GENDERED LABOR “A Hero . . . for the Weak”: Work, Consumption, and the Enfeebled Jewish Worker, 1881–1924

GENDERED LABOR “A Hero . for the Weak”: Work, Consumption, and the Enfeebled Jewish Worker, 1881–1924 Daniel Bender New York University Then I throw myself into the fire, become a hero and struggle like a lion for the weak; and if the bullet strike me,—I fall dead on the field, then I, too, can perish laughing. Morris Rosenfeld, “What Is the World?”1 The view of New York Harbor was a welcome sight for Samuel Siegal, one of nearly two million Eastern European Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1922.2 For Siegal and his shipmates it was the end of an enfeebling boat journey as well as their first glimpse of the goldene medinah (golden land) they had heard and talked about so much in the Pale of Settlement (the region of Czarist Russia open to Jews). Like the overwhelming majority of his coreligionist immigrants, Siegal had traveled to the United States in steerage. There, he ate nearly inedible food—and then only when he was not too nauseated to swallow. After the experience of steerage, Siegal was physically ill-prepared for the medical examination that awaited him at Ellis Island that morning in 1904.3 When Siegal entered the crowded hall at Ellis Island he was seized, stripped, poked, inspected, and fumigated by a host of doctors, nurses, and customs offi- cials. Luckily for Siegal he was not (yet) infected with any of the diseases and handicaps considered rife among Jewish immigrants.4 Although he makes no mention of it in his memoirs, many of his shipmates were certainly either quar- antined at Castle Garden or returned immediately to the alte haym (the “old home” meaning the Pale of Settlement).5 Siegal finally made the trip to Manhattan. During his first several days in New York, Siegal labored hard to “de-green” himself, that is, to look American in the most obvious ways. The day after his arrival he purchased a new suit of American clothes. Siegal could shed his outward otherness with relative ease. However, his physical weakness persisted after his arrival in Manhattan. It fol- lowed him into his first job in a textile shop where he carried bundles of goods I would like to thank Liz Cohen and Louise Tilly for their challenging and useful critiques. A note on the use of Yiddish: I have tried wherever possible to retain as much of the original di- alects by transliterating Yiddish words as they were written, not according to standard rules. International Labor and Working-Class History No. 56, Fall 1999, pp. 1–22 © 1999 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 on hot summer days on weak shoulders. He “worked . to exhaustion.” His first few days convinced Siegal that the Lower East Side was not a golden land. It was a “humiliating beginning.”6 Weakness was hard to escape. The immigration process was the first step in casting Jewish immigrants as weak and potentially diseased. The suggestion of weakness was confirmed when Jewish immigrants went to work. In the garment factories, they encountered new sources of enfeeblement: the consumptive rav- ages of sweated garment labor. Siegal’s experience was not the exception but the rule for both male and female Jewish immigrants. Each immigrant went through a medical examination and the majority suffered debilitating factory work. Many feared for their lives in their jobs—if diagnosable tuberculosis did not strike first, then an exhaustion complete with coughing fits that hinted of consumption would. Many ailments commonly labeled as consumption were not strictly tuberculosis; many simply mimicked its symptoms. Among immigrants, what emerged was a social definition of consumption that was not strictly de- fined by the tuberculosis bacilli. Consumption became the fearful name for many ailments.7 Jewish immigrants understood the connection between consumptive disease and their work in garment factories. They echoed the words of doctors and reformers in suggesting that poor sanitary conditions in garment shops spread tuberculosis. The disease was evident in the stooped, pale bodies of Jewish immigrant workers. Yet in the face of disease, lurking death, and daily struggle, Jewish workers created a means of resistance that forged workplace strength out of physical weakness. Disease not only shaped the way Jewish workers understood their labor but also influenced labor-organizing priorities.8 Nearly every historian of Jewish immigrant labor on the Lower East Side has cited the miserable conditions of the garment shops. However, the larger im- pact of the clouds of dust, extremes of temperature, and cramped quarters on workers’ understandings of labor and class politics has remained largely undis- cussed.9 Yet the cultural meanings of disease, specifically tuberculosis, for Jewish garment workers are crucial in studying the ethnic patterns of Jewish labor organizing, workplace relations, and the rhetoric of class workplace conflict on the Lower East Side. Labor historians and historians in general have recently