How a strike sparked International Women’s Day
In 1908, Theresa Malkiel, a young Jewish refugee who fled antisemitic violence in Russia, was working in a New York factory making shirtwaists, an early twentieth century must-have for “fashionable ladies”. The conditions that the workers – almost entirely female immigrants – endured then are replicated today in the factories of the global south, and also in many workplaces in the global north.
To ensure that profit levels are maintained, conditions in factories both in 1908 and 2019 are hugely unsafe, there are often industrial accidents, days are long and neither wages nor breaks are adequate.
Malkiel, a fantastic organiser and orator, brought together the workers around her and together they went on strike. As part of her activism, Malkiel organised the first International Women’s Day, where in February of 1909, 2000 women and men gathered on 34th Street in New York to listen to socialist feminist speakers discuss the importance of universal suffrage.
Malkiel’s Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker, a fictionalised account of the strike, dedicated to “the nameless heroines of the Shirtwaist Makers Strike” has been unfairly dismissed as propaganda. Yet it helped reform North American labour laws, especially after an industrial disaster in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911, where 146 workers died.
It is also worth re-reading because it reveals the way that these women, often providing the only wage for their family, also faced the burden of the “second shift” i.e. they returned from the shirtwaist factory only to enter what the Wages for Housework Collective called “the social factory”, that is, the family... read more:
To ensure that profit levels are maintained, conditions in factories both in 1908 and 2019 are hugely unsafe, there are often industrial accidents, days are long and neither wages nor breaks are adequate.
Malkiel, a fantastic organiser and orator, brought together the workers around her and together they went on strike. As part of her activism, Malkiel organised the first International Women’s Day, where in February of 1909, 2000 women and men gathered on 34th Street in New York to listen to socialist feminist speakers discuss the importance of universal suffrage.
Malkiel’s Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker, a fictionalised account of the strike, dedicated to “the nameless heroines of the Shirtwaist Makers Strike” has been unfairly dismissed as propaganda. Yet it helped reform North American labour laws, especially after an industrial disaster in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911, where 146 workers died.
It is also worth re-reading because it reveals the way that these women, often providing the only wage for their family, also faced the burden of the “second shift” i.e. they returned from the shirtwaist factory only to enter what the Wages for Housework Collective called “the social factory”, that is, the family... read more:
