Jewish mass immigration reached the United States just as the ready-made clothing industry hit its stride at the turn of the century—a circumstance that provided men and women with unprecedented incentives to unionize. In the Old Country, where jobs were scarce, daughters were married off as fast as possible. But many immigrant women had learned to sew in the workshops of Russian and Polish towns, and in America, where families counted on their contributions, they were expected to work.

Girls sometimes immigrated as teenagers, seeking out an uncle or older sister who might help them to find a first job so that some part of their wages could be sent back to Europe. The wages of other young women helped to pay the rent, to buy food and clothing, to bring relatives to America, and to keep brothers in school. When they married, young women normally stopped working in the garment shops. But, much as in the Old Country, they were still expected to contribute to family income, sometimes by taking in clothing to sew at home.

In early twentieth-century New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other large cities, only the exceptional unmarried woman did not operate a sewing machine in a garment factory for part of her young adult life. Factory or sweatshop work before marriage and the expectation of some form of paid labor afterward fostered a continuing set of ties to the garment industry for this first generation of urban Jewish American women, encouraging a community of understanding around its conditions and continuing support for the ever-changing stream of workers who entered it. Women who worked long hours at extraordinarily low wages, in unsanitary and unsafe working conditions, and faced continual harassment to boot, found succor in their communities and benefited from a class-conscious background.

To be sure, competitive individualism and the desire to make it in America could hinder unionization efforts. But a well-developed ethic of social justice played an equally important role, producing perhaps the most politically aware of all immigrant groups. Socialist newspapers predominated in New York’s Yiddish-speaking Lower East Side. Jews were well represented in the Socialist Party after 1901. Though their unions were weak, Jews were among the best organized of semiskilled immigrants. In the immigrant enclaves of America’s large cities, as in Europe, women benefited from the shared sense that women worked for their families, as they absorbed much of their community’s concern for social justice. This did not deflect the desire of working women to get out of the shops, but it did contribute to the urge to make life in them better.

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The Depression of the 1930s restored union activism, giving voice to women’s earlier demands for community within unions and institutionalizing many of their visions in the social programs of the New Deal. Not surprisingly, Sidney Hillman and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, with its heavily female membership, played a key role in extending social unionism into the national legislative arena. Like the ILGWU, the Amalgamated had developed a health-care program for its own members in the 1920s. The Amalgamated also initiated old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.

But these had limited scope and rarely covered any but long-term workers. Under the pressure of the Depression, Hillman, abetted by his wife, Bessie Abramowitz, and vice president Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca, agitated for and helped to draft bills for unemployment compensation and fair labor standards. He also played a key role in the development of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which, in the 1930s, promised to harbor the residues of the social unionist tradition. Jewish women unionists reaped some rewards in these days: tied to Frances Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt through the New York Women’s Trade Union League, they entered the federal bureaucracy, where they worked to soften the edges of the new legislative agenda.

Under the impetus of a dramatic upswing in female membership sparked by industrywide strikes in 1933, the trade union movement regained some of its vigorous support for the cultural and recreational programs it had earlier abandoned. Drawing on its earlier tradition, unions sponsored gym classes, athletic teams, dramatic clubs, choral groups, orchestras, and, of course, educational opportunities of all kinds. The ILGWU’s long-running Broadway hit, Pins and Needles, testifies to the value of these programs, both for developing the morale of members and for reaching out into the community to expand understanding and support.

Still, the union movement remained uncomfortable with the leadership style of women. Neither in the garment industry nor in the other unions that Jewish women now began to join were women welcomed as leaders. As the only female vice president of the ILGWU in the 1930s, Rose Pesotta adapted the unorthodox female style that had started a generation earlier to become perhaps its most successful organizer. She created pleasant headquarters, threw parties for members and potential members, and devised style shows, festivals, and dances to attract women to the union.

In Los Angeles, she constructed a picket line of women in gowns to embarrass factory owners attending a charity event. Before Easter, she demanded and got special strike allowances for mothers to buy holiday clothes for their children. Nobody questioned her success: She became the union’s most important troubleshooter, traveling far afield, to places like Puerto Rico, Seattle, Akron, Boston, and Montreal to resolve outstanding disputes. But neither the leaders of the ILGWU nor those of other unions understood these tactics. David Dubinsky regularly berated Pesotta for extravagance and mistrusted techniques that appealed to women’s interest in human welfare as much as their interest in wages.

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Nor did Jewish women have much influence on the CIO, which in its early days espoused the rhetoric of radical change. Its leadership remained relentlessly male. A tiny proportion of delegates to its first convention were women, and by 1946, it could boast only twenty women among its six hundred convention delegates. Those who did attend reflected the diversity of the two million women who had joined union ranks in the 1930s. They were Jewish and Catholic, white ethnic and African American. Among them was Ruth Young, a member of the executive board of the United Electrical Workers, and daughter-in-law of Clara Lemlich, who had sparked the Uprising of the 20,000.

Women’s enhanced loyalty to communism undermined long-standing alliances with women’s groups, and particularly with the Women’s Trade Union League. Under Rose Schneiderman’s leadership, the WTUL straddled a delicate line between its traditional support for the AFL and its sympathy for the goals of the new CIO. But neither Schneiderman nor the WTUL’s leaders could tolerate communist influence, and here the WTUL drew a line in the sand. Schneiderman alienated many women (Jews and non-Jews) when she refused to help the militant female members of a United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers local in a bitter 1937 strike. And many more, like Boston’s Rose Norwood, abandoned her as she passively watched the AFL bully local leagues into expelling members from CIO unions. Norwood resigned from the leadership of the Boston WTUL to work for the CIO.

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