I’m writing this on the morning after more than a million people around the world came together in the name of women’s rights, and to protest the regressive policies of the incoming U.S. administration.
Yesterday was awe-inspiring. Today, I hear many people asking, “How can we sustain and mobilize this energy?” So I’m writing this as a reminder that mobilizing and sustaining political action is what women have always done, and it’s what we will continue to do.
Why fashion? Because fashion – through its association with femininity – is usually talked about like it’s frivolous and shallow, and then, paradoxically, is often used as a way to dismiss the political power of people who associate with it.
But fashion is more than just new clothes and styles. It isn’t just a noun. It’s also a verb. Fashion isn’t just something you have, it’s something you do. As a verb, the word fashion means “to make.” It also means “to transform.” Or, more simply, to change.
One reason we often forget that fashion is active is that much of the industry works very hard to frame it in terms of consumer experiences. But when you look at fashion media, it helps to remember that the images don’t just represent styles, garments and models, they also represent the invisible hands of the (most often) women garment workers who made them.
Here’s a fun fact: for all the handwringing about the loss of “real” blue-collar working-class jobs, the truth is that “feminine” jobs created our economy. Textiles were the primary driver of the industrial revolution. And another fun fact: women organizers have been fighting to be recognized as workers and citizens (not just consumers or “mothers, wives and daughters”) for centuries.
So today, I want to celebrate six of these leading women organizers from US history. It’s a somewhat arbitrary selection. Each of these women represents thousands of others who worked just as hard and were just as effective. But I think it’s important to remember that we’ve been doing this all along. And that the things that have been used to define us as “feminine,” and therefore apolitical, have often been the very weapons we’ve used to fight for our causes.
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Harriet Hanson Robinson (1825 – 1911)
Harriet started working in a cotton mill in Lowell Massachusetts at age 10. In 1898 she wrote a vivid account of her participation in some of the first strikes organized by the “Lowell Mill girls” in the 1830s.
As she notes, the mills made a conscious effort to recruit girls and young women from surrounding farms. In order to do this, they had to change the bad reputation female mill workers had unfairly gotten in Northern England. Instead, the Lowell factories offered higher wages, educational opportunities, and promised “respectable” living and working conditions.
Women responded in droves and formed one of the first mass industrial workforces in the U.S. Susan Kaiser argues that the “Lowell girls” can be understood as a counterpoint to Marx’s theory of alienated labor. In fact, these women felt a strong connection to the textiles they made, viewing themselves “not only as active producers, but also thoughtful consumers, of textiles” (109). She goes on to describe how diaries from the time “refer specifically to the young women’s desire for new clothes – as well as economic independence – as a motivating factor to move from their New England farms to the work in the textile mills.”
Did their desire for fashion, which also represented their independence, prove that they were shallow and docile? Nope. Do you know what happens when you create a whole town full of girls who have just forged identities as workers, citizens and as part of a community, and then you raise their rents and lower their wages? Those girls organize, that’s what. Describing the first strike in 1836, Harriet Robinson wrote, “It was estimated that as many as twelve or fifteen hundred girls turned out, and walked in procession through the streets…” And recollecting her role in leading a walkout on her floor (at age 11!), she writes, “As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more proud than I have ever been at any success I may have achieved.”
More strikes followed in subsequent years, and resulted in significant improvements for the workers…until the factory owners found a cheaper labor source in new immigrants, and those women had to start the process again.
Sources:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/robinsonfactgirls.html
http://library.uml.edu/clh/all/han.pdf
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/fashion-and-cultural-studies-9781847885647/
2. Clara Lemlich (1886 – 1982)
Like many Eastern European Jewish (and Italian) immigrants, Clara began working in New York’s garment industry almost immediately upon arriving in 1903. In 1909 she was one of the leaders of the “Uprising of the 20,000,” a coalition of women workers striking against sweatshop conditions in the garment industry.
Nan Enstad points out that “Lemlich included a defense of fashion in a list of grievances. Young women needed a place to put their hats” (8). Lemlich and the other strikers’ insistence on participating in fashion – buying new hats and shoes with delicate “French heels” – was a source of consternation for both bourgeois social commentators (what business did poor women have trying to look like the higher classes?) and for predominantly male union leadership (serious organizers don’t wear ostrich plumes).
But, as Enstad argues, both sides failed to understand the significance of new hats and “American” fashions for these workers. Breaking from a tradition where feminine labor and income belonged entirely to her family, “hats signaled women’s status as workers who earned their own money.” New clothes also represented their new “American” identity. This wasn’t just a matter of aesthetics as, “many employers would not hire women who did not wear American clothing.”
Ultimately, Enstad argues that “while subjectivities formed through commodity consumption are typically dismissed as superficial…working women used popular culture as a resource to lay claim to dignified identities as workers, sometimes from the very terms used to by others to degrade them.” Which makes me think that Clara Lemlich would have loved the pussy hat.
Clara and the 1909 strikers (whose efforts resulted in union contracts at most of the shops – with the notable, tragic, exception of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory) employed a tactic that many subsequent generations would follow. They protested in their best clothes, showing the world that they weren’t just invisible hands. Not just a collection of useful body parts, but whole people. Clara’s story also demonstrates another theme that we see recurring in every generation: she didn’t just have to fight the factory owners and moneyed elite, she also had to fight the unions who were supposed to represent her. After being blacklisted in the garment industry and butting heads with the ILGWU, she focused her efforts on the suffrage movement. Lemlich lived to be 96, and she never stopped organizing.
Sources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/triangle-lemlich/
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/ladies-of-labor-girls-of-adventure/9780231111034
3. Luisa Moreno (1907 – 1992)
Like Clara Lemlich, it’s impossible to summarize Luisa’s organizing career in a paragraph or two. This woman got stuff done, starting as a teenager in Guatemala, when she successfully lobbied to admit women into the nation’s universities. Later, when she was working as a seamstress in Spanish Harlem, she organized her co-workers (the ILGWU didn’t have much interest in organizing with Latinas. For more on this see Rose Pesotta, who worked with Latina garment workers in Los Angeles in the 1930s).
My favorite story about Luisa Moreno, though, involves the clever use of a chic overcoat. In 1930, workers at Zelgreen’s Cafeteria in NYC were protesting “long hours, constant sexual harassment, and the threat, should anyone object, of dismissal.” According to the Zinn Education Project “Hearing that workers would picket the cafeteria, police formed a line on the sidewalk that allowed customers to pass through. Luisa, in a fur collar coat, strolled through the cordon of policemen as if she was going to enter the cafeteria. When she was directly in front of the door she pulled a picket sign from under her coat and thrust it in plain view, yelling, “Strike!” Two burly policemen grabbed her by the elbows. They lifted her off the sidewalk and hustled her into the entrance of a nearby building. She came out with her face bleeding and considered herself fortunate that she was not disfigured.”
Source: https://zinnedproject.org/materials/women-in-labor-history/
4. The Woolworth Girls (1937)
In 1937, Woolworths was one of the largest employers of working-class young women in the country. This wasn’t a coincidence. Store management “knew” that these women would work longer hours for less money, that they wouldn’t stick around very long because they’d probably want to go off and have babies or whatever, and above all, they wouldn’t complain. Oh yeah, and they only hired “white” women, because racism. Well, the girls in Detroit weren’t having it. They saw the success of the recent sit-down strikes among autoworkers, and decided to follow suit.
A couple things to note here:
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The Woolworths “Counter Girls”… The strike started in Detroit but quickly spread to cities around the country, and sparked successful organizing campaigns in every major
department store in America. - These women understood the power of representation. Look at the pictures. They knew what they were doing when they arrived at the strike wearing crisp uniforms and smiles. Everyo
And Barbara Woolworth Hutton. Who would you rather have lunch with? ne shopped at Woolworths. The public knew these girls and very quickly sympathized with their cause. This representational effort was aided by contrasting images in the media of hard-working “counter girls” with infamous heiress, Barbara Woolworth Hutton, who was often seen lounging around European resorts.
