Garment Workers Stand with Union

MARY BROWN SUMNER, The Spirit of the Strikers (1910)

In 1909, women workers in the shirtwaist factories in New York left their machines in a strike protesting sweatshop working conditions in the city. Mary Brown Sumner, journalist and activist in women’s suffrage, penned an admiring profile of two of the striking women, Fannie Zinsher and Clara Lemlich, in a 1910 article in The Survey, a social reform journal. An example of “advocacy journalism,” Sumner’s sketch praised their solidarity with the cause of workers’ rights and what Lemlich called “decent human living.” Many of these shirtwaist workers perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in March 1911.

“I hear them say this strike is historical,” said a young working girl who stood watching a group of shirtwaist pickets. She did not follow her words up; probably she did not know exactly what she meant to express, but between the lines of slighting jocularity in the newspaper accounts of the strike and the strikers, she had somehow caught an idea that made a strong appeal to her imagination.

And well it might, for this spontaneous strike of the 20,000 is the greatest single event in the history of woman’s work. Most remarkable of all, these girls — few of them are over twenty years old — are under the domination of no strong individuals. Secretary Schindler handles the enormously increased volume of executive work quietly and unobtrusively, aided by the volunteer services of Secretary Goldstein of the Bakers’ Union. Committees of the various shops meet nightly, then between midnight and three in the morning report in Clinton Hall to the general executive committee which arranges the next day’s campaign. Beside them as an efficient advertising medium stands the Woman’s Trade Union League which co-operates with the union in committee work, shop meetings and picket duty. Behind them is the Central Federated Union and their faithful reporter, the New York Call, whose employes even gave extra service to get out the strike edition. But where are the agitators, where are the labor leaders who, the girls in the settled shops say their employers tell them, must be plotting for power and pelf somewhere in the background?

There are none — or rather, “their name is legion.” Into the foreground of this great moving picture comes the figure of one girl after another as her services are needed. For the time being she is perfectly regardless of self. With extraordinary simplicity and eloquence she will tell before any kind of audience, without false shame and without self-glorification, the conditions of her work, her wages, and the pinching poverty of her home and the homes of her comrades. Then she withdraws into the background to undertake quietly the danger and humiliation of picket duty or to become a nameless sandwich-girl selling papers on the street; no longer the center of interested attention, but the butt of the most unspeakable abuse. “Streetwalker” is one of the terms that the police and the thugs apply daily to the strikers, in fact it has become in their vocabulary almost synonymous with striker.

Many visits to Clinton Hall during the strike have brought me into contact with numbers of these little soldiers of the common good. Two stand out in my mind, Fanny Zinsher of the Triangle Shop, and Clara Lemlich of Leiserson’s.1 Their stories are typical of many others, their personalities are distinctively their own. Both of them are only twenty years old, both came to this country from Russia five years ago, both are ambitious to rise out of their trade into a profession, and both have sacrificed for the sake of this strike money saved to attain this end. These girls are typical, this same outline of a life history applies equally well to many other young strikers. All have stood as one to improve the conditions in a trade which most of them, all but the weaker, — those that could not have stood up for themselves — will leave for marriage or a higher profession. …

I have two pictures of Fanny Zinsher in my mind, one as she came from Russia at fourteen, fleeing from persecution to free America, with round cheeks, smiling, irresponsible lips and clear eyes full of interest and delight in living; the other after five years of American freedom, with sad sweet eyes whose sight was strained by the flashing of the needle and by study late at night, mouth drooping with a weight of sadness and responsibility and an expression of patience and endurance far beyond her twenty years.

She came a little high school girl from Kishineff to San Francisco. She did not know what work for wages was, but she and her brother four years older had to turn to and support a mother and a little brother. Three hundred power-machines in one long room of the garment factory welcomed this little human machine-in-the-making. The roar and flash of the needles terrified her. She tried to work but her nerves went more and more to pieces, her frightened eyes failed to follow her fingers as they guided her work and the second day she slit a finger open and was laid up for three weeks. When she returned she could adapt herself no better to the nervous strain. At piece work she could earn little over one dollar a week, until a kind forewoman removed her to a smaller room where in time she rose to five dollars.

To the older generation among the Russian Jews the hardest thing of all about America is to find that they can take no part in industry; that it is only their little children, cherished and protected by their patriarchal institutions at home, who are quick and “smart” enough to be used in our industries. For the sixteen years of her widowhood Mrs. Zinsher had supported her family in Russia trying to give them a fair start in life, and now after six months in California she felt that the fear of persecution at home, near relatives and friends, was not so deadly for her children as the machine, with no hope, even, of better things to follow. With what remained of the money she had brought to America she came east to sail, only to learn that a second massacre of her race was going on at Kishineff. So the two children settled down again to the machine and in a year the third boy took up the work. …

In the four years preceding the strain was continuous — to adjust oneself to mechanical work at a high tension all day and then turn to mental work at night and all Sunday. And during that time distress and worry of mind were seldom absent. The student frequently lost her place because school prevented her from working the prescribed number of hours a day — that is, from 8 A.m. to 8:30 P.m. for about six months in the year, and Sunday from 8 to 1, or sometimes to 5. For the same reason her pay was small, even when she had work. The end of mingled study and work came a year ago when she went to the position she held when the strike began, making nine dollars a week for the long day — tucking 2,200 yards a day, for which she should have received $13.20 at the piece wage of $2.20 a day — and planning to save for study. …

For eighteen weeks Fanny has been out of work and her only fear is that her brother’s idleness may force her back into a “settled shop” while her services are still needed by the union. Since the beginning she has been indefatigable, speaking before clubs and trade unions in town and in the suburbs, taking charge at Clinton Hall of the sale of the special strike editions of the newspapers; on hand from early morning till 11 o’clock at night, working harder than she ever worked at a machine. She believes that the strike will be won; she says that if nothing else, the very conditions in the shops which employ strike-breakers will win it in the end for the union. Those that now offer double pay for bad work, short hours and the long lunch hour, the free lunch and waltz music on the gramophone, will be forced to withdraw these privileges and the strike-breakers will be pressed down lower than the strikers were. Then they, too, will recognize, she says, that “the boss wants to get the most out of the workers and that their only hope of decent human living is in sticking together.”

