and class, from the nineteenth throughout the twentieth century. The careful selection of authors in this collection yields a diversity of perspectives that challenge the New-York-City- and Triangle-Shirtwaist-Factory-fire-centered historiography of the clothing industry. The nine articles reflect diverse geographical, racial, and ethnic perspectives over a great span of time. There is diversity in disciplines and methodologies, too, with sociologists’ and activists’ analyses presented alongside those of established and younger scholars.
The essays in A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike point to the continuity of an intersectional dynamic in the clothing industry and its strike lines. Most important, A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike moves the apparel industry into the sunlight, out from behind the shadow of the more often studied textile industry. Together, the essays tell the history of the clothing industry between the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Rana Plaza disaster and they place women clothing workers’ voices at the center of working-class history.
MICHELLE HABERLAND is Professor of History at Georgia Southern University.