International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union Research Articles

The Harwood Manufacturing Corporation and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union: A Case of Role Reversal

In the 1940s, Alfred Marrow and the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation played a key role in laying the foundations of participative management. Concurrently, they were also accused of being antitrade union. These accusations resurfaced in the 1960s with the publication of five articles in Trans-Action, which were initiated by William Gomberg, a former International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) official. This paper examines those articles and Gomberg's relationship with Harwood. It draws particular attention to the “a role reversal in the running of factories” whereby Harwood sought to democratize many of its practices by giving some control to workers, whilst the ILGWU sought to act more like an employer by taking on the industrial engineering role of managers in determining methods and times for jobs. The paper concludes that there is little evidence of antitrade unionism, there was a clash between Harwood's worker-centered approach to industrial democracy and ILGWU's industrial engineering-centered approach.

A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice

A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice

The Border at Work: Undocumented Workers, the ILGWU in Los Angeles, and the Limits of Labor Citizenship

Abstract In 2000, the AFL-CIO officially embraced the call for amnesty for undocumented immigrant workers, reversing long-standing policy in favor of greater restriction and border enforcement. The roots of this new approach stretched back to the 1970s, when the growing presence of undocumented workers in the industrial workforce challenged organized labor's nationalist orthodoxy. Taking the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in Los Angeles as a case study, we show how one union confronted new demographic and organizing realities and recognized the demand for unionization among new immigrants. Radical community organizers, legal advocates, and union organizing staff created a practice of labor citizenship, the recognition of the immigrants’ right to remain by virtue the demand for their labor. The promise of belonging through organizing and collective bargaining was limited by state power and the structural weakness of organized labor in the emerging neoliberal economy. Nevertheless, ILGWU campaigns trained a cohort of organizers that would become central to the union upsurge in Los Angeles during the 1990s.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Sewn in Coal Country: An Oral History of the Ladies' Garment Industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1945–1995

Sewn in Coal Country: An Oral History of the Ladies' Garment Industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1945–1995

Networks of Resistance: Floria Pinkney and Labor Interracialism in Interwar America

The life of Black labor activist Floria Pinkney exemplifies the powerful connections between labor unions, workers’ education, and the YWCA that set the stage for the long Civil Rights Movement. In the 1920s Pinkney attended three workers’ education colleges: Brookwood Labor College, the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, and the International People’s College in Denmark. Pinkney also became a prominent labor organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and worked in the New Deal’s Workers’ Education Project. The 1930s alliance between labor and civil rights generally marks the starting decade of the long Civil Rights Movement. But this alliance was fostered by an earlier left culture of social unionism and workers’ education. Pinkney’s journey through this world illustrates Black women’s propagation of this culture. Her life exposes how the expansive networks of labor and civil rights organizations empowered working-class Black women in the interwar period.

Class Struggle, Group Rights and Socialist Pluralism on the Lower East Side – Radical Lawyering and Constitutional Imagination in the Early Twentieth Century

Class Struggle, Group Rights and Socialist Pluralism on the Lower East Side – Radical Lawyering and Constitutional Imagination in the Early Twentieth Century

Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era by Brian Dolber

Reviewed by: Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era by Brian Dolber Brian Greenberg (bio) Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era. By Brian Dolber. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xiv + 256 pp. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the consolidation of modern America as a consumer society. During these decades, the motion picture, the automobile, and consumer durables for the home such as the radio and [End Page 307] the washing machine were regularly advertised in a growing number of national journals and newspapers. What did the spread of mass consumption, mass media, and mass culture mean for democracy in America? The transformation of America into a consumer culture in the first decades of the twentieth century was the central question addressed by Robert and Helen Lynd in Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, their early 1920s field investigation of Muncie, Indiana. The Lynds viewed the authority achieved by consumer culture as a danger to democracy, because, as Robert Lynd warned, Americans were more important to their country as consumers than they were as citizens. Middletown was written as a secular jeremiad in which the Lynds called on Americans to repent and to renew their traditional nonpecuniary culture. Focusing on the Jewish radical groups and media institutions in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, Brian Dolber, in Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era, reaches conclusions far different from those of the Lynds. For Dolber, even as they adapted to the developing consumerism in America, those who identified with the Jewish left kept alive their traditions of community culture and social unionism. As Dolber relates, in the decade following the Red Scare after the First World War, the Jewish Daily Forward (or Der Forverts), which had been founded in 1897 as the first Yiddish socialist newspaper in New York, and other socialist newspapers found themselves in dire financial straits as a result, in part, of the rise in anti-immigrant nativism in America. In 1918 Baruch Charney Vladack became the business manager of the Forward. Over the next decade, as advertising became a fundamental component of commercial culture in the United States, Vladack saw national advertising as fulfilling two functions: as a source of necessary revenue for the Forward and as a way to demonstrate to political and corporate elites that the Forward and its readership were good Americans, thus protecting them from anti-immigrant political repression. Dolber concludes that the commercialization of the Forward during the 1920s marked the integration of the Jewish labor movement’s media with the broader advertising-driven national commercial communications system. Unlike the Lynds, who equated integration with elite cultural domination, Dolber does not see the working class as becoming the passive tools of an all-powerful cultural elite. Instead, he shows how the Jewish left was able to secure a place for itself within the liberal New Deal coalition that developed in the 1930s. Besides the Forward, the Jewish left included the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union (ACWU) and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), industrial unions founded in New York City [End Page 308] during the first two decades of the twentieth century. As Dolber notes, the ACWU and the ILGWU, working with affiliated ethnic organizations and political parties, embraced what Daniel Katz’s book All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (2013) called “social unionism” a radical expression of labor organization that embraced political engagement and integrated union culture with larger social movements. Social unionism was the ideal of unionism that coalesced in the establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, as union leaders and members became key constituents in the New Deal coalition that emerged during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Yet neither Sidney Hillman nor David Dubinsky (the leaders of, respectively, the ACWU and the ILGWU) figure prominently in Dolber’s account of this change. Also largely absent from Dolber’s analysis is John L. Lewis, who personified the aggressive, CIO-led sit-down strikes of the...

Psychoanalysis in My Life: An Intellectual Memoir

Psychoanalysis in My Life: An Intellectual Memoir Murray M. Schwartz (bio) But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under ever-changing forms. —James Joyce, Ulysses Two distincts, division none. —Shakespeare, “The Phoenix and the Turtle” Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident. —Hamlet, III.ii.194 My “intellectual autobiography” can be imagined as two sets of three overlapping circles. The first set of circles consists of activities: teaching, academic administration, and writing. The second set consists of three intellectual preoccupations: psychoanalysis, literature, especially Shakespeare, and the Holocaust. Each set is implicated in the other, and all six circles are in motion, their interplay and interaction varying from time to time and place to place, more like Ptolemy than Copernicus. This abstract scheme is my guide to memory. I hope that the meanings of the circles will become clearer as I tell my story. I. Beginnings In 1942, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I was born into a working-class Sephardic Jewish family. I have a visceral memory of the resounding percussions of the 16" battleship guns practicing in New York harbor during the Second World War. Less than two years later, my father, a skilled carpenter and welder during the Depression, enlisted in the Navy. He was trained as a pharmacist’s mate, spending 1944–1945 on [End Page 125] the island of Tinian, where he ran an infirmary for prisoners, women, and children. On the opposite side of the island, the Enola Gay took off to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. My earliest images of him envision a caretaker and protector against a background of massive violence. My father was an only child, raised in poverty by a mother on welfare who sold napkins and embroidery for a meager living. His father and a stepfather both died before he was five, thrusting him prematurely into a caretaking role at home, and instilling a desire for a protective family of his own. After the war he became a clothes presser in New York’s garment district, where he represented his coworkers in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). My brothers and I thought of him as “in the service,” condensing the Navy medical man and the worker. My mother’s family became his haven, though he prized his sense of independence and self-sufficiency, having spent much of his youth on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side “taking care of himself,” as he said. My mother was the twelfth of thirteen children, nine of whom survived infancy. She became an expert seamstress and devoted housewife, and spoke Ladino as she shared news and mediated disputes among the siblings of her large extended family. Although she had received only elementary formal education, she was a very intelligent woman, who had no trouble speaking truth to power. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table with her buttered white bread and coffee reading Les Misérables as I left for school, and when I came home she would be watching Joe McCarthy’s interrogations of suspected communists on television, smoking her Pall Mall cigarettes and directing expletives his way. In each of these memories I now see a deeply felt element of my intellectual life: my concern with forms of violence and their relation to personal and familial continuity, my preoccupation with the potential for victimhood, my interest in the uses and misuses of democratic institutions, my desire to mediate conflict. “Murray, you like happy families,” an analyst friend once observed, and my psychoanalytic mind asks what was unhappy about mine, what drives me to seek reconciliations and accommodations. A good part of the answer has to do with the [End Page 126] conflicts and tensions in a large and loving family that was striving to improve its social and economic status while maintaining its Jewish identity in the jostle of mid-century New York. During my analysis, I dreamed of lying as an infant blissfully alone beside a translucent pool, but in reality my identical twin brother, Albert, was born to (re)join me after nine minutes. Although we were raised as a unit (“The Twins”) and dressed identically until...

Racial Formation and Re-formation in Twentieth-Century Civil Rights Movements

Racial Formation and Re-formation in Twentieth-Century Civil Rights Movements Joseph R. Stuart (bio) Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico's Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States. By Ruben Flores. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 353 pages. $29.95 (paper). Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City. By Sonia Song-Ha Lee. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xi + 332 pages. $34.95 (paper). The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi. By Stephen A. Berrey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xci + 331 pages. $29.95 (paper). Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900–1968. By Stephanie Hinnershitz. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. 268 pages. $28.95 (paper). The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland. By Robyn C. Spencer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 260 pages. $24.95 (paper). At the close of her landmark article "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall asks, "How can we make ourselves heard without reducing history to the formulaic mantras on which political narratives usually rely?" Too often, Hall argues, the ways that individuals and social structures work for or against certain groups remain "invisible to citizens trained in not seeing and in thinking exclusively ahistorical, personal terms."1 Scholars must nuance and complicate readers' oversimplified views of the civil rights movement by helping them recognize how individuals and organizations foment social, political, economic, and racial change. The past will always be used politically; it is up to those of us [End Page 291] who research and write history to reveal the messy combination of individual agency and societal structures that create the racial, gendered, political, and economic ecospheres Americans inhabit. The five books under review here affirm that civil rights histories did not begin with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education or end with Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination, and that race in civil rights movements went beyond the oversimplified black–white binary. But more than this, these five scholars make larger arguments about civil rights movements in the United States by highlighting the ways that racial formation and identification informed social movements from the 1930s to the 1970s and from California to New York City. Sonia Song-Ha Lee's Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement examines "the political world in which Puerto Ricans and African Americans conceptualized their racial and ethnic identities" in response to New York City's long civil rights movement (3). Lee argues that, although that two groups frequently lived in geographic proximity and faced similar discrimination, they were not natural allies. Americans defined Puerto Ricans as a racially "in-between" people, neither white nor black (unsurprisingly, they fought to be identified with whites rather than African Americans). Despite that preference, twentieth-century sociologists and anthropologists from Oscar Lewis to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer identified Puerto Ricans through a racialized "culture of poverty," as did government programs, which linked Puerto Ricans with African Americans. Over time, however, many Puerto Ricans began to work with African Americans for civil rights in matters of antipoverty policy. Indeed, one of Lee's great contributions, building on the historiographical trend toward examining interracial political coalitions after World War II, is her exploration of the ways that politics and class created common ground for members of different racial groups within civil rights movements. Despite their shared economic disenfranchisement, New York's Puerto Ricans did not fight for political, social, and labor gains using the tactics embraced by African Americans before World War II. For instance, Lee shows that black and Puerto Rican members followed different paths in the struggle for justice in the workplace in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). Puerto Ricans' fragile status in the United States made them less willing to incur the wrath of their union bosses. African Americans, who did not fear deportation or other punitive measures, fought vocally for labor rights and used their connections to black community and...

Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South, 1930–2000 by Michelle Haberland

Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South, 1930-2000. By Michelle Haberland. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. [xii], 228. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4742-4; cloth, $79.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-2584-2.) Michelle Haberland's study of southern women workers in the U.S. apparel industry is a welcome addition to the existing literatures on southern labor history and the history of women and work. Apparel, Haberland suggests, was a key sector in southern manufacturing that has been obscured by (or conflated with) textiles in much historical writing on southern labor. Because the apparel workforce was much more heavily female (around 80 percent), her book not only chronicles a largely untold story but also provides rich opportunities to examine southern working women's lives. Moreover, it shows how women's history can offer new insights about the histories of economic development, unionization, racial inequality, and industrial decline. Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South, 1930-2000 takes readers on a tour of southern apparel manufacturing from the start of the Great Depression through the end of the twentieth century. Haberland begins by exploring the industry's emergence in the South as a sector fleeing northern-based unions starting in the 1930s. She traces the history of union organizing in southern plants--emphasizing gendered portrayals of women's strike actions--from the 1930s through the 1960s. The book pays close attention to how Jim Crow employment policies benefited white women and how, in the wake of civil rights agitation and legislation in the 1960s, racial integration facilitated union success. It also examines the history of unionists' appeals to women consumers through union label and boycott campaigns, covering in detail the Farah boycott of the early 1970s and the famous Look for the Union Label campaign sponsored by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) (p. 131). The study concludes by considering the recent effects of globalization, which in some ways mirrored the industry's earlier southward turn. Striking Beauties is valuable in several respects. Haberland does an admirable job of exploring racial tensions within the southern apparel workforce and showing how greater racial and ethnic diversity in the 1960s and 1970s pushed the major unions (the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America) toward greater inclusivity, although some forms of segregation persisted even in integrated plants. …

The Dress Strike at Three Finger Brown's: The Complex Realities of Antiracketeering from the Union Perspective in the 1950s

AbstractIn 1958 the International Ladies Garment Workers Union waged a strike in the dress industry. The union's central goal was to curb the growing influence of organized crime, particularly among the factories being set up in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The Garment Workers’ leadership saw the conflict as a pivotal test for their organization. Drawing on newly available source materials, including FBI files and the records of a Senate investigation, this article argues that the union's approach to this strike reflected the complex realities it faced in dealing with corruption in the garment industry. Organized crime played long term and fundamental roles in the New York Garment District and especially in the industry's trucking sector. The union had found itself forced to accommodate aspects of the mob's role in order to build its organization. The 1958 strike was about curbing the mob sector and, in effect, renegotiating the previously made arrangements. It was, the article argues, a kind of real-world anticorruption effort, waged by union members and union leaders at some risk to themselves in mob-dominated towns such as Pittston, Pennsylvania.

‘Not everything that the bourgeois world created is bad’: aesthetics and politics in women workers' education

In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education, Cohn left a rich body of labour literature, wherein art is central in the ways she conceptualized, designed and organized women workers' educational programmes and curricula, as well as cultural activities for more than 50 years. For Cohn, however, art and politics were tightly interwoven in what I have called the artpolitics assemblage of women garment workers' life and work. It is entanglements between ethics, aesthetics and politics, considered in the light of the Rancièrian notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’, that I discuss in this paper.

Educating the seamstress: studying and writing the memory of work

In this paper I excavate the memory of work by looking into institutional histories, discourses and ideologies revolving around women workers’ educational experiences, cultural lives and political activities in the first half of the twentieth century in the US. In doing this I sketch Rose Pesotta’s pen-portrait, drawing on her autobiographical narratives. As a migrant garment worker, an anarchist trade union leader and one of the few women vice-presidents in the history of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), Pesotta emerges as a narrative persona, whose writings throw light on a rather neglected area in the field of gender studies: women’s memory of work and their contribution to the cultural formations of the twentieth century. In analysing Pesotta’s autobiographical writings in the context of their geographies and times, I deploy Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of narratives as tangible traces of the contingency of action and the unpredictability of the human condition, constitutive of politics and the discourse of History.

