Elizabeth > Books: biography‎ (323)

The union holds a meeting. Throngs of workers pack the seats, the aisles, the walls--the hall thrums with excitement. Clara listens to speech after speech.

The speakers, mostly men, want everyone to be careful. Two hours pass. No one recommends a general strike.

Finally, the most powerful union leader in the country goes up to the podium. Not even he proposes action!

So Clara does.

That's right--Clara. She calls out from the front of the hall. The crowd lifts her to the stage, where she shots in Yiddish:

"I have no further patience for talk--I move that we go on a general strike!"

And she starts the largest walkout of women workers in U.S. history.

The next morning, New York is stunned by the sight of thousands of young women streaming from the factories.

One newspaper calls it an army. Others call it a revolt. It's a revolt of girls, for some are only twelve years old, and the rest are barely out of their teens.

In the coming weeks, Clara is called a hero. She lights up chilly union halls with her fiery pep talks. Her singing lifts the spirits of the picketers. When a group of thugs approaches, she yells, "Stand fast, girls!"

And they do. All winter long, in the bitter cold, in their cheap, thin coats, tired and starving and scared, the girls walk alongside the men on the icy sidewalks of the picket line. They spill out of the union halls, blocking the roads, filling street corners and public squares.

Newspapers write stories about them.

College girls raise money for them.

Rich women--swathed in fur coats--picket with the factory girls.

By the time the strike is over, hundreds of bosses agree to let their staff form unions. They shorten the workweek and raise salaries.

The strike emboldens thousands of women to walk out of garment factories in Philadelphia and Chicago.

Between 1880 and 1920, two million Jews immigrated to America, fleeing persecution, pogroms (government-sanctioned attacks), and poverty in Ukraine, Poland, and other parts of Eastern Europe. Many of these immigrants found work in the booming garment industry. In 1909, the year of the genera strike, nearly four hundred factories employing forty thousand people made blouses for half the country. Of these workers, 80 percent were female. 70 percent were between sixteen and twenty-five years of age, and 65 percent were Russian/Eastern European Jewish (the remainder of workers were Italian and American).