Labnet: Book Ann: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman

[labnet at lists.labourhistory.net]

From: Labourhistory.net 

Title: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman
URL: http://labourhistory.net/news/i0803_36.php 

'A Power among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America'
Author: Karen Pastorello

Karen Pastorello's pathbreaking biography of Bessie Abramowitz Hillman
places Hillman at the center of events that marked the founding of
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). Born in Tsarist Russia
to an educated family, the teenaged Bessie Abramowitz immigrated alone
to Chicago to escape an arranged marriage. Empowered by her connection
to the social feminist reform movement centered at Hull-House, she was
one of the first to walk off the job as a button sewer in September 1910
in protest of an arbitrary reduction of wages. Within weeks, more than
thirty-five thousand workers followed the lead of Abramowitz and her
cohorts. A massive strike resulted, paralyzing men's clothing
manufacturers in Chicago and paving the way for the organization of the
men's garment industry under the United Garment Workers (UGW).

In 1914 Bessie Abramowitz Hillman led a breakaway group from the
exclusionary UGW to reorganize as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of
America and was the first woman appointed to the general executive board
of the new union. While married to Sidney Hillman (the ACWA's first
president)and raising two children, she traveled throughout the rural
Northeast, organizing workers in sweatshops that had relocated from
unionized metropolitan areas. In the 1930s she worked to bring black
laundry workers into ACWA, and during World War II she established
child-care centers and recreational facilities for the children of war
workers. After the war, she served on numerous federal commissions on
women and labor, seeking to end race and class injustice and improve the
quality of life for working women.

The description of Hillman's career as a feminist in the labor movement
indicates the prominence of women labor activists in that movement
during the early and middle twentieth century. Drawing from newly
discovered, official union records and valuable interviews of family
members, Pastorello traces the life of a key female labor activist whose
sixty-year career spanned Progressive Era social feminism and the
feminism of the postwar labor movement.

"Pastorello's vigorous chronicle of the tumultuous, eventful life of
Bessie Abramowitz Hillman recognizes Hillman as a major contributor to
American social reform and restores her to her rightful place in the
historical narrative. Readers will be captivated by Pastorello's
skillful rendering of the exhilarating world of Chicago Hull-House
social reformers; the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America campaigns
to organize Philadelphia sweatshops, teenagers in rural Pennsylvania
shirt factories, and African American laundry workers in New York; the
restiveness of working-class women in the post-World War II decades; and
the emergence of labor feminism on the national stage." --Dorothy Sue
Cobble, author of 'The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and
Social Rights in Modern America'

"This compelling life story of an immigrant woman factory worker adds to
our understanding of the founding and development of an important union,
the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and illuminates the
emerging concept of labor feminism."--Brigid O'Farrell, coeditor of
'Rocking the Boat: Union Women's Voices, 1915-1975'

Karen Pastorello is an associate professor of history and chair of
women's studies at Tompkins Cortland Community College, Dryden, New
York.

Cloth: 978-0-252-03230-1
Pages: 304 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 9 in.
Illustrations: 27 photographs

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