International Women’s Day: The Story of Two Claras

By Will Parry

This is the story of two Claras: Clara Lemlich, the fiery young Yiddish-speaking heroine of the 1909-1910 strike of the New York shirtwaist makers, and Clara Zetkin of Germany, for 65 unbroken years one of the ablest theoreticians and most principled fighters of the international labor and socialist movement.

First, Clara Lemlich.

On March 8, 1908, hundreds of women garment workers massed in Rutgers Square in New York’s Lower East Side to demand women’s suffrage and to call for the building of a strong needle trades union. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Yet it was only the initial seething of a boiling cauldron of garment worker unrest, born of 60-hour weeks at $9 wages, with sums deducted by the sweatshop bosses for needles and threads, for electric power, for the very use of the chairs at the women’s machines.

Rutgers Square was the overture. Twenty-one months of spontaneous shop strikes followed.

Mostly young and mostly Jewish, the picketing shirtwaist makers were assaulted by company thugs and jailed by the police. It soon became clear that nothing less than a general strike of all shops could compel action on their grievances.

On November 22, 1909, an overflow meeting was held in Cooper Union to protest the vindictiveness of the struck employers and to discuss an industry-wide walkout.

For two hours the workers heard speaker after speaker, including AFL President Samuel Gompers, appeal for “caution and moderation.” Then young Clara Lemlich marched down the aisle and demanded the right to speak. Already on strike for 11 weeks, she had scarcely recovered from a savage beating on the picketline.

Philip Foner tells her story in his The AFL in the Progressive Era: “Barely five feet tall and not more than 20 years old, she spoke in impassioned Yiddish – the native tongue of the majority of the shirtwaist workers – and proceeded to berate the cautious speakers who had held the platform.” And Foner quotes Lemlich’s stirring conclusion: “I have listened to all the speakers. I have no patience for further talk. I am one who feels and suffers from the things pictured. I move we go on a general strike!”

Instantly the crowd was on its feet, cheering, stamping and roaring a mass demand for strike. Within the next few days, some 30,000 workers walked out at 500 shops. For three months, incredibly, magnificently, despite hundreds of arrests and beatings, the women held the line.

In the end, the strike achieved limited but important gains, including a cut from 60 to 52 hours in the workweek. But the most enduring gain was the recognition that young working women, inexperienced in organizing strategy, could sustain a united, effective strike against an industry and its retinue of thugs, cops and courts.

Before 1909, one union veteran said, “The waist and dress shops were the vilest and foulest industrial sores.” Out of the shirtwaist makers’ uprising came a strong and permanent International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and with it the first measure of decency in a sweated industry .

All because, at the decisive moment, when Samuel Gompers was afraid to lead a struggle for justice, Clara Lemlich was not.

And now for Clara Zetkin.

It was surely historical justice that Zetkin initiated International Women’s Day. As long ago as 1889, she persuaded the Second Socialist International to proclaim that “Male workers have a duty to take women into their ranks upon a basis of equal rights and demand in principle equal pay for the workers of both sexes and without discrimination of nationality.” It was Zetkin as much as anyone who transformed the crusade for women’s suffrage from a battle in which all men were perceived as the enemy into a working-class struggle in which women and men workers fought side by side as colleagues in a common cause.

Foreshadowing the supreme issue of International Women’s Day observances in our own era, Zetkin was a lifelong passionate champion of the cause of peace, holding that the workers of one nation should refuse to wage war upon the workers of another for the profit and power of the employer.

In 1932, in her final years, as a Communist and the senior deputy in the Reichstag, Clara Zetkin presided over the last freely-elected German parliament before Hitler seized power.

In an introduction to Zetkin’s writings, Foner speaks of the Rutgers Square demonstration of March 8, 1908.

Inspired by this rally, and by the historic strike that followed, Clara Zetkin, at an international conference of socialist women in Copenhagen, moved that March 8 be designated International Women’s Day, and that it be dedicated each year to fighting for equal rights for all women in all countries.

Zetkin’s resolution was approved on August 27, 1910, while the earth was still trembling from the mighty shirtwaist makers’ uprising. Clearly, the heroism displayed by Clara Lemlich and her thousands of union sisters had deeply touched a conference of working-class women half a world away.

And that is why, on March 8, 1911 – 99 years ago – the first International Women’s Day was celebrated.

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