Although it was conceived in haste and had its disorderly aspects, the 1902 kosher meat boycott was, from the start, a strategic effort. The women who envisioned it understood that withholding demand was likely to bring prices down. Their challenge was to persuade their neighbors to make short-term sacrifices for long-term benefit.
The only real mistakes they made were to unleash violence against those who continued to patronize the butchers and against the shop owners themselves, and to destroy property. These tactics, which earned them no accolades, were banned by the organizers and condemned by every responsible voice, but they stubbornly reared their heads throughout the effort.
Even here, though, there was discipline. Only butcher shops and, to a much lesser extent, restaurants were ever targeted. Unlike the case in many urban riots, no other establishments suffered collateral damage. Activities, for the most part, ceased from sundown Friday to sundown on Saturday in honor of the Sabbath. And there was never any hint of looting. Confiscated meat was rendered inedible and destroyed, not stolen, taken home, or enjoyed. The women never lost sight of their goal, always tried persuasion first, and did not attack anyone who was not selling or buying meat. It was only the police who were indiscriminate, brutishly clubbing strikers and bystanders alike in their ham-handed efforts to put down the riots.
Resistance in America was a more complex affair than it had been in Russia or Eastern Europe. New York offered a more nuanced legal and economic environment with more stakeholders. To sustain the strike and achieve its goal, the Jewish women needed to break out of their traditional homemaker roles and take radical action. They needed to employ unfamiliar tactics, address a host of audiences, and build coalitions. How they dealt and communicated with their fellow consumers and with the butchers, wholesalers, police, government, media, synagogues, unions, and other allied organizations was of utmost importance. It required planning and creativity.
For ideas, they looked to some extent to the labor unions, which had navigated similar ground in the past. But educating vast numbers of women about supply and demand economics to earn their support for an action that seriously disturbed their families’ lives was far more of a challenge than, say, Joseph Barondess had faced a decade earlier when he organized three thousand cloak makers into a union and led them into a strike. Barondess needed to reach a limited universe of people, and he knew where they worked and how to mobilize young workers to recruit them. This could be accomplished by distributing circulars outside of factories and inviting laborers to organizational meetings. And although their jobs were on the line, it was easy for them to grasp the benefits that could accrue through unionizing. Union victories were all around them.
Where Barondess had a trade to organize, the women behind the meat boycott had an entire community to organize, and in this sense they were pioneers. What is more, it was the largest community of Jews the world had ever seen.
No experiences in Europe prepared these women for a task of this magnitude. If the Jewish population of New York was nearly 600,000 in 1902, then the success of a meat strike probably required reaching a couple of hundred thousand of their women, spread not only throughout the Jewish quarter, but also uptown, in Brooklyn, and in nearby New Jersey. Balebostes would have to be given a vision of their collective power as consumers to change their situation in order to persuade them to commit their families to immediate sacrifices. A successful boycott also involved the enormous task of organizing a core group and recruiting some three thousand women to picket the butcher shops—all on less than a day’s notice.
But that was just the beginning. They had to sustain their effort until their goals were achieved, no mean feat when it meant daily deprivation on the part of their supporters. This required issuing progress reports, reiterating messages, and reaching out to new groups like labor unions and benevolent associations to garner support.
One of the most insidious aspects of the meat riots is that they pitted Jew against Jew. How much the women really understood about who was pulling the strings is debatable; most of their wrath was focused on their neighborhood butchers, who were accused of living luxuriously at their expense. The truth is that, like their customers, most of the retailers were more or less living from hand to mouth. Evidence can be found in the large number of them forced to close their businesses permanently because they lacked the resources to sustain them through a boycott of only a few weeks’ duration.
It was probably inevitable that some control over the strike would eventually pass into the hands of men. This was not necessarily because women were doing a bad job of managing things, although there was some public bickering among the females in charge, and the violence in the streets was earning them no friends. It was likely a combination of factors. It did not sit well with men to see their women clubbed in the streets by the police and thrown into jail. Perhaps more importantly, though, it was the males among them who had the most experience handling contentious situations that transcended the Jewish community.
