The Girl Who Called the Strike

A young woman stands on a platform in a crowded hall, her hands raw from the shirtwaist line. The men on the stage have been talking for two hours about caution.

It is 1909.

She does not just resent the long hours at the machine. She asks for the floor in Yiddish and calls, against the advice of older and more careful leaders, for a general strike of the shirtwaist workers.

She does not just walk out herself. She helps pull tens of thousands of mostly young immigrant women out of the shops in what became known as the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, one of the largest strikes by women workers the country had seen.

She does not just endure the picket line. She is arrested repeatedly, reportedly beaten, and by her own later account had ribs broken while marching, and she keeps returning to the sidewalk outside the factories.

She does not just win better terms in one trade. She helps prove that women at the bottom of the garment industry could organize, bargain, and force an industry to answer to them, a lesson that outlived the strike itself.

Her Spark of Liberty was a raised hand that would not wait for permission.

She had come to the union hall as a rank-and-file worker, not an officer, and the call she made broke a careful, cautious meeting open. The strike that followed did not fix everything. Wages stayed low, some shops refused to settle, and the safety failures that later killed workers in the Triangle fire in 1911 went unaddressed in many buildings. But the walkout showed that the least powerful people in the trade could act together, and it pushed the garment unions to take their women members seriously.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

She was born in 1886 in Gorodok, in what was then the Russian Empire, in present-day Ukraine. She grew up in a Jewish family under a government that restricted Jewish schooling, and by accounts she taught herself to read Russian despite her parents’ objections. After the violence and upheaval of the early 1900s, her family emigrated, and she reached the United States around 1903, settling in New York and taking work in the garment shops of the Lower East Side.

She joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and became active in Local 25. She was involved in strikes before 1909 and was known among organizers as a fierce and difficult presence on the picket line. Her intervention at the mass meeting at Cooper Union in November 1909, calling for the general strike, is the moment most often cited in accounts of her life, though later retellings have sometimes smoothed or dramatized the exact words.

After the great strike, her militancy made her unwelcome to some employers and, by later accounts, to more cautious union officials as well. She turned toward suffrage and socialist politics, working with the Wage Earners’ Suffrage League and campaigning for the vote for working women. She married in 1913 and raised a family in Brooklyn, and she moved much of her organizing into her own neighborhood.

In the decades that followed she organized housewives and tenants, leading rent strikes, meat boycotts, and consumer actions during the 1920s and 1930s. She was associated with Communist and left labor circles, which drew scrutiny during the anti-radical years of the mid-twentieth century. Late in life, living in a nursing home, she is reported to have helped the staff there organize, a story told often in tributes and consistent with a lifetime of the same habit. She died in 1982.

Her name was Clara Lemlich Shavelson.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

A new Sparks of Liberty story is here. Night Watch: The Watchers of the Night.

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