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Immigrant workers faced grueling conditions in the early twentieth-century garment industry. Employees worked long hours at an unrelenting pace for low wages, while employers sometimes tried to intimidate them or cheat them out of their wages. Many garment workers were the teenaged daughters of Jewish and Italian immigrants. Employers took advantage of their diversity to try to keep them divided. These young women also found in their consumption of popular culture, such as movies, amusement parks, and dance halls, ways to build bridges between their communities. As their numbers in the workforce grew and working conditions declined they took matters into their own hands. In 1909, these young women immigrants organized across the boundaries of language and culture to stage the “Uprising of the 20,000,” a massive strike that won union recognition and transformed the role of women in the union movement.
Nan Enstad, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, author of Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Immigrant Women, Popular Culture, and Politics in Turn of the Century America, will join us before the film begins to provide us with additional historical context, and she will be available to respond to comments and questions after the film.
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The East Side Freedom Library is a non-profit private library located on the east side of St. Paul that has a non-circulating research collections. It is associated with but not part of the St. Paul Library. Its mission is to inspire solidarity, advocate for justice and work toward equity for all. It frequently hosts events, which are now offered online.
