Common sense & a little fire
Subtitle: women and working-class politics in the United States, 1900-1965
By: Annelise Orleck ; with a new preface by the author
Edition: Second edition.
Series: Gender & American culture; Gender & American culture
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 384
ISBN-13: 9781469635910
Copyright date: 2017
Subjects: Women in the labor movement; Jewish women; Working class women; Women social reformers; Political activity; History
Other titles: Common sense and a little fire
Description: "Over twenty years after its initial publication, Annelise Orleck's Common Sense and a Little Fire continues to resonate with its harrowing story of activism, labor, and women's history. Orleck traces the personal and public lives of four immigrant women activists who left a lasting imprint on American politics. Though they have rarely made more than cameo appearances in previous histories, Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and Pauline Newman played important roles in the emergence of organized labor, the New Deal welfare state, adult education, and the modern women's movement. Orleck takes her four subjects from turbulent, turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe to the radical ferment of New York's Lower East Side and the gaslit tenements where young workers studied together. Orleck paints a compelling picture of housewives' food and rent protests, of grim conditions in the garment shops, of factory-floor friendships that laid the basis for a mass uprising of young women garment workers, and of the impassioned rallies working women organized for suffrage. "-- page [4] of cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 359-365) and index.
Table of contents: title: Preface to the second edition; title: Introduction; title: pt. 1. The Rise of a Working-Class Women's Movement, 1882-1909; title: Prologue. From the Russian Pale to the Lower East Side : The Cultural Roots of Four Jewish Women's Radicalism. Ch. 1. Coming of Age: The Shock of the Shops and the Dawning of Political Consciousness, 1900-1909; title: pt. 2. Working Women in Rebellion: The Emergence of Industrial Feminism, 1909-1920. Ch. 2. Audacity : The Uprising of Women Garment Workers, 1909-1915. Ch. 3. Common Sense : New York City Working Women and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage; title: pt. 3. The Activists in Their Prime: The Mainstreaming of Industrial Feminism, 1920-1945. Ch. 4. Knocking at the White House Door: Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, and the Campaign for Labor Legislation, 1910-1945. Ch. 5. Emotion Strained through a Thinking Mind : Fannia Cohn, the ILGWU, and the Struggle for Workers' Education, 1915-1945.; title: Ch. 6. Spark plugs in every neighborhood : Clara Lemlich Shavelson and the emergence of a militant working-class housewives' movement, 1913-1945; title: pt.4 The activists in old age : the twilight of a movement, 1945-1986. Ch. 7 Witnessing the end of an era : the postwar years and the decline of industrial feminism; title: Epilogue. Reflections on women and activism.