Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [888]
Women doffed wigs and kerchiefs and adopted American fashions. Some even began to question shtetl dogmas about female inferiority, now that they were in a country that considered women elevated creatures. They were less taken, however, with the bourgeois American notion that women should be homebound and passive, accustomed as they were to breadwinning roles. By the early 1890s an estimated twenty thousand young Jewish women, largely American born, were employed as saleswomen, milliners, typists, bookkeepers, stenographers, and public or private school teachers.
By and large, Jewish secular radical intellectuals would have more impact on their countrymen than did Orthodox traditionalists. At first, however, intoxicated by New York’s cosmopolitanism and their newfound freedom from shtetl and czarist controls, the intellectuals devoted most of their attention to debating one another. Some were attracted by socialism, with its optimism, universalism, impressive learning, and ethical appeal, and Tammany was startled in 1886 by the heavy turnout of Jewish voters for Henry George. Others, like Emma Goldman, opted for anarchism. Goldman, a Lithuanian immigrant who had been sewing overcoats in Rochester for several years, arrived in New York during the summer of 1889 with a sewing machine and five dollars, rented a room on Suffolk Street, and plunged immediately into the political scene, determined, like Russian heroines, to “go to the people.”
Inspired by the impromptu refusal (in 1882) of a group of newly arrived Jewish immigrants to scab on striking Irish longshoreman, the city’s German socialists began holding mass meetings on Rivington Street. Abraham Cahan, a brash young Lithuanian immigrant and former cell member of Vilna’s Narodnaya Volya, argued successfully that such lectures, to be effective, must be given in Yiddish. This led, with German socialist assistance, to the formation in 1886 of the New Yorker Yiddishe Volks-Zeitung and in 1888 of the United Hebrew Trades (UHT), both dedicated to helping the “Jewish proletariat. . . free itself more quickly from the filth of the pig market.”
The UHT grew swiftly, due in large part to the efforts of Cahan, Morris Hillkowitz (later Hillquit), a twenty-year-old recently arrived shirtmaker who helped unionize tailors, cloakmakers, and pressers, and the flamboyant Joseph Barondess, self-styled king of the cloakmakers. Barondess affected the haughty, not to say arrogant, manners of a bohemian aristocrat, satisfying his followers’ yearning for dramatic militancy, rather as Mike Walsh had done for the Irish half a century earlier. In the 1890 May Day celebrations, Barondess, mounted on a white horse, led his three thousand cloakmakers in a grand parade of nine thousand Jewish workers that marched to the “Marseillaise” up to Union Square, greeted by cheering bystanders waving red banners from windows.
Histrionics aside, with the aid of assistants like Emma Goldman, Barondess in 1890 led a strike by cutters and contractors against the Cloak Manufacturers Association and stood firm as well against the determined opposition of the United Hebrew Charities, which, when asked to extend relief to locked-out cloakmakers, reportedly said: “If they strike on account of their union, let them suffer for it. . . let them starve.” (“Better the whip of Fonye [the Tsar],” snarled the Arbeiter Zeitung, “than the charity of Eighth Street.”) In the end, Meyer Jonassen, New York’s leading clothing manufacturer and a wealthy uptown German Jew, was forced to boost wages and recognize the union, though the terms excluded women, who were the bulk of his factory employees.
In the volatile garment industry, successes proved hard to sustain. Concessions were withdrawn, agreements broken. The year following Barondess’s triumph, one of the largest manufacturers sent work to nonunion shops out in Jamaica, and Barondess himself was thrown in jail on a trumped-up charge. By the