On the evening of November 22, 1909, several thousand garment workers squeezed into Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City. The crowd was almost all women, many still in their teens.
They were there to discuss the poor working conditions that plagued their industry—low wages, inhumane hours, abusive and unsafe environments—and whether they should call for a general strike among shirtwaist makers. This meeting was the culmination of a series of smaller strikes organized by female labor activists, several of which had led to arrests and violence against the picketing workers. The speakers slated for that evening included labor leaders such as the American Federation of Labor’s Samuel Gompers, the Women’s Trade Union League’s Leonora O’Reilly, and B. Feigenbaum of the Jewish Daily Forward.1 One after another, they expressed solidarity with the shirtwaist makers, talking at length about the terrible conditions the workers experienced, while failing to offer concrete actions.
Eventually, a slight twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian Jewish woman named Clara Lemlich—erroneously described by reporters as a teenager, despite already being an experienced organizer—could stand it no longer.
“I want to say a few words,” she yelled out, before delivering a short, powerful speech in Yiddish.
“I have listened to all the speakers. I would not have further patience for talk, as I am one of those who feels and suffers from the things pictured. I move that we go on a general strike.”
And they did.
The next morning 15,000 shirtwaist makers went on strike.2 By night, that number had grown to 20,000. Some estimate that as many as 40,000 shirtwaist makers eventually joined the movement.
This strike, known alternately as the Uprising of the 20,000 and (my personal favorite) the Revolt of the Girls,3 gave energy to the organizing efforts of women garment workers across the country. Within the year, thousands of women workers had gone on strike, from Philadelphia to Chicago. The eleven-week-long Uprising of the 20,000 didn’t get the strikers all of their demands, but it did result in concrete progress: 339 waist and dress manufacturers signed contracts granting shorter workweeks, paid holidays, wage negotiations, and a promise not to discriminate against unionized workers.4
In 1954,5 Lemlich, who remained an activist throughout her life, gave an interview about her early days as a labor organizer. “What did I know about trade unionism?” she said. “Audacity—that was all I had—audacity!”
The 2016 presidential election felt, in some ways, like a referendum on the value of women (and people of color and immigrants and refugees and Muslims . . . the list goes on), one that we had lost. On the evening of November 9, I walked in a daze under the gray, drizzly haze that seemed to permeate New York City to meet three friends, all women who shared my single-minded desire to sit in a cozy, dark corner and plot the resistance—or at the very least feel a modicum of usefulness.
En route to the meet-up, I passed Cooper Union, which stands just around the corner from my office—the site of Clara Lemlich’s speech, the place where she had refused to be silent and allow inaction 107 years before.
In the months following the presidential election, I found myself thinking a lot about women like Clara—women who had the audacity to speak out and organize for change before it was possible to rally the masses with a viral hashtag or even cast a vote at the ballot box.
American history is filled with women who slowly but surely transformed the country. But since men’s stories are the ones that tend to dominate our history books, we hear less about the contributions of these extraordinary women.
Women such as civil rights leader Diane Nash, who cofounded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was instrumental in organizing sit-ins and Freedom Rides to protest segregation in the South.
Or Sarah and Angelina Grimké, white Quaker sisters and abolitionists, who were the first women to testify on the issue of black American rights before a state legislature.6 They spent much of their lives speaking publicly against slavery, even debating men—something that was nearly unheard of at the time.
Or Sylvia Rivera,7 who at the age of seventeen was one of the drag queens who fought back against police when they came to raid the Stonewall Inn, helping start the seminal 1969 Stonewall riots. According to the New York Times, as the riot began, Sylvia yelled: “I’m not missing a minute of this—it’s the revolution!”
Or human rights and antiracism activist and author Grace Lee Boggs, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, who grew up to adopt the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and hosted Malcolm X at her Detroit home.
As OG feminist icon Gloria Steinem once said: “Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.”8 Each one of these trailblazing women took power where none was bestowed.
Today women are getting to watch that “process of the taking” play out right in front of their eyes. Necessitated by a political moment that is distinctly hostile to women’s rights, women are leading the resistance—from the courts to the streets to Hollywood to the halls of Congress.
Senators such as Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand are persisting like the “nasty women” they are. Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors—the women behind Black Lives Matter—are channeling their movement’s energy into combating an administration’s open disdain for black and brown lives.9 Women’s March national cochairs Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, Bob Bland, and Carmen Perez are turning the massive energy the world witnessed on January 21, 2017, into a movement with true staying power.
And it’s not just the most visible leaders of this resistance that matter. Not only has progressive activism surged overall since November 2016, but women are more likely than their male counterparts to write and call Congress, march and protest, and express an intention to get more involved in the coming years.10 American women of all ages are showing up and doing the work and giving a fuck.
This book is for the women and girls who give all the fucks, because there have always been women and girls who did—women and girls who showed up to fight for their own inalienable rights and the rights of others. This book is for every woman who has chosen to give a fuck despite the odds being stacked against her.
I learned so much from listening to the women I spoke to while writing this book. I hope these pages can serve as a beginner’s guide to getting involved—or at least a crash refresher course. (Writing it certainly was for me.) You’ll learn steps you can take to start making a tangible difference and how to stay (at least relatively) sane while doing it. And you’ll get all this advice from women who live and breathe what they are talking about every damn day, women who have the audacity today that Clara Lemlich had in 1909.
In April 1912, Clara Lemlich argued passionately for working women’s right to vote. “We are here, and we are here to stay,” she said.
Today, we are here. And we are here to stay.
So, dear reader, go forth and change the world. There’s an army of women who came before you, and they all have your back.