Thread by @jewdas

Happy International Women's Day!

Originally, IWD was a socialist holiday to commemorate the strikes of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union plus other fantastic working women across the world.

#IWD2020

Clara Lemlich was a leader in ILGWU and lead the "Uprising of the 20,000" strike of 1909 which is considered one of the most successful strikes of the union and of the time. 20,000 women walked out of their factories for 14 weeks...

...ending in increases in pay and working conditions in all apart from the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.

As a child in a Ukrainian shtetl, Clara taught herself to Russian to read revolutionary texts before her family fled the pogroms to New York. Clara found work in a sweatshop and immediately started to unionise the workers.

At the time, the sweatshop workforce was almost entirely Jewish and Italian migrant women.

In fact the strikers took a Yiddish oath "zol opbliyen mayn rekhter hant tsi ikh brekh der strayk" (may my right hand wither if I break the strike) to show their devotion to the strike.

Throughout her life Clara Lemlich was unrelenting in her absolute devotion to the cause. Leading landmark strikes and being elected to the executive board of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union after being told that there was no point unionising women.

Clara faced violence not only from the police and thugs hired by factories but also from men on the Left.

Even once she had been blacklisted from the industry Clara continued.

She organised women in her area to boycott kosher meat in protest of unreasonable rises in prices, was kicked out of several women's suffrage organisations for being too radical and even in her last years, Lemlich organised the workers in her nursing home.

Clara Lemlich, Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman and so so many more. The Jewish migrant women who lead the labour movement in the US carved a path for us but too often we forget. They have left a footprint on all of our lives with the rights they won for us all.

This International Women's Day, and the other 364 days of the year, remember these women and their contributions to women's, worker's and migrant's rights but do not forget about the women like them today. Their legacy must be protected.

jwa.org/blog/10-things…