Pins and Needles (1937): Everything in moderation

Pins and Needles, a revue produced and performed by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) in 1937, is frequently compared with another leftist revue of the Great Depression, Parade, produced by the Theater Guild in 1935. Parade presented satirical sketches entirely from the liberal perspective, which apparently did not satisfy audiences, because the show closed in only five weeks. Pins and Needles, on the other hand, ran for three years, although it, too, was born out of a socially progressive culture. Why, then, did it succeed? The following study will illuminate Pins and Needles’ balanced content, which was achieved by introducing skits that featured the tempered political viewpoints and socially progressive ideals of the union from which it came. Through the careful construction of content, and the decisions made by the show’s creative team, which included theatre professionals and union leadership who answered to the cast of ILGWU members, Pins and Needles’ enjoyed wide-ranging and long-lasting appeal.

In Memoriam

Harriet Fleisher Berger was a trailblazer. She was a curious thinker and a practitioner of feminism before the term became familiar in the field of political science. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1938, married, and raised two sons. After graduation, she became a researcher at the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. This was a pathway for young women at that time since many of the traditional academic pathways were often limited for women. In addition to her research at the ILGWU, she also helped start the first union medical clinic in Philadelphia. Her family came from an aristocratic-type family, who owned a garment manufacturing business in Philadelphia which provided them with a comfortable standard of life. Throughout her life Dr. Berger, in addition to her teaching, actively worked as an anti-colonialist, a liberal, an environmentalist, a conservationist, a labor organizer, and a New Deal Democrat.

David Dubinsky, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Limits of Social Democratic Trade Unionism

Unlike Parmet’s (2005) well-written and thoroughly researched biography and many other generally admiring books and articles on David Dubinsky, the former International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) president from 1932 to 1966, this essay contends that even though Dubinsky initiated important developments within the ILGWU and fought heroically against Nazism and Fascism, his right-wing social democratic worldview was ultimately divisive to the achievement of national and international working class unity. Dubinsky’s political positions become evident through his vigorous anti-Communism which he engaged in with regards to his dealings with Communists in the ILGWU, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the American Labor Party. Moreover, the exporting of his anti-Communism abroad via the American Federation of Labor’s Free Trade Union Committee and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions damaged international working class unity through the sabotaging of radical trade unionism not only in Western Europe but in nations around the globe. Understanding Dubinsky’s anti-Communism is the key for ultimately comprehending the garment union leader’s politics.

An Unladylike Strike Fashionably Clothed: Mexicana and Anglo Women Garment Workers Against Tex-Son, 1959–1963

A conflict that rocked San Antonio from 1959 to 1963, the Tex-Son garment workers' strike was the first International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) struggle led by a Mexican American woman and the first strike in which Mexican-origin and Anglo women picketed together in Texas. Responding to the city press's focus on the violence of the strike, the women of Tex-Son strategically used Cold War-era ideologies of femininity and domesticity to revise public notions of their "unladylike" struggle. By literally refashioning themselves through their physical appearance and emphasizing their dual role as mothers and workers, the mostly Mexicana Tex-Son strikers gained tremendous support in the traditionally anti-union city of San Antonio. Situated between the end of World War II and the Chicano movement, the Tex-Son strike represents an important, transitional form of Mexican and Mexican American women's activism not yet fully explored by historians.

A Power among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (review)

