Sweated work, weak bodies: anti-sweatshop campaigns and languages of labor

Figure 1 "Garment Sweatshop" (from UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901 [ca. 1910]). This photograph captures the various kinds of gendered and industrial disorder that so worried factory inspectors on the eve of the great strikes that would transform the industry. The factory embodies all the problems that the model American shop ideally solved: production is irrational with clothing and cloth spread haphazardly around this converted domestic space and men and women labor together in close quarters.

Figure 2 Jacob Epstein, "The Spirit of the Ghetto" (frontispiece for Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter of New York [1902; reprint, New York: Schocken, 1965]; image from the collection of the Tamiment-Wagner Labor Archives, New York University). The drawing captures the way Jewish workers talked about their labor in the sweatshop. Epstein alludes to the abominable conditions of labor in the sweatshops, not by drawing a cramped, filthy space, but by focusing on the deformed, obviously Jewish tailor's body. The conditions of work are etched on the male worker's enfeebled frame.

Figure 3 E. M. Lilien, "At the Sewing Machine" (frontispiece from Morris Rosenfeld, Songs of Labor [Boston: Richard Badger, 1914]; image from the collection of the Tamiment-Wagner Labor Archives, New York University). This drawing connects workers' bodily decline and ethnicity with the oppression of the sweatshop. The frail worker is, based on his clothing, obviously Jewish. The half-bat, half-bloated capitalist behind the worker is either the boss or the embodiment of disease—or perhaps both. By depicting a straw from the vampire boss's mouth to the worker's body, Lilien seems to suggest that the sweated system sucks out workers' vitality and injects disease.

Figure 4 "Industrial Homework" (from UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901). This emotionally charged drawing from Harper's Weekly highlights the concerns of factory inspectors, policymakers, and social reformers. The home is transformed into a workplace, mingling the worlds of production and reproduction. A child lies asleep on a pile of unfinished garments, perhaps spreading its germs to middle-class consumers and the male worker in the center holds his face in his hand. His pose evokes fears of a loss of manhood and degeneration.

Figure 5 Pie-chart illustrating the movement of the garment industry uptown (from Five Years' Work and Progress of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control in the Cloak, Suit and Skirt and the Dress and Waist Industries: An Experiment in Industrial Self-Control [New York: Joint Board of Sanitary Control, October 31, 1915], 5; image from General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tolden Foundations). The map captures the JBSC's sense of progress in the ladies' garment industry. The pie graphs laid over the map of Manhattan highlight the movement uptown, implying an improvement in conditions. It also suggests a new focus on scientific, rational reform among inspectors and workers and a departure from older ways of talking about sweatshop dangers.

Figure 6 "Shop on East Fourth Street" (from A General Survey of the Sanitary Conditions of the Shops in the Cloak Industry [New York: Joint Board of Sanitary Control, 1911], 9; image from the collection of the Tamiment-Wagner Labor Archives, New York University). Mention of the tenement garment shop's location in the photograph's original caption seems sufficient to explain the danger, mess, and illegitimacy of the shops.

Figure 7 "Modern Shop with Many Windows" (from A General Survey of the Sanitary Conditions of the Shops in the Cloak Industry [New York: Joint Board of Sanitary Control, 1911], 25; image from the collection of the Tamiment-Wagner Labor Archives, New York University). The JBSC praised this new loft factory for its modernity. The composition of the photograph captures the sense of spaciousness, rationality, modernity, progress, and ultimately sanitary safety.

Figure 8 "Shop on Greene Street" and "Machine Room of a Large Modern Shop" (from A General Survey of the Sanitary Conditions of the Shops in the Cloak Industry [New York: Joint Board of Sanitary Control, 1911], 28; image from the collection of the Tamiment-Wagner Labor Archives, New York University). The JBSC used such comparisons of tenement and modern shops to depict progress toward a model shop. Filth is compared to order, confusion to rationality, and labor in homes to work in modern shops. Note also the sense of gendered disorder as men and women labor together in the Greene Street photograph and the all-male order in the photograph of the modern shop. Ethnicity and race are also obscured; only signs of sexual differences are visible.

