As the flames engulfed the top floors of the Asch building in Greenwich Village on March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins, who would become the first woman to serve as a cabinet secretary, watched in horror as the bodies began to pile up on the street. At the end of the ordeal, 146 victims — mostly young women from Jewish and Italian immigrant families — perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, New York City’s largest industrial disaster.
Witnessing the event made a lasting impression on Perkins and shaped her career. “It was the day the New Deal was born,” she commented years later, acknowledging the impact the event had not only on her but on society.
Perkins was not the only one who was propelled into action by the fire. Public outcry about this avoidable disaster pushed the New York State legislature to create the Factory Investigating Commission, which implemented over 30 bills addressing issues of fire safety, women’s labor, and factory regulation.
Most of all, the fire and its aftermath were a gruesome reminder of the necessity of unions. Only 13 months prior, the city witnessed as Triangle workers and their fellow garment makers walked out on what would be the largest women’s strike at this time. The 1909 “Uprising of the 20,000” called for better wages, safer working conditions, and shorter hours. It demonstrated not only that women could organize, but that they can be a powerful voice within the labor movement.
After disaster struck, it was even more imperative to make unions a powerful political force, and women, who comprised about 80 percent of the workers in the garment industry, a powerful constituency in them.
Yet, what strike leaders such as Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman understood, and that the fire made even more clear, was that women workers’ campaign should go beyond the shop floor and union halls. Women needed representation, they needed the vote, but they also, and most importantly, needed to be treated as human beings deserving of joy and pleasure.
“What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art,” argued Schneiderman in 1912. “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”
The idea of “Bread and Roses” came to define women’s labor activism in this period. Infusing working class activism and socialist political ideas with a feminist consciousness, working women developed their own brand of “Industrial Feminism,” which sought to center self-fulfillment, education, and culture in the struggle for justice.
The 1909 strikers, for example, focused not only on better wages and working conditions, but also on issues such as mirrors in bathrooms and an end to sexual harassment in the shop. Although male union leaders often found some demands frivolous or even irrelevant, the ability to protect their hard-earned fashionable possessions through hooks to hang their hats on was crucial to women workers sense of identity. “We like new hats as well as other young women. Why shouldn’t we?” argued Lemlich, justifying strikers’ demands.
For women workers, donning beautiful clothes and fancy hats was an important political strategy in their struggle to gain rights as women, workers, and Americans. When they picketed in the streets with their best fashions, they conveyed their demand to be treated as respectable ladies, but also signaled what they were fighting for.
Striving for self-fulfillment meant not only better wages for working conditions, but also the right for education, leisure, and the ability to enjoy oneself. As the feminist anarchist Emma Goldman proclaimed: “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”
In 1911, this approach was immortalized by James Oppenheim who published his poem “Bread and Roses” in American Magazine. The verses allude to working women’s struggles and sacrifice and were quickly picked up by the labor movement. During the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike, organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the song became so popular that the strike was commonly referred to as the “Bread and Roses strike.”
With a catchy tune and poignant message, “Bread and Roses” soon became a classic union song: “As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead,” alluding to the Triangle Factory fire disaster. But it also stresses that their sacrifice could not be in vain: “Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirit knew — Yes, it is Bread we fight for — but we fight for Roses, too.”
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The song and the spirit it conveyed continued to reverberate in working women’s struggles for equality, not just in the labor movement but also for suffrage and women’s rights. Representing a working-class perspective about the importance of woman’s suffrage, Schneiderman saw the vote as a tool, not an end goal in itself. The vote was a fire escape and a shorter working week, but the vote was also a chance to live a happy and fulfilling life.
The feminist demand for Bread and Roses was further institutionalized in the first commemorations of International Women’s Day, and later was revived by feminists in the 1970s. As feminist organizations began to proliferate in the late 1960s, a radical feminist group from Boston, Massachusetts, adopted the name and the ideology behind it. Boston’s Bread and Roses formed in 1969 and defined itself as an organization of socialist women who believed that a total social transformation was necessary for women’s liberation. One of their projects, which later developed into the publication Our Bodies, Ourselves, focused on women’s need to gain knowledge and control over their bodies.
In the face of tragedy like the Triangle Factory fire, working women formed a community and marched for a better future. Women’s demand to not only survive but to thrive in the face of oppression is still relevant today.
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” Emma Goldman once said, reminding us that joy and pleasure should be part of every serious political action. Over a century ago, working women understood the importance of striving for both bread and roses; today, women continue the fight.
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