begun to examine how disease shaped understandings of proletarian daily life and political representations of the working class.10 Jewish workers on the Lower East Side recast tuberculosis as far more than a medically diagnosable physical condi- tion. Its new role as an imagined (and sometimes real) illness raises significant and previously underexplored questions about the way workers described the physical effects of their labor on their bodies. Garment work, Jewish workers in- sisted, was a physical struggle; the conditions of the workplace and the pressures of garment manufacture were etched on workers’ bodies—on their sunken chests, their stooped shoulders, and ultimately their tubercular physique. Tracing the intersection of work and disease among Jewish workers de- mands the identification of the particular methods and outlets workers em- ployed to describe their labor. Work is treated here as a discursive subject lay- “A Hero . for the Weak” 3 ered with metaphorical significance, not simply as the set of physical processes of garment manufacture, like sewing, stitching, or cutting. Workers’ memoirs, letters, poetry, and art reveal that Jewish workers sought to comprehend and to depict the dangers and exploitation of their labor by examining the effects of labor on their health. Work, then, becomes the subject of cultural analysis. The cultural analysis presented here extends previous labor historians’ ex- aminations of work, which have been limited to explaining how the physical processes and conditions of labor (alongside questions of race, class, gender, and ethnicity) determined forms of resistance and organizing. When labor is exam- ined as a subject that workers discussed, debated, and depicted, this examination offers a powerful way to identify what workers imagined to be their shared conditions. Jewish workers viewed work as an inevitable confrontation with weakness and disease, and this image represented an important part of how Jew- ish workers articulated their common experiences as garment workers. Moreover, if we examine how workers talked about their labor, we can ex- plore workplace conflict in more complex ways. How did workers describe shop- floor struggle? What metaphors did workers employ to depict their forms of resistance? And, perhaps most important, how did this metaphoric portrayal of workplace struggle shape priorities of resistance and organizing? In the end, un- derstanding work as a subject workers sought to define and represent helps de- termine the root of particular strategies of resistance. Jewish workers used images of disease and enfeeblement to describe workplace conflict; questions of health and curing workers’ bodies lay at the heart of their organizing.11 For Jewish workers, images of weakness, dust, and physical damage became an important part of their political rhetoric. They adopted forms of worker organization that addressed a wide range of proletarian concerns beyond wages and benefits, like health care and factory investigations. Jewish workers’ understandings of work, grounded in the belief that garment labor meant a confrontation with disease, politicized workers’ bodies by transforming them into the terrain of workplace conflict. In many ways, the discourse around tuberculosis helped forge a common language of labor, as workers were able to articulate common experiences even in the highly specialized and segmented garment industry in a wide variety of workplaces from small family-owned sweatshops to larger loft factories. Al- though the discourse around tuberculosis helped crystallize a sense of shared experiences in the workplace which in turn shaped the priorities of collective ac- tion, it did little to dampen gender cleavages within the Jewish garment working class. Male and female garment workers experienced the workplace differently. Women frequently found themselves a minority plagued by sexual harass- ment and nearly always laboring for lower wages. In a survey published in 1911, only 10,108 of 45,199 cloakmakers were women. Of these women, few held the higher-paying positions of operator and cutter. Most women labored in the less skilled, lower-paying positions of baster, finisher, or buttonhole maker.12 In ad- dition, most female garment workers were younger and unmarried. Most 4 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 women did not continue to work for wages long past marriage. The Senate Im- migration Committee reported in 1911 that only eight percent of married immigrant Jewish women worked outside of the home.13 Indeed, Jewish women considered marriage a means to escape from the consumptive world of sweatshop labor. As Clara Lemlich, the socialist union activist whose fiery speech helped rally strikers during the female shirtwaist workers’ strike of 1909 to 1910, de- clared: “Almost all [women] . work under long hours and miserable conditions . Their only way to leave the factory is marriage.”14 For most women, full-time garment work was often temporary.

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