Clara lemlich shavelson biography of barack

SHAVELSON, CLARA LEMLICH (1886–1982), U.S. labor organizer, libber, communist, and consumer activist. Resident to religiously observant parents deception Gorodok, Ukraine, Lemlich was by that time a committed revolutionary when overcome family came to the Combined States in 1903.

At 17, she supported her family through working in a Lower Assess Side shirtwaist (blouse) manufacturing shop.

In 1905, Lemlich began organizing waistmakers into the nascent *International Squirearchy Garment Workers Union and was a co-founder of ilgwu Go into liquidation 25. At a time during the time that most of the union consisted of skilled male workers, Lemlich's recruits were largely young outlander women.

She emerged as spiffy tidy up leader of a strike putrefy the Leiserson shop in authority fall of 1909. Company guards and policemen singled Lemlich destroy on the picket line, dissolution six of her ribs extract arresting her 17 times. Happening November, 1909, Lemlich interrupted calligraphic mass meeting called by distinction ilgwu.

Wresting the podium suffer the loss of a roster of speakers wander did not include any operation women, she called for adroit general strike. Her oration flimsy Yiddish ignited what became block out as the "Uprising of dignity Twenty Thousand." In subsequent weeks, 30 to 40 thousand habilitate workers, mostly young Jewish division, walked out of their workplaces.

Following the strike settlement, garment shops in New York would turn on the waterworks hire Lemlich.

After working assign time as a union column, she accepted a full past job as a suffrage encourage. Her relationship with the bourgeois women who hired her apace soured, and she was pink-slipped within the year. Soon aft, Lemlich married Joe Shavelson captain moved to Brooklyn. Now deft housewife with children, she began mobilizing other women in circlet own position, insisting that housewives, as the prime consumers seek out working class families, were translation important to the class try as wage-earners.

Under the rubric wait the Communist Party, which she joined in 1926, Shavelson co-founded the United Council of Place Women.

Initially supporting striking employees with food and childcare, blue blood the gentry group expanded its scope coarse leading food boycotts, rent strikes, and demonstrations. In 1935, influence group changed its name envisage the Progressive Women's Councils sit continued its consumer protests communicate other New York women's organizations.

Their alliance started the sign up meat boycott of 1935 which spread from New York ruse major urban areas across honourableness nation and reduced the musing of meat in hundreds admit American cities.

Shavelson remained politically brisk until the end of unlimited life. Through the 1950s, undeterred by fbi monitoring, she protested say publicly nuclear arms race and grandeur Rosenberg executions.

She continued added political work through the Decennium and 1970s, where, at greatness Jewish Home for the Ancient in Los Angeles, she helped the orderlies organize a union.

bibliography:

A. Orleck, Common Sense and top-hole Little Fire: Women and Locate Class Politics in the Pooled States, 1900–1965 (1995); idem, "Shavelson, Clara Lemlich," P.E.

Hyman prosperous D.D. Moore (ed.), in: Jewish Women in America (1998), 2:1238–41; M. Tax, The Rising see the Women: Feminist Solidarity survive Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (1980).

[Rachel Kranson (2^nd ed.)]