Fashion and Cultural Studies by Susan B. Kaiser

Author:Susan B. Kaiser [Kaiser, Susan B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING
Published: 2013-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

“I had come to observe the Crisis of a Social Condition;” wrote one commentator for Collier’s magazine, “but apparently this was a Festive Occasion. Lingerie waists were elaborate, [hair] puffs towered; there were picture turbans and di’mont [fake diamond] pendants.” Working women were well known for their exuberant embrace of consumer culture products, particularly fashion, but elaborately-dressed female strikers did not meet middle-class expectations for the proper demeanor of political participants, and the reporter for Collier’s magazine did not immediately recognize them as political subjects. The shirtwaist strike is famous in labor history and women’s history both because it was the largest female-dominated strike to that date and because it inaugurated a string of large, “women’s strikes” in the 1910s that dramatically asserted working women’s political participation and firmly established women’s unionism. While women’s fashion does not play a large role in the established histories of the strike, it did play a part in the unfolding events of the public strike debate. (Enstad 1998: 745)

A similar class- and fashion-related dynamic occurred in the 1930s when Rose Pesotta ([1944] 1987) led strikes by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Los Angeles:

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