"Too much of distasteful masculinity": Historicizing sexual harassment in the garment sweatshop and factory

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 15, Issue 4, 2004, Pages

  Bender, Daniel E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33749374882     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2004.0004     Document Type: Article

References (124)

1. Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 74-76;
2. and Sydney Stahl Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 135-36.
3. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 139-43.
4. Sam Liptzin, Tales of A Tailor: Humor and Tragedy in the Struggles of the Early Immigrants Against the Sweatshop, trans. Max Rosenfeld (New York: Prompt Press, 1965), 60-63.
5. For some of the most accessible descriptions of this sexual harassment, see Sadie Fowne, "The Story of a Sweatshop Girl" in Plain Folk: The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, ed. David M. Katzman and William M. Tuttle, Jr. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 55;
6. Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995);
7. A General Survey of Sanitary Conditions of Shops in the Cloak industry (New York: Joint Board of Sanitary Control, 1911), 6-7.
8. For one example of such a "crossover" of scholarship and activism, see Alliance Against Sexual Coercion, "Organizing Against Sexual Harassment" in Worker's Struggles, Past and Present, 234-48.
9. Working Women United Institute, Sexual Harassment on the Job: Results of a Preliminary Survey (New York: Working Women United Institute, 1975);
10. Catherine MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979);
11. Susan Estritch, "Sex at Work," Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 813-61;
12. and Anne C. Levy and Michele A. Paludi, Workplace Sexual Harassment (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002). Nonetheless, writing the history of sexual harassment in a way that supports and relies upon legal definitions tends to deny sexual harassment a history of its own.
13. For initial studies of harassment in the sweatshop, see Bularzik, "Sexual Harassment at the Workplace," 125-135;
14. Segrave, The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Workplace, 52-59;
15. and Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 141-45. These examples, however, only see sexual harassment as coming from bosses and, therefore, ignore the way harassment soothed relations between male workers and bosses and cemented hierarchies of skill.
16. Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African-American Domestics in Washington D.C., 1910-1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1994);
17. Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987);
18. Elsa Barkley Brown, "'What Has Happened Here': The Politics of Difference in Women's History and Feminist Politics," Feminist Studies 18 (summer 1992): 302-07;
19. and Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 102-03.
20. For examples, see Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 372-376;
21. Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 14-16; 33-34;
22. Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing it Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 44-45;
23. and George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 53.
24. Robin D.G. Kelley, "'We Are Now What We Seem': Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South" Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 97-98.
25. Irons, Testing the New Deal, 33;
26. Cobble, Dishing it Out, 131;
27. Dorothy Sue Cobble, "'A Spontaneous Loss of Enthusiasm': Workplace Feminism and the Transformation of Women's Service Jobs in the 1970s" International Labor and Working-Class History 56 (fall 1999);
28. and Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 54.
29. There is a large and strong literature on sexual abuse in slavery. See for example, Margaret A. Burnham, "An Impossible Marriage: Slave Law and Family Law" Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 5 (July 1987 {AU: page numbers for Burnham article?}) 189;
30. Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, A Slave (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991);
31. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988);
32. Marli F. Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998);
33. Dolores Janiewski, "Southern Honor, Southern Dishonor: Managerial Ideology and the Construction of Gender, Race, and Class Relations in Southern Industry" in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 70-91, esp. 86.
34. Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor, "Sex and Skill: Notes Towards a Feminist Economics" in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 317-30.
35. See for example, Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 69-99;
36. and Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Public Art and Theater (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 83-109.
37. Patricia Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Women, Men, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987);
38. Ava Baron, "An 'Other' Side of Gender Antagonism at Work: Men, Boys, and the Remasculinazation of Printers' Work, 1830-1920" in Work Engendered, 47-69;
39. Nancy Hewitt, "'The Voice of Virile Labor': Labor Militancy, Community Solidarity, and Gender Identity Among Tampa's Latin Workers, 1880-1921" in Work Engendered, 142-67;
40. Ileen DeVault, "'To Sit Among Men': Skill, Gender, and Craft Unionism in the early American Federation of Labor" in Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working Class Experience, ed. Eric Arneson, Julie Greene, and Bruce Laurie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 259-83;
41. and Gregory L. Kaster, "Labour's True Man: Organized Workingmen and the Language of Manliness in the USA, 1827-1877" Gender and History 13 (April 2001): 24-64.
42. Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988);
43. Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington: Univerity Press of Kentucky, 1990);
44. and Stephen Norwood, Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878-1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990)
45. David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), esp. 1-17.
46. Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, 141-42.
47. Anna McGinty, "Letter to the Editor; Forced to Strike" The Ladies Garment Worker (August 1911);
48. and Clara Lemlich, "Leader Tells Why 40,000 girls Struck" New York Call, 29 December, 1909.
49. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leasure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
50. Alice Kessler-Harris, "Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union" Labor History 17 (winter 1976);
51. and Wienberg, World of Our Mothers, 211.
52. Franke, "What's Wrong with Sexual Harassment?" 771-72.
53. Drawing on the work of Franke, Judith Butler suggests that while heterosexual harassment, legally, the most visible form of harassment, takes place "in the service of shoring up gender hierarchy," sexual harassment of homosexuals might promote "gender normativity." See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), xiii.
54. Special Report of the Sanitary Conditions of the Shops of the Dress and Waist Industry (New York: Joint Board of Sanitary Control, 1913), 8-10;
55. and Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
56. Mabel Hurd Willet, The Employment of Women in the Clothing Trade (New York: Columbia University Press, 1902), 72;
57. Jesse Pope, The Clothing Industry in New York (Columbia, Mo.: E.W. Stephens Publishing Company, 1905), 28;
58. David Roediger points out that the category carries racial tags. It also carries gender tags. The way these tags are applied is a crucial focus for labor history. See David Roediger, "What If Labor Were Not White and Male? Recentering Working-Class History and Reconstructing Debate on the Unions and Race" International Labor and Working-Class History 51 (spring 1997): 72-95.
59. Alice Kessler-Harris argues that labor historians must also explore gendered expectations of economic activity. Alice Kessler-Harris, "Treating the Male as 'Other': Redefining the Parameters of Labor History" Labor History 34 (spring-summer 1993): 190-204.
60. Pope, The Clothing Industry in New York, 51.
61. See also, Daniel E. Bender, Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor and Organizing (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004);
62. Ephraim Wagner, The Village Boy (unpublished autobiography, 1942), YIVO, AJA, #45, 156;
63. and Willet, The Employment of Women in the Clothing Trade, 89. It is important to note that marriage meant the end of wage-earning more for Jewish, than for Italian, women largely because Jewish men, more than Italian men, worked in the garment industry. Italian men were often employed outside of the garment industry.
64. Liptzin, Tales of a Tailor, 72-74.
65. Male workers have often sought ways of normalizing and naturalizing the sexual segregation of work. They often turned to social constructions of science and the body, pointing, for example, to women's dainty hands. See Ruth Milkman, "Redefining 'Women's Work': The Sexual Division of Labor in the Auto Industry during World War II" Feminist Studies 8 (summer 1982): 337-72.
66. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 139;
67. The small size and low capitalization of garment shops was not just a New York phenomenon. The arrival of Jewish immigrants in other cities created similar patterns. See Jo Ann Argersinger, Making the Amagamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 1899-1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 8-27.
68. Gayle Rubin describes how the "traffic in women" was crucial in maintaining the social bond between men. This suggests a way of examining sexual harassment, not simply as a difficulty women faced at work, but as a crucial element in the structuring of workplace relations. See Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 152-210.
69. Frowne, "The Story of a Sweatshop Girl," 55.
70. See, for example, Cohen, Out of the Shadow.
71. Morris Rosenfeld, "The Red Banner," 1913, Morris Rosenfeld Papers; YIVORG 431, Box 8, folder 94.
72. "Girls' Stories" Life and Labor (August 1914);
73. Kapp, Immigrant Physician, 137.
74. Lazarus Marcovitz, Episodes from Life, 1966, YIVO; AJA #287, 6.
75. Harry Lang, "62" Biography of a Union (New York: Astoria Press, 1940), 178-79.
76. This strike has often been noted in secondary literature. See for example, Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Women in America (New York: The Dial Press, 1976), 135-36
77. "A Shopgirl," 1907, in A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward, ed. Isaac Metzker (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 72;
78. Life and Labor 4 (August 1914);
79. Marcovitz, Episodes from Life, 7.
80. For theoretical understandings of how conceptions of sexual difference at work are transformed into ideas of women's character and moral failings, see Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 93-112.
