THE GREAT UPRISINGS: 1900–1920
BETWEEN 1905 and 1915 a hundred thousand women in the clothing factories of New York City, Rochester, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cleveland walked off their jobs, demanding higher wages, better working conditions, and an end to subcontracting. Owners fought back with all the weapons at their command: police control, undercover agents, bootlegged garments, and strikebreakers. Women took their cause to middle-class women, asking for solidarity in their efforts. Militant Jewish and Italian immigrant women moved into new positions of leadership in speaking, organizing, and planning strategy. It was an incredible decade, with thousands of working women in the streets demanding economic justice. New leaders emerged—and new martyrs. The uprisings culminated in the movement of women into unions and in the beginning of the runaway shops.
Women emerged as militant workers at the same time that clothing workers as a whole moved out of the sweatshops into factories and into the forefront of American organized labor. In fact, women’s organizing activities not only made the clothing industry unique; they also accounted for the particular interest by the public accorded to the conflicts over the wages and work conditions of needleworkers. The flood of women who burst onto the streets and into the organizations of previously male workers, gave the needlework industry a particular importance to the era of reform from 1890–1920. The militance and organizational strength of women often encouraged their male comrades to join in demands for better working conditions. These women wanted bread and roses—increased wages and a better way of life. For two decades, women workers in America—like the women in revolutionary Russia—were a catalyst for worker discontent.
The garment districts, as they became known, were areas in the middle of cities devoted almost exclusively to the manufacture of clothing. While heavy industry and other types of manufacturing usually moved to the periphery of the growing nineteenth-century cities, clothing manufacturing remained centrally located. New York City’s garment district eventually centered in Manhattan, clustered from 34th to 40th streets between Sixth and Ninth avenues. Chicago’s district was centered between Halsted Street and the Chicago River and south to 22nd Street. Baltimore, Rochester, Cleveland, Boston, and Philadelphia had similar districts where most manufacturing centered, developing out of the commercial city and surviving into the twentieth-century industrial city. The districts were composed of multi-story manufacturing establishments and nearby subcontracting shops in which women manufactured such accessories as artificial flowers and belts, or did special trimming, hand sewing, and embroidery. Nearby were working-class residential areas, usually close enough for women to walk to the factories. Some workers came to work on the new municipal transportation systems being created to get workers from their homes to the more distant heavy industry, but most lived within a mile of work and usually walked. This arrangement allowed close physical proximity of workers, shops, and factories. Often in the cities where garment districts were located, the industry accounted for a large portion of the work force. The pattern developed early. By 1860 Baltimore already had one-third of its work force involved in manufacturing ready-to-wear. By 1910 the men’s clothing industry was Chicago’s largest employer, larger than the much described stockyards. New York City by 1914 had 62 percent of all wage earners manufacturing women’s clothing.1 These garment districts were enclaves where immigrants found supportive relatives, abundant work, easy job entry, and a community culture that provided them with a transition point to the New World.
While some employees walked to the garment district factories and worked there, others returned home with piles of cut clothing to be sewn at home. Still others worked in the tenements at the small subcontracting shops, where they toiled at discrete sewing tasks, some performed by hand, some by foot-powered machines. There is no way of knowing exactly how many women worked at these tasks, for this cottage industry employed thousands each year, usually for only part of the year, without leaving records on individual workers. The factories by the 1880s were usually under some sort of primitive municipal laws that governed health, housing, and age of workers. Subcontracting shops were not.
Subcontractors were often known as “sweaters” because of the system of lowering bids in periods of extreme competition and then “sweating” the difference out of the workers. The term “sweatshop” came to describe the environment of this highly competitive enterprise. The rooms were often small and crowded, sometimes located in the homes of subcontractors, where the sewing work went forward amid the daily tasks of cooking, cleaning, and child rearing. Sweatshops attracted a great deal of attention between 1890 and 1920 because they exemplified the uncontrolled conditions of manufacturing. Jacob Riis, the famous New York photographer, recorded the crowded conditions of the sweatshops on Hester, Division, and Lud-low streets, which he visited in 1889. His memorable description of the end of a day in the New York sweatshop district revealed the sweatshop to middle-class people, who knew little of the conditions under which their own garments were being made. “The thousands of lighted windows in the tenements glow like dull red eyes in a huge stone wall,” he wrote in How the Other Half Lives. “From every door multitudes of tired men and women pour forth for a half-hour’s rest in the open air before sleep closes the eyes weary with incessant working.” Riis saw no solution but teaching manual trades and the English language to the young.2
The sweatshops Riis described and the criticism of them were soon dwarfed by the new manufacturing lofts of Manhattan, large buildings where hundreds of women workers stitched at machines. There was strong public support for the establishment of factories, because subcontracting had joined the home-and-work lives of immigrant clothing workers in a way that middle-class reformers saw as a threat to family life. But factories were scarcely more healthy for workers than crowded homes. Factories simply created new problems. They brought thousands of young women out of their homes and into shops where they worked alongside male workers. Most of the married women remained at home sewing in cottage industries, but their daughters crowded into the new factories, providing the first really mass-production proletarian labor force in the clothing industry. Factories provided not only a new physical space within which young women worked, but also further segmentation of their work. The older task system of constructing an entire garment now gave way to complete fragmentation of process where women always worked on only one part of a garment—a seam, a sleeve, a buttonhole. Behind the rows of sewing machines, or at work in rows of hand basters, they repeated the same process over, and over, and over again. No longer could a worker keep track of the number of garments completed in one day. Instead, she had a pile of tickets that she received in return for each piece of garment finished. With steam to power the sewing machines, women could work faster and faster on smaller and smaller units in the construction of garments. They could replace men at lower wages. By 1913, 70 percent of all clothing workers were women.3
Women joined an industry already divided by conflict. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, the clothing industry was one of the labor sectors most affected by strikes. While labor historians have traditionally focused on the predominantly male industries of mining and building—two sectors with the largest number of strikes and striking workers from 1880 to 1920—they have usually neglected the third most strike-prone industry, the needle trades. The needle trades rivaled the two male-dominated industries in conflict during the period when increasing numbers of women were moving into the factories of those trades. There are no systematic statistics for the years 1905 to 1914, the years in which women first became visible in large clothing strikes, but the unrest in the industry can be seen in the overall figures. From 1881 to 1905, over two and one half million mine workers were involved in strikes, over one million building workers, and over eight hundred and fifty thousand in the needle trades—including clothing, hats and caps, hosiery and knit goods, and millinery. These workers engaged in over 2500 strikes and lockouts. During the period from 1914 to 1926, the number of strikes involving needle workers would increase to 3563, surpassed only by strikes in the building trades.4
Confrontation between capital and labor was a constant theme between 1880 and 1920. Employers, government officials, middle-class reformers, and many organizers sought solutions that would decrease the growing conflict. Welfarism and scientific management were favorite employer solutions. But in the clothing industry, collective bargaining emerged as the solution favored by workers, and accepted by employers, in the face of increased disruptions of production due to strikes. One historian has estimated a 400 percent increase in unionism during the period 1897 to 1903. Mine workers were the first to move toward industrial unions, in which strict trade autonomy was replaced by unions joining together the various crafts in one industry and, in some cases, drawing skilled and unskilled together in one union. The panic of 1907 created a financial crisis that lasted until World War I revived production. During these years of retrenchment, the clothing industry attempted to reduce operating costs by introducing new efficiency schemes, by encouraging the expansion of immigration to form a reserve of low-paid workers, and by hiring increasing numbers of young women who were at the bottom of the wage scale. When tapped by employers, this huge reserve of women workers became a crucial element in labor-capital conflicts. Their role determined who would emerge victorious in the conflict over power.5
