Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.
A slight young woman with lively dark eyes pushed her way to the front of a crowd of garment workers at a union meeting in New York City in 1909 and demanded to be heard.
“I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms,” Clara Lemlich Shavelson declared in Yiddish, as the audience lifted her onto the platform, according to news reports that November. “I move that we go on a general strike!”
The crowd roared its approval. Male union officials had cautioned against a strike, arguing it would be too difficult and too costly, especially for young women working in the factories.
But the day after the speech, thousands of young women were among the garment workers who formed the Uprising of the 20,000, a milestone action in a swelling labor movement that made workplaces safer, workdays shorter and wages higher.
Shavelson, already a battle-worn veteran of the movement at 23, has often been pushed to the margins of history books, sometimes remembered as an anonymous “wisp of a girl.” But she was an influential woman leader in a labor movement dominated by men, and a pioneer of the type of consumer boycotts and feminist thinking that exists today.
Before she spoke that day at Cooper Union, she had already been arrested 17 times and beaten by police and company guards who broke six of her ribs. She hid her injuries from her parents, fearing they would forbid her from returning to the picket line.
The Uprising of the 20,000 ended when many shops agreed to higher wages, a 52-hour week, and recognition of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union on the factory floor. (One of the holdouts was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where an infamous fire killed 146 workers a year later. The male union negotiators had ignored the women strikers’ safety concerns, letting factories off the hook for conditions inside.)
The strike also had a different kind of impact, as a weekly paper noted in 1910: “These young, inexperienced girls have proved that women can strike, and strike successfully.”
Shavelson would go on to become a radical across causes, galvanizing working-class women to fight for suffrage; battling landlords and evictions in the 1920s and ’30s; and leading housewives in a struggle for lower food and rent prices during the Great Depression. (The New York Times, for instance, reported on a “boycott of high-priced meat spread by militant housewives” in 1935 that was organized by Shavelson.)
Described by contemporaries as warm and vivacious, with a nearly absolutist certainty about what was right, Shavelson viewed every aspect of her life with a defiant political lens.
“When you don’t work, and you don’t work in the movement, you’re nothing,” she said in “Common Sense and a Little Fire” (1995), a book by Annelise Orleck about Shavelson and three other women labor leaders.
Clara Lemlich was born in the Ukrainian village of Gorodok in 1886. When she arrived in the United States at age 16, she was already committed to the Russian revolutionary movement. She quickly found work sewing dresses in a crammed factory in New York City and threw herself into learning. A 1954 article in Jewish Life Magazine detailed how after 11-hour workdays, she read Russian classics at the local public library and studied Marxist theory.
Shavelson dedicated herself early on to helping working women, and after the 1909 strike, she began to see the women’s vote as an essential tool.
“The manufacturer has a vote; the bosses have votes; the foremen have votes; the inspectors have votes. The working girl has no vote,” she wrote in Good Housekeeping in 1912. “When she asks to have the building in which she must work made clean and safe, the officials do not have to listen.”
In the early 1910s, Clara married Joe Shavelson. They had three children and Shavelson shifted her focus to the conditions of the wives and mothers around her.
She pursued a vision of motherhood that was almost unheard-of at the time, bringing her children with her to Socialist meetings as soon as they were old enough to walk and organizing rent strikes that got her family evicted from at least one home.
She and other working class women in her Brooklyn neighborhood formed tenants’ unions, fighting for rent control and taking militant action like pouring boiling water from teakettles onto those who arrived to carry out evictions.
Shavelson joined the Communist Party U.S.A. around 1926, and she remained loyal to it throughout her life, despite the mounting evidence of Stalin’s murderous crimes against his people. After a trip to the Soviet Union in 1951, Shavelson praised Soviet health care, education and freedom of religion. She was subsequently summoned to Washington to testify, and her passport was revoked. It was only years later that she admitted, reluctantly, that she had been wrong about the Soviet Union.
Shavelson died on July 25, 1982, in California, at 96.
Near the end of her life, she moved into the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles, where she organized the nurses and orderlies, according to “Common Sense.”
“How much worse could these conditions get?” the 83-year-old asked hesitant staffers, before they successfully unionized. “You’d be crazy not to join a union.”