81. Alice Kessler-Harris, "Where are the Organized Women Workers?" Feminist Studies 3 (fall 1975): 92-110.
82. Ladies' Waist Makers' Union, Souvenir History of the Strike (New York: Ladies' Waist Makers' Union, 1910);
83. Rose Schneiderman, "The White Goods Workers of New York, Their Struggle For Human Conditions" Life and Labor (May 1913);
84. Maxine Schwartz Seller, "The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand: Sex, Class, and Ethnicity in the Shirtwait Makers' Strike of 1909" in "Struggle a Hard Battle": Essays on Working-Class Immigrants, ed. Dirk Hoerder (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986);
85. Lang, "62" Biography of a Union, 94-139;
86. "A bleter ois der geshikte fun der veist makers iunion" The Ladies Garment Worker, April, 1910;
87. and Levine, The Women Garment Workers, 218-32.
88. The Ladies' Garment Worker, March, 1913;
89. Levine, The Women's Garment Workers, 218-26;
90. and Gertrude Barnum, "The Childrens' Crusade: The New York Strikers are Winning Fights," The Ladies' Garment Worker (February, 1913.)
91. "Holding the Fort: The Chicago Garment Workers' Strike" Life and Labor (February 1911);
92. Leonora O'Reilly, "The Story of Kalamazoo" Life and Labor (August, 1912);
93. Nancy MacLean, "The Culture of Resistance: Female Institution Building in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, 1905-1925," Michigan Occasional Papers in Women's Studies 21 (winter 1982) 105.
94. Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women's Trade Union League of New York (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980), 61-109;
95. See for example, Helon Marot, "A Woman's Strike: An Appreciation of the Shirtwaist Makers of New York" Proceedings of the American Academy of Political Science, City of New York 1 (1910), 119-28;
96. "The Shirtwaist Makers' Strike" Survey 23 (15 January 1910);
97. Mary Brown Summer, "The Spirit of the Strikers" Survey 23 (22 January 1910), 550-55;
98. "Why the Waistmakers Strike?" Evening Journal (26 November 1909);
99. Schneiderman, "The White Goods Workers of New York" Life and Labor (May 1913).
100. In fact, Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel suggest that women often were blamed and blamed themselves for sexual harassment in the sweatshop. See Baum, Hyman, and Michel, The Jewish Women in America, 132-36.
101. Dorothy Dix, "Shirtwaist Strike Shows Women's Need of the Ballot" Evening Journal (Microfilm Edition of the Papers of the WTUL, O'Reilly Papers, Reel 11).
102. New York Call, 5, 7, 8 December 1909;
103. Orleck, Common Sense and A Little Fire, 61-2;
104. and Dye, As Equals and As Sisters, 91.
105. Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt, "Working Girls Budgets: The Shirtwaist Makers and Their Strike" McClure's 36 (November 1910), 82;
106. "Chicago at the Front" Life and Labor;
107. Max Danish, "Kalamazoo Corset Co. Breaks on Union Wheel" The Ladies' Garment Worker (October 1914);
108. "Editorial" The Ladies' Garment Worker (May 1912);
109. Sarah Comstock, "The Uprising of the Girls" Collier's 14 (25 December 1909), 20-21;
110. Katherine Coman, "A Sweated Industry" Life and Labor (January 1911)
111. See also Danish, "Kalamazoo Corset Co. Breaks on the Union Wheel."
112. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), ix-18.
113. This understanding of the language of ladyhood as confirming sexual difference and highlighting only the harassment of bosses is in contrast with Enstad's interpretation. Enstad sees it solely as a language to express public discontent over sexual practice that was otherwise private. See Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, 84-118.
114. For changes in the systems of garment production, see Bender, From Sweatshop to Model Shop.
115. Rosenfeld, "The Red Banner."
116. The Ladies' Garment Worker (June 1911).
117. Twentieth Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the Year Ended September 30, 1902 (Albany: The Argus Company, Printers, 1903), 1-35;
118. MacLean, "The Culture of Resistance,"
119. Orleck, Common Sense and A Little Fire, 65. The diminutive "Paul," rather than Pauline suggests that Dyche was trying to place Newman outside of the heterosexual male-female binary that dominated union and shop floor life.
120. Fannia Colin, "Education Aids Workingwomen" Labor Age (January, 1928), 12-13.
121. Pauline Newman, "Out of the Past- Into the Future" Life and Labor (June 1921), 171-72;
122. Justice, 29 February 1924.
123. Fannia Cohn, "Winning Workingwomen to Unionism," Justice, 8 July 1927.
124. McGinty, "Forced to Strike" The Ladies' Garment Worker;