Women became the new proletariat in this rationalization of the work place. Previously, women, like unskilled males, were peripheral to the work process. Skilled males dominated labor-capital relations. Now, older male unionists had to successfully incorporate into their strategy both the immigrant male and the woman worker, or lose the place they had carved out for themselves in the economic order. The deteriorating working conditions of the women who became mass-production workers set the stage for their revolt. That revolt propelled union membership forward in the clothing industry even after 1915, when the growth of unionism had been checked in other sectors, and employers no longer felt the need to compromise with labor on collective bargaining issues. The force of organizing was the only weapon workers had, as manufacturers appeared less and less willing to meet their demands. With the growing violence of the period between 1910 and 1915, middle-class reformers—alarmed by death, injury, and arrest of female as well as male workers—pressured employers to meet some worker demands. Under these pressures, manufacturers became more conciliatory. Needleworkers in New York and Chicago emerged with the strongest union base, buttressed by a preferential shop and collective bargaining. In other cities, even where unions were less successful, organizing and strikes resulted in establishment of common workplace standards, elimination of sweatshops and subcontracting, and a measure of stability in the strike-torn clothing industry.6
Four unions participated in the organization of clothing workers during this era of the great uprisings—the United Garment Workers of America (UGWA), the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The first two became affiliated with the American Federation of Labor—the UGWA primarily organizing the men’s clothing trade, the ILGWU the women’s clothing trade, but both remaining within the circle of older craft-based unions. The ACWA and the IWW operated outside the federation, the ACWA carving out its own place among skilled and unskilled clothing workers, primarily in the men’s clothing industry, and the IWW attempting to organize entire industries regardless of industry or skill. A brief history of these unions, their ideology, and their tactics, will help to explain their interactions during this period of industrial upheaval and mass organizing.
The UGWA, oldest of the clothing unions, was founded in 1891 by skilled male workers, and was the most traditional. By 1900, women scattered and isolated in rural factories comprised 30 percent of the membership. The UGWA, oriented to workers producing men’s clothing (mainly overalls and shirts), used the union label as an organizing device, allowing employers to display the label in return for recognition. As some employers began to specialize in producing better-quality men’s clothing, the label became less important. Middle-class males in general were not interested in knowing whether the workers producing their clothing were unionized or not. Moreover, the UGWA had difficulty in organizing urban shops, in which a majority or a large minority were skilled male workers, who could rely on their skills in negotiating favorable contracts. The UGWA also had particular difficulty in organizing the Jewish needleworkers of New York City, who supported an aggressive strike strategy rather than negotiation alone.7
The ILGWU came into being in 1900 to organize the rapidly expanding women’s ready-to-wear industry. From the beginning the ILGWU was much more ideologically oriented than the UGWA, although the leadership was often at odds with its militant members. Its revised 1912 constitution explicitly stated that its aim was to organize into a “class-conscious trade union” to bring about a “system of society wherein the workers shall receive the full value of their product.” The preamble of the constitution also provided for support of the “political party whose aim is the abolition of the capitalist system.” Still, the organizational structure was the same as that of a craft union, with leaders merely more committed to careful listening to rank-and-file attitudes. Locals organized single crafts, ethnic groups from all crafts, and women. Because of both political traditions and cross-craft solidarity, ethnic and women’s locals became some of the most militant in the ILGWU. The ILGWU was unique—a strongly socialist union that maintained close ties to the AFL and its middle-of-the-road president Samuel Gompers.8