Fannie Zinsher is strong and steadfast, but the soul of this young women’s revolution is Clara Lemlich, a spirit of fire and tears, devoid of egotism, unable to tolerate the thought of human suffering. The dramatic climax of the strike came when this girl was raised to the platform at Cooper Union and “with the simplicity of genius,” as one reporter says, put the motion for the general strike. “I have listened to all the speakers and I have no patience for talk. I am one who feels and suffers for the things pictured. I move that we go on a general strike,” she said. Dramatic, too, was the moment two years before when she stood, a solitary little figure, distributing circulars of her union to the girls employed in “the worst shop in New York.” For this “disorderly conduct” she was arrested and had her first experience of a prison cell. …

At sixteen her real education began — in the shop. Her description of the slow and blundering way she pieced together the relation of the workers to their work and their employer recalls the slow dawning in Judge Lindsey’s2 mind of the outline of the “Beast.” What outraged her most from the beginning were the petty persecutions, the meannesses, and the failure to recognize the girls as human beings. She tells of the forewoman following a girl if she left the room and hurrying her back again, of the pay of the new girls kept down because they did not know what the market rate was, of excessive fines, of frequent “mistakes” in pay envelopes hard and embarrassing to rectify; of a system of registering on the time clock that stole more than twenty minutes from the lunch hour, of the office clock covered so that the girls could not waste time looking at it, or put back an hour so that they should not know that they were working overtime. She sat and worked and observed, and her greatest wonder was that the workers endured this constant dragging down of their self-respect.

Very soon she began to say things that made her parents call her a “socialist.” She thought more deeply about her industrial experiences in America, and became one. At the same time she joined the International Union of Shirtwaist Makers — one of the handful who fought for years to keep that infant union alive. From that time she became an agitator in a small way. She had no personal grievance. She was a draper, always well paid and in demand. She needed money, furthermore, because she wished to take a course in medicine, but this did not prevent her from trying persistently to organize every shop she worked in. She tells of one time when she felt that she must keep her place and determined to be “a good girl” — from the boss’s point of view — but in two days found herself talking unionism again. She found, too, then as almost always, that the girls listened and in a crude sort of way hung together in the shop even when they did not join the union. She gradually learned to look for work in the smaller shops where she could make her influence felt. Two years ago the girls in her shop went out on strike because in one department married men were being turned off to make room for cheap girls. That is Clara Lemlich’s idea of solidarity.

In this present strike the girls “walked out to prevent themselves from being starved out,” she says. Their employer who is reckoned worth $100,000 — the whole of it made in the garment trade in the last three years — decided that his employes were too expensive and, as in Fannie Zinsher’s shop, tried to get rid of them gradually on the ground of slack work. Soon the girls found that he was sending his work to a cheap shop he had started downtown, or giving it to the low paid girls in their own shop. Then the battle was joined in good earnest. Clara went on picket duty, was attacked and so badly hurt that she was laid up for several days. This did not deter her; she went back to her post and, being a logical talker, straightforward and well fitted to gain the confidence of her comrades, she was able to add to the number of the strikers. She even gathered a crowd around her on the street corner and enlisted their sympathies in the strikers.

Through the monotonous years when nobody took an interest in the union, when even those who were nominally members would not attend or properly support it, Clara Lemlich’s hope lived on the vivid appeal to the imagination of the idea of the brotherhood of labor, and the pitiful plight of the young and lightheaded and helpless in her trade kept her fighting spirit up. And now with the general strike her faith had justified itself far beyond her expectation. “We never really expected,” she said after the Cooper Union meeting, “that the mass of the workers would be inspired and come out.” But they did, and so strongly was she moved by their action that, she tells you with a faint flush, she ended her report on the floor of the Central Federated Union the next day with the words, “I seem to see the realization of the words of Karl Marx: ‘Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have the world to gain.’”

But all is not exhilaration in this struggle. There is much hard work and much discouragement. The hard work she has done bravely. She has refused a paid position in the union but speaks continually in public in its behalf, serves on shop committees and on the general executive committee. She faces with a full realization the long, discouraging task of keeping alive the union spirit and putting it on the basis of a permanent intellectual and moral appeal. She faces the laborious task of adjusting the details of agreements with employers in the various shops and is already looking forward to the next steps, when they shall demand the union label on shirtwaists and set on foot a broad system of training for learners in the shops. She does not believe that the strike can fail for it has a spirit that will carry it through, and she feels that even after “the tumult and the shouting dies,” a new understanding of their relation to each other will have dawned on the girls, and from this time on the workers in the garment trades will stand together.

Mary Brown Sumner, “The Spirit of the Strikers,” The Survey 23 (January 22, 1910): 550–555.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS