New York shirtwaist strike of 1909

New York Shirtwaist Strike of 1909

Two women strikers picketing during the shirtwaist strike of 1909
Date	November 1909 to March 1911
Location	New York City
Also known as	Uprising of the 20,000
Outcome	Successful renegotiation of garment worker contracts

The New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, also known as the Uprising of the 20,000, was a labor strike primarily involving Jewish women working in New York shirtwaist factories. Led by Clara Lemlich and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and supported by the National Women's Trade Union League of America (NWTUL), the strike began in November 1909. In February 1910, the NWTUL settled with the factory owners, gaining improved wages, working conditions, and hours. The end of the strike was followed only a year later by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which exposed the plight of immigrant women working in dangerous and difficult conditions.

The population of New York City was more than half immigrant in the early 1900s, many of the shirtwaist workers were immigrants. These immigrants came from a wide variety of backgrounds (such as Jews and Italian), and crowded into immigrant neighborhoods like the Lower East Side of Manhattan Island, which at the time had one of the highest population densities in the world. Many of these immigrants, men, women, and children alike, worked for low pay in factories with terrible working conditions to help support themselves and their families. But they were also exposed to a bustling new world, and to the political and union organizers therein. Immigrant women especially often came from conservative social backgrounds which limited their interaction with men and people outside the family. But New York in the early 1900s provided the opportunity for these women to explore such social interactions, and exhibit a new level of independence.

Many of these women immigrants toiled in the garment industry, which was New York's best known industry at the time. They worked not for a single, large conglomerate but many smaller companies spread across lower Manhattan, among the largest of which were the Triangle and Leiserson shirtwaist factories. This workforce was more than 70% women, about half of whom were not yet twenty years old, and about half of whom were Jewish and a third Italian. In the production of shirtwaists in particular, the workforce was nearly all Jewish women. Some of them had belonged to labor unions in Europe before their immigration; many of the Jewish women in particular had been members of the Bund. Thus, they were no strangers to organized labor or to its tactics. Indeed, Jewish women who worked in the garment industry were among the most vocal and active supporters of women's suffrage in New York.