Life Story: Clara Lemlich Shavelson (1886-1982)

Clara Lemlich was born in 1886 in Gorodok, Ukraine. She did not receive a formal education because there were no Jewish schools for girls in her community. But Clara did not let this stop her. She borrowed books from neighbors and hid them in her attic. She became fascinated with the political theories of Karl Marx and communism. By the time she was a teenager Clara had formed her own beliefs about the challenges and opportunities of working-class people.

When Clara was seventeen her entire family immigrated to the United States to escape the violence against Jews spreading in Europe. Within two weeks of arriving on New York’s Lower East Side, Clara was working in a garment factory. Because her father found it hard to find a permanent job, Clara was often the primary breadwinner for her family.

In the early 1900s the garment industry was experiencing explosive growth. New inventions led to faster and cheaper production. Americans could now buy “ready-made” clothes in stores and catalogs and clothing styles were changing. Although the garment industry was almost exclusively owned and managed by men, the vast majority of its workers were young Jewish and Italian immigrant women. These women typically worked six to seven days a week for twelve to fourteen hours a day, with one bathroom break per day. The average wage was $2 per day. Workers often had to provide their own supplies, including sewing machines. When they were late or made a mistake, they were fined or fired.

Clara found the work unbearable. Like other young immigrants, she had hoped to take advantage of life in a big city. But she was too busy working to go to the theater, the beach, or the grand department stores that sold the very clothes she made.

Clara spent her little free time doing what she did best—teaching herself new things. After a long day of work, she would go to the public library to read or take a class at night school. Then, she would go home, eat a late dinner, and sleep for a few hours before starting again.

Through her studies, Clara realized the only way to change the lives of the garment workers was to organize. Traditionally, unions ignored garment workers because most young women only worked for a few years until they married, as many jobs would fire a woman once she was wed. But Clara did not believe that this was a good excuse for not fighting for better conditions.

Clara helped form a chapter of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. She spoke on street corners, organized meetings, and led strikes in several factories. Every time an employer learned about her activism she was fired. Every time she lost a job, she found a new one and started to make trouble again. During one strike, Clara was arrested seventeen times and the police broke six of her ribs. Within days, she was back on the picket line. She hid her bruises from her parents so they would not beg her to stop.

On November 22, 1909 a massive meeting of garment workers was held at New York City’s Cooper Union. Male leaders spoke for hours about the terrible work conditions. Clara became frustrated that they did not offer a solution. So, she walked up to the podium and spoke in Yiddish, the language spoken by most Jewish immigrants. In her remarks, she called for a general strike to force factory owners to pay attention to their demands. The newspapers described her as an unknown girl, but the crowd recognized her as a leader who had been fighting for years. Her words were an inspiration.

The next morning workers across the garment industry went on a strike that came to be known as “The Uprising of the 20,000.” Within days, an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 young women garment workers were striking. It was the largest organized strike in US history to date. Similar strikes popped up in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and other states, all inspired by the work of Clara and her colleagues.

Through the long, cold winter of 1909–10 Clara led picket lines, organized parades, and made speeches. Rich women helped to raise money and attract newspaper attention. As the public learned about the workers’ concerns, some factory owners felt pressure and offered shorter hours, better pay, and better conditions. But by February 1910 many workers could no longer afford to continue striking. Most returned to work without any change in their circumstances.

Clara could not return to work. She had been blacklisted from the garment industry. Instead, she found paid work as an organizer. She spoke out about women’s suffrage, education, work conditions, and more.

Although the strike improved conditions at some factories, it did not result in the widespread reform Clara and her fellow workers hoped for. Only one year later, on March 25, 1911, a lack of safety precautions led to a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York. One hundred and forty-six workers, mostly young immigrant women, died. This event inspired a larger reform movement, but even that would not result in significant change until President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, was in Washington Square Park on the day of the fire and watched women garment workers jump to their deaths trying to escape the flames. She later said that the New Deal began that day.

In 1913 Clara married Joe Shavelson. They had three children and moved to Brownsville, Brooklyn. In Brownsville, Clara organized the housewives and mothers to boycott stores that charged too much for food, protest landlords who increased rents, and fight for better access to schools. In the 1930s she organized a meat boycott that forced 4,500 New York City butchers to temporarily shut down until they lowered their prices. The movement spread to other cities, including Detroit and Los Angeles.

Clara’s husband died in 1951. That same year, she had to testify in Congress before the House Un-American Activities Committee because of her connections to the Communist Party and her anti-war beliefs. She and her children remained under government surveillance for two decades.

In her eighties Clara lived in a nursing home. She helped the staff form a union and encouraged people at the home to boycott certain businesses because of unfair labor practices. She died at the age of ninety-six in 1982, having worked as an activist until the end of her life.

• blacklisted: being put on a list of people who are disapproved of and tracked so that others might avoid or boycott them. 
• breadwinner: The person in a family who is responsible for most of the family’s income.
• communism: A political system in which all goods and items of value are distributed equally.
• garment: An article of clothing.
• House Un-American Activities Committee: A committee of the House of Representatives that investigated individuals and organizations suspected of being disloyal to the United States.
• Karl Marx: A German political theorist who promoted the ideals of communism and wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848.
• picket line: A line of people protesting; often used during strikes.
• strike: A collective work stoppage to protest unfair working conditions.
• Yiddish: The language spoken by most Eastern European Jewish immigrants in this era.

• APUSH Connection: 7.4: The Progressives
• Strikes were an important technique used by labor activists to demand change in the workplace. Compare the story of New York City’s garment workers with that of laundry workers in El Paso, Texas.
• Clara made her famous speech during a mass meeting at Cooper Union in New York City. Look at the advertisement for the feminist mass meeting (also held at Cooper Union) and consider how and why mass meetings were an important tool used by activists and social reformers in this era.
• Compare Clara’s life story with that of Emma Goldman, another Russian Jewish immigrant who was politically active in New York City.
• To learn more about the history of women’s labor activism, see In Their Own Words.

IMMIGRATION, MIGRATION, AND SETTLEMENT; ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE; WORK, LABOR, AND ECONOMY