A Women’s Gathering
About This Entry
In 1894, twelve thousand New York tailors went out on strike to protest the miserable working conditions of the sweatshop system. The Yiddish-language Di arbeter tsaytung (The Workers’ Newspaper) reported on a meeting, held November 7, 1894, aimed at drumming up the support of the wives of the striking workers. In the ensuing decades, women themselves became active participants and leaders in the trade union movement. In 1909, Jewish women played the leading role in a strike of New York City shirtwaist makers, known as the Uprising of the 20,000, the largest strike by women in the United States to that date.
The cloak makers have hit upon an outstanding plan. Everybody knows that the greatest enemies of strikes are often the wives of the strikers themselves. That which the bosses cannot achieve with money, policemen, and Pinkertons, they achieve much easier by hiring people to incite the wives against their striking husbands. This inadvertent Alliance is usually the greatest danger for all strikes. In order to avoid this danger, the cloak makers yesterday took their wives to Walhalla Hall, where S. Miller, S. Pollack, and M. Sheynfeld gave them moral instruction. Over 500 wives of the strikers listened with great attentiveness to the speeches, and, at the end, they fervently swore not only not to chastise their husbands anymore for striking but, on the contrary, to allow the men not to return to work until the bosses give in to the union’s demands.
Credits
Unknown, “A Women’s Gathering,” trans. Tony Michels, from Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History (New York: New York University Press, 2012), pp. 93–96. © 2012 by New York University. All rights reserved. Originally published in Yiddish in Di arbeter tsaytung, Nov. 7, 1894. Used with permission of New York University Press.
Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.
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