From the beginning, women were a large minority in the ILGWU. By 1903 over one-third of its 10,000 members were women. The depression of 1903, and a simultaneous switch to more conservative leadership, combined to decimate the ranks of the new union to 300. Officials even contemplated merging with the UGWA, but the more radical rank and file rejected the merger. Within a few years, however, workers again began moving into the union. Although the women shirtwaist makers spontaneously walked out in 1909, the union mobilized strikers because it was convinced that the organization of women was crucial to union survival. Successful strikes in New York in 1910 gave the ILGWU a commanding place in the growing clothing industry and recognition as the bargaining agent for most workers in women’s clothing. By 1912 the union had 50,000 members, approximately one-half women, and had spread from New York to other centers of the women’s clothing industry in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. By 1920 it was the sixth largest union in the AFL with over 100,000 members.9
The UGWA, meanwhile, lost most of its remaining support among the male clothing workers when, in 1913, it announced the settlement of a New York strike without consulting the strikers. The workers continued the strike, and won additional concessions. The UGWA also lost support in Rochester by its lack of ability to organize women, immigrants, and more militant workers.10 Out of the failure of the UGWA to retain the loyalty of its urban, female, and militant workers, came secession in 1914 and the formation of a more radical union, the ACWA. The ACWA was much more explicit in its radicalism than even the ILGWU. In its constitution it recognized class divisions caused by the ownership of the means of production by one class and the labor power by the other, and a “constant and increasing struggle” between the classes. The leaders of the new union believed that modern industrial methods had wiped out the old craft demarcations and that conditions dictated organizing along industrial lines. An industrial organization based on class consciousness would “put the organized working class in actual control of the system of production.” The AFL refused admission to the ACWA, calling it a dual union, and continuing to recognize only the UGWA. Workers in men’s ready-to-wear industries poured into the new union which, despite its radical rhetoric and interest in mass organizing, also gradually settled into an emphasis on negotiations rather than on strikes, and collective bargaining to avoid work stoppages that caused loss of wages to workers and loss of profits to employers. Still, the ACWA remained the most militant of the three major unions, much more receptive to women than the UGWA, and willing to recognize women as officials and organizers.11
The IWW was formed in 1905 by radical dissidents from the AFL, who seceded to form a union based entirely on industrial principles and dedicated to organizing masses of workers. The IWW had a shadowy existence among the clothing workers in the early years of its existence. It appealed to Italian syndicalists and Jewish revolutionaries who migrated from Russia after the abortive 1905 uprising. A number of ILGWU locals went over to the IWW in the first years of its existence, helping to organize a number of strikes. ILGWU wooed many of the dissident locals back into its ranks during 1908 and 1909, but the IWW remained a left-wing force among garment workers, pushing the other unions farther to the left in an attempt to keep the militant and active workers within their organizations. The IWW continued to support strike independence by the rank and file, and opposed a number of compromises hammered out by the ILGWU and ACWA leaders in the years between 1905 and 1916. The IWW was suppressed by the federal government with the acquiesence of the AFL during World War I. From that time on, the ILGWU and the ACWA led the organized forces of needleworkers against radicals to their left, and against employers to their right. Jewish leadership remained firmly in control of both unions.12
While these four unions were becoming the vehicles for organizing working-class women in the needle trades, middle-class women were also becoming active in supporting working women’s move into these unions. The main organization for this support was the National Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), formed in 1903 and headed by a group of dynamic reformers. Although the WTUL had a national membership, the New York state organization, headed by Margaret Dreier from 1905 to 1915, remained the driving force in organizing middle-class and working-class women into alliances. Historians who have studied the WTUL have concluded that these coalitions of women never completely reconciled unionism and feminism, but that although cross-class alliances remained fragile, the WTUL provided a framework for support and networking. Most of these alliances disintegrated under the pressure of the 1919 Red scare. As one consequence of government efforts to suppress radicals in the spring of 1919, many middle-class women refused to work with Socialists or radical unionists. Meanwhile, the ILGWU journal, Justice, warned: “The interests of the women of the working classes are diametrically opposed to those of the middle classes.”13
