A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki

Author:Ronald Takaki [Takaki, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-05-17T07:00:00+00:00

Daughters of the Colony

Thousands of these garment workers were young women. Many of them had come first, before their families. “In growing numbers,” observed historian Susan A. Glenn, “Jewish families were willing and found it practicable to send one or more children including their working-age daughters, in advance.” What made it “practicable” to send them ahead was the fact that many possessed sewing skills. In the Pale of Settlement in the 1890s, over fifty thousand Jewish women worked in the sewing trades, constituting 70 percent of all registered female artisans. The first sewing machines had been introduced in Russia two decades earlier, and the Singer sewing machine came to symbolize a guarantee of a good livelihood. Fannie Shapiro recalled that in each small Russian town there were little shops where “two, three, four, or five girls in a house, [were] working, making dresses and things. And they had a Singer’s, a sewing machine.” Girls reaching the age of thirteen were usually apprenticed to a seamstress. One of them, Sarah Rozner, had to work hard to learn how to operate the sewing machine: “I finally got it, and believe me it helped a lot when I came to this country.”34

In America, most of the young Jewish women working in the garment industry were single, planning to work for a few years before marriage. One of them told an interviewer: “Henry has seen me home every night for a long time and makes love to me. He wants me to marry him, but I am not seventeen yet, and I think that is too young…. Lately he has been urging me more and more to get married—but I think I’ll wait.” In 1910, over 70 percent of the Jewish daughters sixteen years old or over were working for wages. “Right after Passover, I entered school,” remembered one of them. “When school was out in June, I knew I couldn’t go back any more, so coming home I cried all the way…. My father had a job for me. I couldn’t do any thing—at that age, you know, you couldn’t work till you were sixteen, but kids worked at fourteen and thirteen.”35

Constituting over one-third of the garment industry’s workforce in 1910, these young women labored in dangerous and cramped conditions. In the sweatshops, they were literally packed together. On floor after floor, they worked elbow to elbow at sewing machines on row after row of long tables. “We are so crowded together that there is not an inch of space,” they complained. “The machines are so close together that there is no way to escape in case of immergansie.”36

An emergency did happen on March 26, 1911, when a fire suddenly exploded at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Eight hundred workers, mostly young women, were trapped in the burning building. “A stream of fire tore up through the elevator shaft and stairways to the upper floors. Fire instantly appeared at all windows, and tongues of flames crept higher and higher along the walls to where little groups of terrified girls, workers, stood in confusion.

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