Remembering Women's Activism by Sharon Crozier-De Rosa Vera Mackie

Author:Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Vera Mackie [Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Vera Mackie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, World, Modern
ISBN: 9780429850486
Google: mFtxDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-09-25T05:07:16+00:00

On 25 March 1911, a fire broke out in the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York. The top floors of the building housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. In total, 146 garment workers – 123 women and 23 men – died either directly in the fire, through smoke inhalation, or jumping to their deaths. Most were from immigrant Jewish or Italian families, likely resident in the tenements of lower Manhattan.3

The day the fire broke out, the doors to the factory had been locked to prevent theft, unauthorized rest breaks, and contact between workers and union organizers. At least one stairwell was engulfed with flames. Some workers went out on to a flimsy fire escape but fell to their deaths. Many workers had not even known of the existence of this external fire escape, and many of the first press reports mistakenly reported that there had been no external fire escape at all.4 Some workers used the elevator, with the assistance of elevator operators who stayed at their posts. Some fell into the elevator shaft, with the elevator eventually stalling. Some managed to climb on to the roof, where Law students from New York University helped them climb over the roofs of the adjoining buildings to escape.5 The fire brigade ladders only reached to the sixth floor of the building, but the factory fire was on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. Firefighters held tarpaulins near ground level to catch those who jumped but these, too, failed to save the workers.

A couple of years before the fire, in November 1909, twenty thousand garment workers in New York had gone on strike, protesting against exploitative labour practices, crowded spaces, long hours, and dangerous, unsanitary working conditions. They demanded recognition of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). While conditions for some improved after the strike, many companies such as Triangle failed to recognize the union, even though their workers had been among the first to strike. Among the workers who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire were those who had been brought in to replace the striking workers.

The press reported on the fire, not always with complete accuracy, as journalists tried to piece together what had happened. In the reporting, there was a combination of horror, pathos, and melodrama, as can be seen respectively in the three extracts below. One newspaper described the horror of seeing workers jumping from the burning building.

Shortly after half-past 4 pedestrians gazing upwards noticed wisps of smoke at the windows. ‘Somebody is up there’, one man observed. ‘Look, he is throwing down a bundle of cloth’. The bundle fell and redounded from the road. It was the shapeless body of a girl … Within a few minutes the windows were lit with flames and a sickness seized the crowd below as they realised that women and girls were standing on the ledges flinging themselves, half a dozen at a time, into the dizzy depths … The fire brigade arrived with a life-saving net and a score

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