Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965

The life stories of four Jewish immigrant organizers--Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, Clara Lemlich Shavelson and Fannia Cohn--frame Orleck's history of women in U.S. working-class movements. All had energized their communities and garment-factory shop floors, located on New York's Lower East Side, by their early 20s and were lifelong labor leaders. Consummate organizers (Newman conceived and led the largest rent strike New York had ever seen when she was 16), they negotiated the minefields of male labor leaders' sexism, middle- and upper-class feminists' elitism and the country's anti-Semitism and xenophobia to carve out careers, forge friendships and develop a politics Orleck describes as ``industrial feminism.'' Schneiderman's and Newman's most significant intimate relationships were with women. Orleck, an assistant professor of history at Dartmouth and herself the descendant of immigrant Jewish working-class organizers, draws on social history and on primary texts; some of the latter have only recently become accessible to scholars. In the hands of a skilled storyteller, this material would have been gripping, but Orleck's prose is matter-of-fact and often repetitive. Luckily, the rich factual detail and the epic nature of the women's lives sometimes overcome the shortcomings of the writing. Photos not seen by PW. (May)