While these alliances flourished, however, they provided middle-class support for working-class women strikers and working-class support for social reformers. The peculiar blend of social legislation and union organization which emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century was reflected clearly in the activities of the WTUL. After the uprising of 1909, the WTUL helped organize ILGWU locals; and after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, it began lobbying the state legislature to establish an investigating committee to examine safety and health standards. The Triangle fire of 1911 remains one of the most powerful symbols of the oppression endured by sewing women in America. Trapped in the building where they worked with fire-escape doors locked, almost one hundred and fifty women jumped and fell to their deaths, or were incinerated inside the multi-story building. The grief and outrage of the survivors’ coworkers and families, combined with the horror of middle-class women, led both to increased unionization and to protective legislation for women. By late 1912 the state of New York had renewed its efforts to control the health and safety of its young women workers, and to protect “future generations” by means of a bill limiting the hours women could work to fifty-four a week between 6 A.M. and 9 P.M.14
Both working-class and middle-class women in the WTUL also compaigned for suffrage. As Nancy Schrom Dye has observed, however, WTUL women never proceeded to an analysis of American conditions which came to terms with the exploitation of women as workers and as women. Although such union organizers as Pauline Newman found a home in the WTUL in the 1910s, working-class women often felt alienated by the teas and social events planned by the “ladies” for the working class “girls.” The labor crisis of 1919, then, released women from the necessity of bridging classes with their coalitions.15
The WTUL continued to support protective legislation in the 1920s, but the promise of sisterly solidarity faded before the rise of class consciousness following World War I. For most women the political stress of that period led back to class-based organizing. Feminism could function as a unifying theme only when that unity seemed essential to both groups. Women clothing workers entered the decade of the 1920s essentially on their own. In an era when middle-class women increasingly feared that social reform might lead to more radical social change, working women found their allies among working-class males. The sewing women were now almost entirely dependent upon efforts of unions to stabilize production and control the migration of clothing shops to unorganized areas, as employers faced another escalation of economic competition. The 1920s witnessed the flooding of eastern sewing women into the ILGWU and the ACWA in an attempt to control their deteriorating working conditions, and the movement of union organizers west in an effort to protect eastern workers from the competition of western women workers.16
NOTES
1. Edward K. Muller and Paul A. Groves, “The Emergence of Industrial Districts in Mid-Nineteenth Century Baltimore,” The Geographical Review, 69 (April 1979), 159–178; Edward K. Muller and Paul A. Groves, “The Changing Location of the Clothing Industry: A Link to the Social Geography of Baltimore in the Nineteenth Century,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 71 (Fall 1976), 403–420; and Max Hall, ed., Made in New York: Case Studies in Metropolitan Manufacturing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 22, 68.
2. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Dover, 1971), 97–107.
3. Alice Kessler-Harris, “Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union,” Labor History, 17 (Winter 1976), 6, n. 1.
4. Florence Peterson, Strikes in the United States, 1880–1936 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1938), 30, 38.
5. Bruno Ramirez, When Workers Fight: the Politics of Industrial Relations in the Progressive Era, 1898–1916 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978), provides the best discussion of this period although he barely mentions women. See also Melvyn Dubofsky, When Workers Organize: New York City in the Progressive Era (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968).
6. Ibid., 135–138.
7. Joel Seidman, The Needle Trades (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942), 88–124.
8. J. M. Budish and George Soule, The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968; repr. of 1920 ed.), 169–175.
9. John Laslett, Labor and the Left (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 98–143.
10. Benjamin Stolberg, Tailor’s Progress: The Story of a Famous Union and the Men Who Made It (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1944), 49, 53.
11. Seidman, Needle Trades, 122.
12. Budish and Soule, New Unionism, 169–170.
13. Louis Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1924), 126, 226, 274.
14. Kessler-Harris, “Organizing,” 17.
15. A selection of eyewitness and contemporary writings is in Leon Stein, ed., Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy (New York: Quadrangle, 1977), 188–197.
16. Robin Miller Jacoby, “The Women’s Trade Union League and American Feminism,” Feminist Studies, 3 (Fall 1975), 126–140, and Nancy Schrom Dye, “Creating a Feminist Alliance: Sisterhood and Class Conflict in the New York Women’s Trade Union League, 1903–1914,” Feminist Studies, 2 (Spring 1975), 24–36, and As Equals and As Sisters: Feminism, Unionism, and the Women’s Trade Union League of New York (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980).