SPOTLIGHT ON AN ACTIVIST FROM THE PAST: CLARA LEMLICH
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Photo Source: Jewish Women’s Archive
Clara Lemlich immigrated to the United States from Ukraine when she was 17 years old to escape violence against Jews in Eastern Europe. Within two weeks of arriving on New York’s Lower East Side, she was working in a garment factory. Her father had a difficult time finding a permanent job so she was often the person responsible for supporting her family.
The conditions in the garment sweatshops were terrible. Clara and other female immigrants worked 6 to 7 days a week for 12 to 14 hours a day. They earned meager wages. The horrific conditions drove Clara to organize other women garment workers into circles where they began to talk about what was wrong in their workplace and how they could change it. Eventually, these circles grew larger and larger. Here’s what happened next in an imaginative reconstruction of what Clara Lemlich might recount to us based on the historical archive.
We kept meeting together and we knew that it would only be by taking action as workers together that we could change this. This is really important. I couldn’t change these conditions on my own. But together with many other workers we could act together to force a change. More and more women started coming to the meetings and we talked to the garment union which back then was run by men. Women weren’t in leadership even though they were also sewing clothing. The places where we women sewed clothing were called shirtwaist factories and there was no union at these factories.
In November of 1909, at a meeting at Cooper Union in New York City, thousands of women and men came together to hear speeches about how bad the conditions were in the garment factories – especially in the shirtwaist factories where all of the women worked. Everyone thought there would be a call for a general strike. But after hours of speeches…nothing. After man after man stood up to describe the problems we faced, I got fed up. I wasn’t very tall (I think she was around 5 feet) but I shouted out as loud as I could from the back of the hall, “Wait, I have something to say! I want to speak!”
The speakers stopped and I was passed hand over hand by the crowd through the hall all the way up to the stage. Once I got to the stage, I yelled as loud as I could in Yiddish “Enough! The time for talk is over! I call for a general strike!” The hall went wild! Thousands of women garment workers cheered and pledged to walk off the job; to leave their sewing machines to march in the streets and demand better conditions and pay. This was really risky because remember our jobs helped us feed and clothe and house our families. But we had had enough and we were ready to risk it all, together.
One of the men on the stage was Benjamin Feigenbaum, who was the First General Secretary and co-founder of the Workers Circle. He wasn’t just about talk and he also recognized young women could be powerful leaders. As the hall cheered after I called for a general strike, he walked over to me on the stage, he took my arm and raised it into the air. And he said that we would now all bind ourselves to action by taking a traditional Yiddish oath. He asked the women to repeat after him. “Should I turn traitor to my cause, may my arm which I now raise, wither.” Everyone raised their arm into the air as thousands took that oath.
The strike became known as the uprising of the 20,000 and took place on the lower east side in NYC. The actual number was closer to 35,000 and was actually the biggest strike in all of United States history. Through the long, cold winter of 1909–1910, I led picket lines, organized parades, and made speeches. Even rich women started to learn about our cause and helped raise money and attract newspaper attention. We kept the pressure on and as the public became aware, most (80%) of the factory owners finally agreed to shorter hours, better pay, better conditions and, importantly, the right of all workers to join a union so that they could protect their rights together.
Read more about Clara Lemlich, from the Jewish Women’s Archive, Accessed 21 June 2022.
“Clara Lemlich and the Uprising of the 20,000.” PBS. Accessed 21 June 2022. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography-clara-lemlich/.