Once the women reached out to other organizations for support, men, for better or worse, became part of the leadership of their movement, and soon they went so far as to organize a coalition, pointedly giving it a new name that omitted the word “Ladies.” By the time the strike was ended, a male-dominated Committee of Fifty was calling the shots.
There were certainly examples of male chauvinism in the drama. But it does not appear that it was chauvinism per se that drove the male takeover of the movement, or that this outcome was the object of any nefarious plot to wrest control. Nor do the women appear to have objected to the appropriation of power. It was never doubted that the men who allied themselves with them supported their goals wholeheartedly. And the women seemed accepting of the notion that the men possessed skills, experiences, and connections that they, despite their initial successes, may have lacked.
Indeed, there is no evidence of any dissatisfaction at the direction the movement had taken under the Committee of Fifty until the very end, when Carolyn Schatzberg visited the Forward to express her feelings of betrayal. She never explicitly raised the issue of gender in her complaint, but there is no denying that those she accused of losing sight of the goal were male.
It is probably also fair to say that while the women ran their households, they were accustomed to men running organizations and large community efforts, and did not presume, at this early stage, to pose any serious challenge to the status quo in this regard. Jewish women would eventually break down all of these barriers and become active in the suffrage movement, which was nothing if not an attempt to acquire political power, and become far more involved in the labor movement. But this would not happen for several more years.
The Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association disappeared as soon as it was no longer needed, but as a short-lived, grass-roots community organization movement it was an important milestone as well as a harbinger of things to come. It signaled a new spirit of combativeness and an awakening political consciousness on the part of immigrant Jewish women.
The lessons of the power of community organizing could not be unlearned and, as the vanguard of homemaker-organized Jewish activism in America, the 1902 strike, which was also the high-water mark in terms of sheer numbers of people mobilized, was long remembered, although not to this day. Women needed no further persuading that they were capable of organizing and effecting change; they had already proven that. In subsequent rent strikes, such as those in 1904 and 1908, and when the price of meat went up again in 1908, 1917, and even during the Depression in 1935, copycat tactics could easily be discerned, and the 1902 effort was often explicitly called out as a precedent. Tactics like leafleting, street meetings, and other forms of community organizing also proved handy later in the decade in support of New York Jews’ efforts in the women’s suffrage movement.
At the end of her 1980 article that explored the implications of the boycott, Professor Paula E. Hyman speculated that “it is likely that the political awareness expressed by boycotters was no isolated phenomenon, but was communicated effectively, if quietly and informally, to their younger sisters and daughters.” Hyman was forced to speculate because of the paucity of biographical information available about women who—with apologies to Shakespeare’s Hamlet—strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more. But we can put a little flesh on those bones today with two examples.
Pauline Newman, a seventy-year veteran of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, may never have met Sarah Edelson, but she owed her a debt. She had lived through the 1902 meat strike, and the subsequent 1908 rent strike, which was the battle that launched her activist career, was a community organization exercise of a piece with the 1902 effort. Her visits to tenements to organize housewives had an analogue in Edelson’s pioneer door-to-door effort to build support for her meat boycott.
Similarly, Clara Lemlich, known for her leadership role in the 1909 shirtwaist workers’ strike—the largest of its time that involved women—borrowed a page from Caroline Schatzberg’s playbook. She didn’t arrive in America until 1904, and she was already an experienced activist well before she led the 1935 meat boycott. But like Schatzberg before her, Lemlich sought a meeting with the mayor, headed a committee that demanded that the butchers close up shop, and spoke to the press on behalf of her cohorts. There’s no record of her interrupting Shabbos services to plead her case, but she did meet with meat wholesalers to demand that they lower their prices.1
The women of the 1902 strikes ushered in a new spirit of activism and an awakening among their sisters in the Jewish community. This applied not only to community movements like food and rent strikes; it also applied to labor actions, and was an important factor in the central role that Jewish American women played in the American labor movement well into the twentieth century. That spirit, like their pioneer strategies and tactics, lived on, and was appropriated, as needed, by subsequent generations of Jewish men and women alike to address injustice wherever and whenever they experienced it.