Reviewed by: A Power among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Melissa R. Klapper (bio) A Power among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. By Karen Pastorello. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xvii + 273 pp. Karen Pastorello’s new book is both a throwback and a welcome innovation. It is a throwback in the sense that it offers a biography of a labor leader through a lens trained rather narrowly on the public dimensions of a life. But it is a welcome innovation in the sense that it restores Bessie Abramowitz Hillman to a photographic panorama that has far too long focused on male leaders to the exclusion of women, the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) to the exclusion of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW), and New York to the exclusion of Chicago. That Pastorello, working with admittedly limited resources, manages to use Hillman’s experiences as an ACW founder and lifelong union organizer to illuminate the evolution of labor feminism is an accomplishment indeed. The outline of Hillman’s life in some ways parallels the stories of other Jewish women who became labor leaders. Born in eastern Europe, she emigrated rather than face an arranged marriage, began working in the needle trades shortly after arriving in Chicago, and was politicized by the conditions of her work environment. In 1910 she participated in a major strike at Hart, Schaffner, and Marx, a strike initiated by women, and in the aftermath of the successful settlement became first an organizer for the United Garment Workers and then a founder of the ACW. A roughly similar story could be told of Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Rose Pesotta, and Pauline Newman, all of whom worked within the ILGWU in New York. All these leaders struggled with similar problems. Union executives were almost exclusively male and usually hostile to any perceived encroachment of women into the ranks of leadership, despite the predominance of women workers in some sectors of the needle trades. Like her ILGWU colleagues, whom she knew and with whom she cooperated, Hillman depended, at least to some degree, on the kind of middle-class female allies she had first met at Chicago’s Hull House. All the women labor leaders were constantly confronted with a choice [End Page 124] between prioritizing their gender and class identities. Their refusal to make that choice (most of the time) yielded a particular strain of labor feminism that sustained them all over many decades. There were important ways in which Hillman’s path diverged from those of other women labor leaders, however. At the time of the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx strike, she was already involved with the ACW’s first president, fellow Chicago striker Sidney Hillman, whom she married in 1916, moving to New York to join him at the union’s headquarters. The Hillmans had two children, owned a home, and experienced at least some upward economic mobility. For the thirty years of their marriage, Bessie Hillman worked tirelessly as a union organizer and education director, starting many of the programs that made the ACW such an important union, but she never accepted a salary during her husband’s lifetime. The other Jewish women labor leaders supported themselves and their families and fought bitterly to be paid what their work was worth. Though her family life was far from perfect and she spent a substantial amount of time on the road, Hillman does not seem to have experienced the devastating loneliness and weariness of Cohn, Pesotta, and others. Nor does she seem to have relied quite as heavily on a network of female friends. It is difficult to know how to evaluate the role these differences played in Hillman’s life because, unlike the most prominent ILGWU women, she did not leave behind substantial personal papers. Pastorello reconstructs her public life in some detail and provides plenty of contextual information, sometimes to the point of repetition, but the kind of sophisticated, interior landscape of women labor leaders that other historians have managed to map is missing here. The biographer cannot be faulted for a...

Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea by Laura Hapke and Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti‐Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor by Daniel E. Bender

Sweatshop: History of an American Idea Laura Hapke. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor Daniel E. Bender. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Laura Hapke's book Sweatshop: History of an American Idea and Daniel Bender's book Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor are complementary works both published in 2004 by Rutgers University Press. Bender covers the topic from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s; while Hapke starts in the 1940s and continues to the present. first part of Hapke's book, The Surveyed, depicts the sweatshop's development from the Massachusetts Lowell Mills of the 1840s to New York's Lower East Side tenements of the 1890s. Gender differences concerning sweatshops are made apparent by the authors, particularly in terms of the role of men and women in the sweatshops and in labor organizations such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Hapke focuses on the role of women after the Shirtwaist Strike of 1909-1910 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, in which 146 people died in a modern tenement built without sanitation and safety considerations. While the sweatshop workplace was condemned by the 1920s, the idea lived on among many workers into the 1930s. Hapke's second part entitled Sweatshop Aesthetics details the New Deal's pictorial treatment of the sweatshops and their workingclass subjects in the chapter called Newsreel of Memory: WPA in the Great Depression. Hapke takes the idea and substance of the sweatshop into the post-World War II industrial and postindustrial world. New ethnic and racial groups, blacks, Asians, and Latinos, replaced the Jews and Italians. While the Age of Affluence (1945-1953) was the time of the unionized sweatshop, the sweatshop jobs were quickly outsourced, immigrant labor serviced new illegal sweatshops, and increasingly Americans worked in postindustrial service jobs. Older unions, particularly the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the ILGWU, merged to form UNITE, an organization pledged to unionize the new sweatshops in American, but as Hapke points out Americans disagreed about the nature of the modern sweatshops, as witnessed by the controversy revolving around the 1998 Smithsonian Institution's exhibit Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of Sweatshops 1820 to the Present held at the National Museum of American History. …