Figure 9 "Sewing Room" (from Report of the Committee for the Care of the Jewish Tuberculous, 1913-1936 [New York, 1937], 38; image from the collection of the Tamiment-Wagner Labor Archives, New York University). This picture of the Altro Works's main sewing room aims toward wide-open windows, thereby stressing the sanitary modernity of the workroom. The orderliness of the shop is reflected in the gendered order of the all-male workforce. As a model shop, the Altro Works sought to care for sick male breadwinners.

Figure 10 "Pauline Newman" (from UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901 [ca. 1915]). The garment worker turned trade unionist Pauline Newman played a critical role in the strikes of female garment workers from 1909-1913. In the following years, she was one of a number of female trade union activists who struggled to win leadership positions for women within the ILGWU.

Figure 11 "Taking Prisoners into the Jefferson Market Prison" (from UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901). Strikers, like these, who were arrested on the picketlines during the 1909 strike were taken for summary judgment to the nearby Jefferson Market prison. Employers often drew on public concerns about the sexual dangers of sweated work by hiring prostitutes as strikebreakers and by comparing arrested strikers to prostitutes.

Figure 12 "Two Phases of Yuletide, 1909" (from the New York Call, December 24, 1909). This cartoon was typical in the way it presented female workers as physically decrepit and young. It was partially in their enfeebled bodies that workers and their middle-class leaders claimed to find workplace legitimacy. The cartoon is also emblematic of the cross-class dialogue that was integral to the direction of the 1909 and 1913 strikes.

Figure 13 "Hilf" Help. The angel, holding the Arbeter Ring's charter and gesturing to its sanitarium, embodies the ideological goals of the AR to cure its members. The tubercular patient is a male worker with a sunken chest.

Figure 14 "Fereinigung" Association. The Arbeter Ring depicted its desire and ability to care for its members throughout their lives in this allegorical drawing. The strong physique of the older male represents the success of the AR.

Figure 15 "Women Raise Their Hands Voting for a Strike" (from UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901). As a male union official looks on, female rank-and-file pledge to walk the picket lines. The scene dramatically displays women's commitment to union activism, as well as the gendered inequality of the ILGWU.

Figure 16 "ILGWU Waist and Dressmakers Voting on an Agreement" (from UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901 [1913]). The concern on the male union leader's face in the center of the photograph reveals the gendered tension within the union's ranks during the 1913 strikers. During the strikes, officials like this man found themselves in conflict with female rank-and-file and shopfloor leaders. Strikers forcibly and violently forced male union officials to renegotiate one agreement, foreshadowing conflicts between male leaders and female unionists throughout the 1910s.

Figure 17 "ILGWU Local 25 Executive Board" (from UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901 [1915]). Male domination of union leadership positions in the ILGWU is dramatically captured in this group portrait. In a local almost entirely composed of women, the board has only three women. Women in Local 25 turned to languages of union democracy and class empowerment in Communism to voice resentment over their exclusion from leadership positions.

Figure 18 "We Have Swept Them Out" (from UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901 [1927]). Police try to control a crowd, probably of anti-Communist partisans during the violent years following the 1926 strike. This photograph highlights both the public violence that came to accompany partisan battles after 1926 and the way this violence was acted out by male unionists and male gangsters.

Figure 19 "A Confrontation between the Right and Left Wing of the ILGWU outside Madison Square Garden" (from UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901 [1926]). In the aftermath of the failed 1926 cloakmakers' strike, the ILGWU was torn asunder by political battles. This photograph captures just one of many violent conflicts between partisans of the Communist local leadership of the 1926 strike and the anti-Communist leaders of the ILGWU. As this photograph suggests, these conflicts, expressed in a prevailing language of manliness, reduced women to the roles of spectators, further restricting their roles in the anti-sweatshop movement.