Today’s left, and particularly today’s feminist movement, is all too often stumbling from crisis to crisis, reactive, frustrated, and lost.
It is also bigger than it has been in decades, rebuilding old organizations and starting new ones, jostling for position in a world where those crises are themselves the norm. In the wake of the 2008 financial collapse and now the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, there are new opportunities to remake the relations of power that just twenty years ago seemed immutable.
When we are cut off from our history—as we so often are in a neoliberal world obsessed with the eternal “now”—we find ourselves doomed to rehash the same debates, the same fights, the same betrayals. We cannot learn from our history when we only know its barest contours, or when we only learn it as the glorious tale of a hero or heroine who made victory possible. The left is no less prone to “Great Man” histories than anyone else, even as it professes to care about collective action.
And so Meredith Tax’s history of the collective action of women in labor in America at the turn of the 20th century, and the repeated attempts to form a “united front of women” to fight for feminist goals, was necessary when it was first written, and it is even more necessary now. Today’s rising U.S. left confronts many of the same questions that workers did in the Gilded Age, before the New Deal and the rise of industrial unionism, when worker organization was fractious, police and even military violence met any who tried to disrupt the process of capital accumulation, many workers made ends meet with piece-work (or as we might call it today, gig work) in the home, and employers exploited migrants and Black workers to keep wages low, stoking racism to maintain division.
Of course, things are different now, too.
Few today who take labor seriously would say out loud that women are unorganizable or don’t need unions. Yet too often the labor movement even in 2021 fetishizes structures and tactics built for a mid-century working world where a man goes to work and has a wife at home, and mourns the loss of traditionally masculine jobs while giving feminized industries short shrift. Too often unions turn to electoral politics to win gains that seem impossible to win on the shop floor, only to be betrayed by the politicians that labor has backed. And even in today’s organizations there is a tendency to decry “identity politics,” which in practice tends to mean “how dare you get your race and gender in my nice neat class war.”
Except as this book shows, there is nothing neat about class war. And to win, working people will have to learn to form coalitions, discern the difference between allies and comrades, and take seriously demands that come from the home and community as well as the workplace.
The Rising of the Women is a book meant for political practice, a book designed to take lessons from history to help today’s organizers and troublemakers formulate strategies for their work. By reading the true stories of what happened during famous strikes like the “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 and the “Uprising of the 30,000” in New York in 1909, as well as of lesser-known struggles, Tax has given today’s organizers a particular gift: she shows us how much there is to be learned from losses, as much as from a heroic win.
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At the heart of the book are socialist women, who, Tax writes, understood themselves as “the human links between the feminist movement, the labor movement, and the socialist movement.” They understood the relationship between these movements as dialectical, and within their lives—their immigrant, radical, working-class lives—they brought together, sometimes messily, issues that they were often told were opposed. For them, Tax notes, “labor history comes attached to community history and family history and the history of reproduction. It involves not only class consciousness and the consciousness of national oppression, but also sex consciousness.”
There were high points for these women, when all of the struggles seemed to coalesce, when an understanding of the problems of the class meant understanding that class struggle could occur in the street and the home and the church and the community organization as well as the shop floor, that the bread riot is a proletarian battle too and that fighting eviction is a feminist goal. And there were low points, when labor leaders (particularly within the American Federation of Labor) treated feminism as a bourgeois plot, or bourgeois allies tried to corral working women’s uprisings into the fight for the vote, trying to solve every problem with protective legislation and support for lesser-evil candidates rather than more immediate action.
These women worked in fledgling labor organizations, from the Knights of Labor to the Industrial Workers of the World, and of course the AFL. Sometimes they organized locals separately from the men and sometimes they were absorbed into the broader union; they also formed cross-class but (at least in theory) prolabor organizations like the Illinois Women’s Alliance and the Women’s Trade Union League.
This is a book about collective struggles rather than individual heroes, but nonetheless Tax brings to life in these pages so many vibrant characters who are fierce and funny, righteous and burned out, and above all real people who experienced wins and losses as material changes to their lives, not just numbers on a scoreboard. You will meet Chicago radical Lizzie Swank; the AFL’s first “general organizer for women” Mary Kenney; Leonora O’Reilly, “the soul of the WTUL”; IWW firebrand Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; Clara Lemlich, hero of the shirtwaist strike; IWW domestic worker organizer Jane Street; and rank and file textile striker Annie Welsenbach of Lawrence.
Gilded Age workplace demands often centered on the need for freedom from work, pointing out that the drudgery most paid jobs consisted of was hardly liberatory. As Chicago garment worker Anna Rudnitsky wrote in the WTUL’s magazine, “First we must get a living-wage and then we must get a shorter work-day, and many many more girls must do some thinking. It isn’t that they do not want to think, but they are too tired to think and that is the best thing in the Union, it makes us think…. It makes us stronger and it makes us happier and it makes us more interested in life and to be more interested in life is oh, a thousand times better than to be so dead that one never sees anything but work all day and not enough money to live on. That is terrible, that is like death.”
Organizing gave them freedom to enjoy more of their lives, the famed “roses” of the Lawrence strike’s call for “bread and roses,” and the union was often a vehicle too for socializing—the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union included “social enjoyment” in their statement of purpose alongside more serious goals of righting the wrongs done by unjust employers. Women unionists talked of bringing their activism to their love lives, playfully checking men’s clothing for the union label.
And the strike, when it did come, was a whirlwind of excitement, an escape from the workplace, perhaps, but another kind of work, and a moment where many years’ worth of learning was compressed into days. Radical journalist Mary Heaton Vorse described the Lawrence strike as “a college for the workers,” where they learned “history and economics translated into the terms of their own lives” and “suddenly find hitherto unsuspected powers,” giving speeches, writing articles and leaflets, inventing new forms of picketing and writing and singing labor songs. Women, Helen Marot of the WTUL argued, made the best strikers because of their “genius for sacrifice and the ability to sustain, over prolonged periods, response to emotional appeals,” and their skill at managing and sustaining personal relationships even during crisis. That skill was needed when strikes, as in Lawrence, included workers from several different countries, speaking multiple languages.
Immigrants, Tax notes, made up the majority of the industrial working class of this age, and they were given the worst jobs, paid less, and ghettoized into neighborhoods by ethnicity. Nor did immigrant women come in for the gentle treatment afforded to well-off white women. During strikes, women faced brutal police crackdowns with unexpected bravery, even as many of them were targeted for particular violence. Clara Lemlich, a Russian Jewish migrant, was singled out and beaten until six of her ribs were broken while picketing during the shirtwaist strikes; later, she recalled, “Ah—then I had fire in my mouth…. What did I know about trade unionism? Audacity—that was all I had—audacity!”
They needed that audacity. While the police brutality and threat of imprisonment has not dissipated over the years, women today hardly face the level of opprobrium for being union activists that Tax’s subjects did. Women who were publicly active risked becoming outcasts and were often compared to prostitutes; thus, Tax notes, “Women organizers in the 1880s thus tended to be very highly motivated and strong individuals who were often both social and sexual radicals as well.” The police violence they faced made them sympathetic to sex workers who were constantly victimized by law enforcement, and the Illinois Women’s Alliance took up the sex workers’ cause, attending court hearings and demanding access to women who were jailed to report on their conditions.
Radical women of the gilded age, then, experimented not just with forms of labor organization, but communal living and social support, and they demanded that the labor movement consider prostitution not a social vice but a labor issue. They understood that while “sweated labor” was scattered across tenement workshops or sent home with workers, it would be impossible to organize shop by shop, so they organized politically and in the community, in ways that hold lessons for today’s gig economy workers. They demanded—decades before the Wages for Housework movement—that labor organizations recognize housework as work and the housewife as part of the working class. And they argued that improving the conditions of women workers (including providing them with birth control) would allow women to marry for love rather than out of economic necessity—or to not marry at all.
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Is the “united front of women” possible today, or necessary?
By “united front” Tax means the term as it was used when she first wrote the book in the 1970s, to mean “the coming together of different classes and their organizations (as well as different national and gender groups) for a goal of some magnitude that takes a considerable length of time to achieve.”
Feminism has several fault lines running through it that would seem to make such united fronts difficult, and indeed Tax’s book shows us many ways that those fronts fell apart. One such front is careerism, or as Selma James has acidly put it, “jobs for the girls.” While well-off women could make organizing a priority without needing to get paid, working-class women like Maggie Hinchey, blacklisted for her organizing as a laundry worker, often suffered real consequences and could not turn troublemaking into a career—particularly if their radicalism frightened their rich allies.1
In her introduction to the 2001 edition of The Rising of the women, Tax notes, “Corporate feminists do not need a strong movement. They need strong brand recognition.” These words have if anything gained potency in the years since, the years of Lean In and Hillary Clinton and the girlboss. Surely if there is to be a united front of women, it cannot be the hectoring one pushed on American women in 2016, when we were assured that a victory for Clinton would be a victory for us all. After all, as has been noted so many times since then, 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump. Surely, a united front of women still understands that some women have chosen the other side.2
Yet Tax argues that it is neither true that working women inherently need cross-class alliances, nor that “working with middle- class women is a terrible mistake because of the corrupting effect of their petit bourgeois ideas.” Instead, she persuasively writes, “the character of any such alliance depends on a large number of factors: the strength of the labor movement; the influence of the left within it; the left’s support of women’s liberation; the openness of the feminist movement to influence from workers and from the left; and, of course, the political and economic character of the period in general.”
Such alliances can be pushed one way or the other by shifts in the world outside; victories for workers can provoke more opposition from bosses, which leads to fractures within class alliances when some of the well-off choose their class over their gender. This is not, of course, only a problem for feminists. A united front of any type, Tax points out, “always contains the possibility of betrayal, and struggle within it is inevitable.” Where feminism is concerned, it would be a strategic error to concede the movement and the name of feminist to the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world; the result is real harm to real people of any gender.
Feminist struggle has won its greatest gains when the working class as a whole has been strong and moving. Yet it would be a mistake to take from this the idea that a “pure” class struggle can liberate women and destroy the shackles of binary gender without ever mentioning either as a goal. We must, then, guard against the two types of error Tax names: “‘right errors,’ which try to eliminate women’s problems by various reforms, and ‘left errors,’ which see only the class struggle as important and negate the need for any separate work against the oppression of women.”
In our present moment political alliances are shifting, and what political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo calls “class fragments” are realigning.3 The socialist movement, he notes, has always relied to a degree on cross-class solidarity, and today’s far right has attempted to split the industrial working class away from pink- collar service and care workers, to win what it thinks of as male and culturally conservative workers into a coalition with small businesspeople and managers against the head and heart workers of today’s socialist left. To understand these splits a feminist class analysis will be necessary, a study of the way work itself is gendered and valued (or devalued) based upon who does it. The success of today’s cross-class alliances, like those of the Gilded Age feminists, will depend on whose interests are placed at the fore.
Today, we stand at a precipice, beginning to emerge from a pandemic into a more immediate climate crisis. The material foundations of gender as we know it are crumbling, and a backlash is crisscrossing the world, writing abortion bans and transphobia into the law. It is more important than ever, even as we are whipsawed by plural apocalypses, to think strategically and carefully even as we react.
This book can help us to map the rough terrain that lies ahead.