The Uprising of the 20,000!
This week is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. That tragedy is well-talked about, so I’d instead like to focus on the amazing actions taken by some of the women who later perished in the highly preventable fire (were sprinklers available? yes! was it mandatory to install them? no!). SPECIFICALLY, the Uprising of the 20,000, aka the largest labor strike by women ever.
THE YEAR WAS 1909. Women had for decades not been a large part of the unions, if allowed in at all. They were seen as part-time workers who could be disregarded, as their investment in their jobs would only last until they got married.
This assumption was a mistake.
Shirtwaists were hugely popular. Many of them were made in factories on the Lower East Side of New York City. Women workers were frequently sexually harassed or assaulted by their bosses or other male workers, there were almost no safety regulations, and they were (unsurprisingly) paid much less than their male counterparts.
A meeting was called at Cooper Union. Male union leaders spoke of patience and negotiation, until Clara Lemlich, a young Jewish Ukrainian immigrant jumped on the stage and said:
“I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I make a motion that we go out in a general strike.”
And so the Uprising of the 20,000 began!!
Women walked the picket line despite frequent beatings, arrest, freezing temperatures, and a rapidly diminishing strike fund. Smaller companies started giving into their demands, but larger ones (like Triangle) would not. They hired scabs, as well as thugs to attack the women in the streets. They paid off judges to put the women in rough jails when similar strikes by men had led to no more than half a dozen total arrests.
Women came together (for a time) across class lines! A group of women called the Mink Brigade contributed considerable time, resources, and support to the strike. This did not happen in men’s strikes.
And the college girls came!
Girls from women’s colleges like Vassar, Wellesley, and Bryn Mawr started showing up on the picket line.
Bryn Mawr graduate and heiress Carola Woerishoffer bought houses, and “haunted the entrance to the Jefferson Market Court at Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street and whenever another group of arrested strikers was marched before a magistrate, she was with them in front of the bench armed with a deed, ready to slap it down for their release.”
This attention and help changed the way the strikers saw themselves. The women who came to their aid made them feel like “not victims in need of pity, but fighters. . .It stiffened the spines of the shirtwaist strikers and made them proud of being exactly what they were – workers, immigrants.”
The strike came to an end on February 15, 1910, a little more than a year before the Triangle fire. Out of 353 companies, 339 agreed to most of the strikers’ terms. The shirtwaist workers proved women could be a formidable force for the union. One of the companies not to capitulate was, of course, Triangle. When the fire occurred in 1911, it was said that the police who had been beating the women in the street the year before were now picking their bodies up from the sidewalk.
The strike not only gave these thousands of women a stronger sense of worth, but gave them the knowledge they could make a difference. Many became suffragists as a result of the strike, as they learned their voices were worth being heard. THE UPRISING OF THE 20,000. Let us remember its awesome name and the deeds of those involved forevermore.