Clara Lemlich
Clara Lemlich · Civil Rights & Human Rights
Moved the general strike at Cooper Union on 22 November 1909 that became the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand; later organised housewives' councils, the 1935 meat boycott and rent strikes, and at eighty-one a union among the orderlies of her nursing home.
28 March 1886, Horodok, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) — 12 July 1982, Los Angeles, California, United States
New York · Los Angeles
Clara Lemlich is recognized among Jewish contributors to Civil Rights & Human Rights — Moved the general strike at Cooper Union on 22 November 1909 that became the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand; later organised housewives' councils, the 1935 meat boycott and rent strikes, and at eighty-one a union among the orderlies of her nursing home.
Origins and early life
Clara Lemlich was born on 28 March 1886 at Horodok, a Yiddish-speaking village of the Russian empire that is now in Ukraine, and came to the United States with her family in 1903, after the pogrom at Kishinev.
Work and career
She went into the shirtwaist shops of New York, where girls worked long days at machines they rented from the boss, and she was already a known agitator when the union called a mass meeting at Cooper Union on 22 November 1909. The speakers talked for two hours in generalities; Lemlich asked for the floor and said, in Yiddish, that she was tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities, that what they were there for was to decide whether or not to strike, and she moved a general strike.
Within two days some twenty thousand of the thirty-two thousand shirtwaist workers had walked out, and the strike the newspapers called the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand held until 10 February 1910 and won union contracts at almost every shop in the trade. Almost: the Triangle Shirtwaist Company did not sign, and its doors were still locked when its upper floors burned on 25 March 1911 and a hundred and forty-six workers died.
Hired men broke several of Lemlich's ribs on the picket line and she went back to it; blacklisted out of the trade and raising three children with Joe Shavelson, she founded the United Council of Working Class Housewives, ran the meat boycott of 1935 that shut more than four thousand butcher shops in New York, and led rent strikes.
Later years
At eighty-one, in a Los Angeles nursing home, she got the orderlies who looked after her organised into a union; she died there on 12 July 1982, at ninety-six, seventy-three years after Cooper Union.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jewish Women's Archive — Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia; Wikipedia
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Moved the general strike at Cooper Union on 22 November 1909 that became the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand; later organised housewives' councils, the 1935 meat boycott and rent strikes, and at eighty-one a union among the orderlies of her nursing home.
Source: Jewish Women's Archive — Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia; Wikipedia
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