A woman coal miner in Appalachia. The photo likely
comes from the late 1970s or early 1980s. Source unknown.
International Working Women's Day (IWWD), now more commonly known as International Women's Day, falls on March 8 every year. The day likely has its origins in the United States but is not celebrated here as an officially recognized holiday as it is elsewhere in the world. May Day also has its origins in the United States as a day for working-class protest and it is also not widely or legally observed here.
International Working Women's Day probably began in New York City in the middle of the nineteenth century as a day of protest organized by women working in the garment industry. It fell out of use and was revived by socialists in New York City in the early years of the twentieth century as garment workers---most of them women---began to organize into the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). The ILGWU was then attempting to become an industry-wide union of all garment workers employed in making women's clothing. The union existed in large part as a coalition of immigrant garment workers, most of them women, and their supporters. Among these supporters were feminists of the time, immigrant journalists and writers, reformers and socialists of various stripes. and people who were concerned with workplace safety and health and cleaning up the poor and immigrant urban neighborhoods. Opposed to them all were the garment manufacturers and the contractors they hired, most elected and appointed officials, the police, criminal gangs employed by the garment manufacturers to break strikes and manage the competitive garment industry, the landlords who owned the factory buildings, and most of the mainstream press.
Union labels from the ILGWU.*
Women socialists took up the cause of working women's rights internationally around the turn of the century, but it was the dramatic mass strike of garment workers in New York, known as the Uprising of the 20,000 (1909), and the terrible Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 that put IWWD on the calendars of the international labor movement. The main demands of the strike were for a 20-percent pay raise, a 52-hour workweek, extra pay for overtime, and a union shop in which every worker was a union member and the employers had to bargain with the union and agree on a contract, but the mostly young immigrant women who were the strike and union activists were hopeful and idealistic and wanted more. They faced outrageous attacks by thugs and police on their picket lines, unfriendly politicians and mainstream newspapers that supported the employers, and even some union officials who publicly doubted that they could win. Still, their determination won over socialists and reformers and large sections of the labor movement, many immigrant organizations and newspapers, and even many prominent wealthy women. The strikers were asserting themselves into history on behalf of all working women and immigrant communities whether they realized it or not.
Photo source unknown.
The main body of strike lasted three months and won many improvements, but it did not bring the total victory that many of the women had fought for. Still, the union had gained a generation of women activists and leaders and had shown that women could lead a mass strike and win advances that were crucial to their lives and to their collective advancement as working women and as immigrants. These lessons remain with us today. The strike set in motion a process for cleaning up factories and resolving disputes between workers and bosses, made progress in cleaning up poor and immigrant neighborhoods, and contributed to women winning the vote. Some factories held out by using thugs and police and the courts to avoid unionization.
One of the those companies was the Triangle Shirtwaist factory located in lower Manhattan. On Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire that started on the top floors of the factory took the lives of at least 146 of the workers. The inherited story of the fire tells us that the factory owners had locked the factory's exits in order to stop workers from stealing or to stop them from leaving work early. Many of the facts surrounding the fire remain in dispute, but it is a fact that the firefighters who arrived to fight the fire did not have ladders tall enough to reach the upper floors of the 10-story building and that the fire caused the rails controlling the building's elevators to buckle and become inoperable.
A newspaperman who happened to be present called in his account of the fire in real time and offered the following:
I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from the factory building caught my eye. I reached the building before the alarm was turned in. I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound--a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.
Thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead. Sixty-two thud-deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was eighty feet.
The first ten thud-deads shocked me. I looked up-saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they, too, must come down, and something within me-something that I didn't know was there-steeled me.
I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud--then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs.
As I reached the scene of the fire, a cloud of smoke hung over the building. . . . I looked up to the seventh floor. There was a living picture in each window-four screaming heads of girls waving their arms.
"Call the firemen," they screamed-scores of them. "Get a ladder," cried others. They were all as alive and whole and sound as were we who stood on the sidewalk. I couldn't help thinking of that. We cried to them not to jump. We heard the siren of a fire engine in the distance. The other sirens sounded from several directions.
