In
honor of Lily Ledbetter’s speech last night, and Labor Day the day
before that, the Awesome Woman for Wednesday, September 5, 2012, is
Clara Lemlich (March 28, 1886 – July 12, 1982), U.S. advocate for
working women’s rights.
From the Jewish Women’s Archive (quote): Clara Lemlich was born in 1886
in Gorodok, Ukraine, to deeply religious parents. Like most girls, she
was taught Yiddish but was offered no further Jewish schooling. Her
parents were willing to send her to public school, but found that
Gorodok’s only school excluded Jews. Angered by the Russian government’s
antisemitism, her parents forbade her to speak Russian or to bring
Russian books into their home. The headstrong child continued her study
of Russian secretly, teaching Russian folk songs to older Jewish girls
in exchange for their volumes of Tolstoy, Gorky, and Turgenev.
Before she was in her teens, Clara was sewing buttonholes on shirts to
pay for her reading habit. Already fluent in written Yiddish, she
fattened her book fund by writing letters for illiterate mothers to send
to their children in America. When her father found a cache of books
hidden beneath a meat pan in the kitchen, he burned the whole lot and
Clara had to start collecting again. She began storing books in the
attic, where she would perch on a bare beam to read. One Sabbath
afternoon, while her family dozed, she was discovered by a neighbor. He
not only kept her secret, but lent her revolutionary tracts from his own
collection. By the time the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 convinced her
parents to immigrate to the United States, seventeen-year-old Clara was a
committed revolutionary. (endquote) http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/shavelson-clara-lemlich
Clara is probably best known for the speech she gave in Yiddish
exhorting her fellow garment workers to strike and inciting what became
known as the Uprising of 20,000.
From American Experience:
Clara Lemlich | Triangle Fire (quote): As she stood in front of
thousands of her fellow female workers at the Cooper Union in New York
City, speaking in her native Yiddish language, she demanded swift
action. "I am a working girl," proclaimed Lemlich. "One of those who are
on strike against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to
speakers who talk in general terms. What we are here for is to decide
whether we shall strike or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a
general strike be declared now." After a prolonged roar of approval,
Lemlich and the thousands in attendance took a Yiddish oath to strike
the following day, pledging, "If I turn traitor to the cause I now
pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise."
The
next morning, Lemlich and 15,000 factory workers stood in the streets of
New York to protest wages and working conditions. This strike, later
dubbed the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, lasted for over two months
and transformed the culture of the industrial worker. Protestors won
concessions from several factories for fair wages and shorter hours.
Lemlich had not only started a protest, but she had also instigated a
worker's revolution.
… In 1913, Lemlich married Joe Shavelson, a
printer's union activist, and together they had three children. She
continued to speak on behalf of several causes, and she lead a
nationwide food strike in response to inflated prices during World War
I. Throughout the 1940's Lemlich served on the American Committee to
Survey Trade Union Conditions in Europe, and became an organizer for the
American League against War and Fascism. Due to her earlier involvement
in the Communist Party, Lemlich and her family were monitored by the
House of Un-American Activities Committee throughout the 1950s. Lemlich
officially retired from the ILGWU in 1954. She died on July 12, 1982.
(endquote)
From the New York Times (quote): Later in life, her
own union said she had not put enough time in for a pension. Living in a
nursing home, she urged the workers there to organize. In her 1965
letter, Mrs. Lemlich Shavelson concluded by writing, “In so far as I am
concerned, I am still at it.” (endquote). http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/one-woman-who-changed-the-rules/
Unlike most of the Awesome Women I profile, there is a ton of
information out there about Clara. She’s really something, and I highly
recommend reading more about her.
