Seamstresses and Strikes: Women Organizers and the Garment Industry

Women Unionizing.

In 1914 Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), expressed his regret that women had not joined men in a concerted effort to improve standards in the nation's factories. Gompers's observation, however, was at least partially based in his own bias against women factory workers. If he had looked more closely he would have seen that women were taking important steps toward unionization. Militant women garment workers entered the labor movement in large numbers as organizers, picketers, and negotiators in the 1910s. These brave women willingly met the threats a strike imposed on their livelihood and faced the reality of social ostracism because striking violated the norms of respectability and femininity. Women organizers had to deal with problems that male union organizers did not understand or would not acknowledge.

Grudging Acceptance.

Near the end of the decade the...

[The entire page is 1080 words long]

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