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Ida Braiman (died February 5, 1913) (sometimes spelled Brayman, Breiman, or Braeman) was a Ukrainian Jewish garment worker killed while on strike for better working conditions in Rochester, New York. Her death brought statewide attention to the 1913 Rochester Garment Workers' Strike.
Not much is known about Braiman's life before she arrived in New York State as an immigrant to the United States from Zhitomyr, Ukraine. [1] Her age at the time of her arrival is given variously as 17 or 18 years old. [2]
Ida Braiman and her father were participants in a citywide strike of the United Garment Workers of America only months after her arrival in the United States. On February 5, 1913, she was part of a group of strikers going to small textile factories encouraging workers their to join the strike. [3] The strikers, a crowd of some seven hundred people, picketed a tailor shop owned by Valentine Sauter. When picketers began to throw stones, Valentine Sauter used a shotgun to fire into the crowd, killing Braiman and injuring three others. [4] Although Sauter was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, a grand jury declined to indict him. [2] Several strikers from the crowd were also arrested for rioting. [4]
Braiman's death became a rallying point for the striking workers, and garnered support for the strike from middle- and upper-class women's suffrage organizers. [5] Five thousand people attended her funeral and processed behind the hearse carrying her body to the graveyard. [2] She was buried in the Waad Hakolel Jewish cemetery in Rochester. [2]
In 2013 Braiman was honored by Rochester labor organizations on the 100th anniversary of her death.[2] The memorial card that was distributed after her death was adopted by the women's liberation movement of the 1970s as a symbol of feminist history, and reprinted as a poster by the Times Change Press in New York City. now in Sebastopol California reprinting the poster [6]
"Bread and Roses" is a political slogan as well as the name of an associated poem and song. It originated from a speech given by American women's suffrage activist Helen Todd; a line in that speech about "bread for all, and roses too" inspired the title of the poem Bread and Roses by James Oppenheim. The poem was first published in The American Magazine in December 1911, with the attribution line "'Bread for all, and Roses, too'—a slogan of the women in the West." The poem has been translated into other languages and has been set to music by at least three composers.
The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) was once one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first U.S. unions to have a primarily female membership, and a key player in the labor history of the 1920s and 1930s. The union, generally referred to as the "ILGWU" or the "ILG," merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in the 1990s to form the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). UNITE merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) in 2004 to create a new union known as UNITE HERE. The two unions that formed UNITE in 1995 represented 250,000 workers between them, down from the ILGWU's peak membership of 450,000 in 1969.
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) was a United States labor union known for its support for "social unionism" and progressive political causes. Led by Sidney Hillman for its first thirty years, it helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It merged with the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) in 1976 to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), which merged with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in 1995 to create the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). UNITE merged in 2004 with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) in 2004 to create a new union known as UNITE HERE. After a bitter internal dispute in 2009, the majority of the UNITE side of the union, along with some of the disgruntled HERE locals left UNITE HERE, and formed a new union named Workers United, led by former UNITE president Bruce Raynor.
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Leonora O’Reilly was an American feminist, suffragist, and trade union organizer. O'Reilly was born in New York state, raised in the Lower East Side of New York City. She was born into a working-class family and left school at the age of eleven to begin working as a seamstress. Leonora O’Reilly’s parents were Irish immigrants escaping the Great Famine; her father, John, was a printer and a grocer and died while Leonora was the age of one, forcing her mother, Winifred Rooney O’Reilly, to work more hours as a garment worker in order to support Leonora and her younger brother.
Clara Lemlich Shavelson was a leader of the Uprising of 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York's garment industry in 1909, where she spoke in Yiddish and called for action. Later blacklisted from the industry for her labor union work, she became a member of the Communist Party USA and a consumer activist. In her last years as a nursing home resident she helped to organize the staff.
The New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, also known as the Uprising of the 20,000, was a labour strike primarily involving Jewish women working in New York shirtwaist factories. It was the largest strike by female American workers up to that date. Led by Clara Lemlich and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and supported by the National Women's Trade Union League of America (NWTUL), the strike began in November 1909.
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Fannie Sellins was an American union organizer.
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Pauline M. Newman was an American labor activist. She is best remembered as the first female general organizer of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and for six decades of work as the education director of the ILGWU Health Center.
Flora Dodge "Fola" La Follette was a women's suffrage and labor activist from Madison, Wisconsin, United States. At the time of her death in 1970, The New York Times quoted her on women's suffrage: "A good husband is not a substitute for the ballot." She was the daughter of progressive politician Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette and lawyer and women's suffrage leader Belle Case La Follette, wife of playwright George Middleton, a contributing editor to La Follette’s Weekly Magazine, an actress, and, with her mother, a chronicler of her father's life.
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August Bellanca (1880–1969) was an American labor activist who was a founder and three-time vice president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). The ACWA was formed as an offshoot of United Garment Workers and was the result of tensions between the national union and urban locals. Bellanca served as vice president at intervals over a period of fifty years, from 1916-1934, 1946-1948 and also from 1952-1966.
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