"Here they come," we yelled. "Don't jump; stay there."
One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back. Then she dropped into space. I didn't notice whether those above watched her drop because I had turned away. Then came that first thud. I looked up, another girl was climbing onto the window sill; others were crowding behind her. She dropped. I watched her fall, and again the dreadful sound. Two windows away two girls were climbing onto the sill; they were fighting each other and crowding for air. Behind them I saw many screaming heads. They fell almost together, but I heard two distinct thuds. Then the flames burst out through the windows on the floor below them, and curled up into their faces.
The firemen began to raise a ladder. Others took out a life net and, while they were rushing to the sidewalk with it, two more girls shot down. The firemen held it under them; the bodies broke it; the grotesque simile of a dog jumping through a hoop struck me. Before they could move the net another girl's body flashed through it. The thuds were just as loud, it seemed, as if there had been no net there. It seemed to me that the thuds were so loud that they might have been heard all over the city.
I had counted ten. Then my dulled senses began to work automatically. I noticed things that it had not occurred to me before to notice. Little details that the first shock had blinded me to. I looked up to see whether those above watched those who fell. I noticed that they did; they watched them every inch of the way down and probably heard the roaring thuds that we heard.
As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He seemed cool and calculating. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if he were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry.
Then came the love amid the flames. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward-the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head.
Thud-dead, thud-dead-together they went into eternity. I saw his face before they covered it. You could see in it that he was a real man. He had done his best.
We found out later that, in the room in which he stood, many girls were being burned to death by the flames and were screaming in an inferno of flame and heat. He chose the easiest way and was brave enough to even help the girl he loved to a quicker death, after she had given him a goodbye kiss. He leaped with an energy as if to arrive first in that mysterious land of eternity, but her thud-dead came first.
The firemen raised the longest ladder. It reached only to the sixth floor. I saw the last girl jump at it and miss it. And then the faces disappeared from the window. But now the crowd was enormous, though all this had occurred in less than seven minutes, the start of the fire and the thuds and deaths.
I heard screams around the corner and hurried there. What I had seen before was not so terrible as what had followed. Up in the [ninth] floor girls were burning to death before our very eyes. They were jammed in the windows. No one was lucky enough to be able to jump, it seemed. But, one by one, the jams broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking-flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire.
The whole, sound, unharmed girls who had jumped on the other side of the building had tried to fall feet down. But these fire torches, suffering ones, fell inertly, only intent that death should come to them on the sidewalk instead of in the furnace behind them.
On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring. A fireman who came downstairs from the building told me that there were at least fifty bodies in the big room on the seventh floor. Another fireman told me that more girls had jumped down an air shaft in the rear of the building. I went back there, into the narrow court, and saw a heap of dead girls. . . .
The floods of water from the firemen's hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.
That was the garment industry's answer to immigrant women daring to assert themselves.
International Working Women's Day was widely observed in pre-war Western and Central Europe, and later in the Soviet Union and in China, but it gained international acceptance in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. Somewhere along the way IWWD became International Women's Day (IWD) and the United Nations began marking IWD in 1975. The UN's General Assembly declared March 8 an officially designated day for women and world peace in 1977. Democratic and undemocratic governments now recognize the day, as do many multinational corporations, but IWWD (or IWD) is not an officially designated holiday in the United States, the place of its origins. Taking the "Working" out of the Day's name perhaps tamed the nature of the Day for some. It is up to us to reclaim it.
* Many readers will not know what these are. The ILGWU (1900-1995) used the union label as a way of letting consumers know that a garment was made by union-represented workers in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. All garments produced by ILGWU members had to have the union label sewn in. ILGWU members received higher wages and better healthcare benefits than did non-union garment workers, and the ILGWU pension kept qualified garment workers out of poverty. The ILGWU union contracts set a good standard in the garment industry. Workplace safety remained a top concern for the union through its entire existence and the union again prioritized organizing immigrant workers in the late 1970s and 1980s.