As Fred Goldstein writes, “This is an important struggle in the history of the workers’ movement. Wal-Mart is no more anti-union today than Woolworth’s was in 1937. This struggle shows that it is not the structure of the retail industry that determines whether or not it can be organized but the climate of the labor movement, the general level of struggle in the country and its effect on the rank-and-file.”
Source: http://www.workers.org/2010/us/woolworth_0318/
5. Crystal Lee Sutton (1940 – 2009)
You know how Sally Field won an Oscar for playing a small town, Southern wife who fought to organize the textile factory where she worked? Remember? Norma Rae? Well, she was based on a real person – Crystal Lee. You already know the basics of her story, because you’ve watched the movie. If you haven’t, go do it right now. I’ll wait….
Ok, now I want to talk about Crystal Lee. Because she knew something Hollywood couldn’t let on: the truth “that there were many Norma Raes.” As groundbreaking as Norma Rae was, telling stories about organizing – especially women organizing – is hard for Hollywood for a lot of reasons, not least because their storytelling paradigm is based on individual identification. And women are supposed to identify with relationships and romance. One of the most important things about Crystal Lee Sutton’s story is that it isn’t Crystal Lee Sutton’s story. When textile workers in Roanoke Rapids voted to unionize, it was largely due to the coalition and cooperation of working-class African-American and white women. Joey Fink writes, “For organizers and union leaders, the success in Roanoke Rapids seemed to signal a turning point: black and white workers could unite against a company as aggressively anti-union as Stevens. “Roanoke Rapids is everywhere,” proclaimed North Carolina civil rights activist Reverend W. W. Finlator.”
And for more on Black women and the ILGWU read this fantastic article: http://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/invaders-black-ladies-of-the-ilgwu-and-the-emergence-of-the-early-civil-rights-movement-in-new-york-city)
6. May Chen (1948)
May Chen is an educator and organizer, who like all of these women has accomplished far too much to summarize here. So I’ll just talk briefly about how she led the ILGWU Chinatown garment workers’ strike in 1982. Nearly 20,000 workers gathered in Columbus Park, making it the largest protest in Chinatown’s history. You can read the details here.
What’s important to me is that organizing this particular group of people must have felt impossible. Because business owners were employing age-old tactics: dividing into smaller and smaller, isolated shops – making it increasingly difficult for workers to get together. And, just as the Jewish owned shops at the turn-of-the-century didn’t think Jewish girls would betray their ethnic and religious affiliations and fight for better working conditions, the Chinese owned shops played on this sense of cultural loyalty. Chen and the mostly women garment workers she represented proved these tactics don’t work.
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So this is just a small sample, spanning a mere 150 years. I chose examples from the U.S. labor movement because it’s a movement based on organizing around rights. Obviously it hasn’t been perfect though. Union leaders have historically been victim to the same racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, etc. prejudices as the rest of our society. Some (myself included) have argued that one reason for the decline of unions in the late 20th century was its failure to adequately take on service industries that were dominated by women and people of color, and which became the basis of our economy.
That’s why I also focused on fashion related stories. Stories about women who made, styled and wore the “looks” of their day. Making fashion, wearing fashion is about imagining what the future will look like and what you will do there. The women listed here were brave enough to imagine a different future from the one laid out for them. There were gaps in their vision, for sure. Many people were left out and had to work twice as hard to be seen. But that was then. Now it’s our turn to decide how we will wear tomorrow. And how will we bring others into this vision? My own thoughts turn first to the fact that the American garment industry is basically gone. Our economy is global now. And “America First” is un-American nonsense. Women around the world marched in solidarity with us yesterday. How will we support them? For example, how can we support women in Bangladesh – the women who make our clothes now – as they fight to unionize? It’s time to figure it out.
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