Robert D. Parmet: Review of Karen Pastorello's A Power Among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (University of Illinois Press, 2008)"
[Robert D. Parmet is Professor of History at York College of the City University of New York.]
The annals of needle trades unionism contain the names of many women who contributed heroically to the quest for social and economic justice in America. Most frequently cited in this regard are Clara Lemlich Shavelson, Pauline Newman, Rose Pesotta, Dorothy Bellanca, Rose Schneiderman, Maida Springer and Bessie Abramowitz Hillman. Thanks to a growing number of scholars, such as Alice Kessler-Harris, Annelise Orleck, and now Karen Pastorello, their stories are being properly told. Pastorello’s biography of Bessie Abramowitz Hillman does more than merely credit her contributions. It rescues her from the enormous shadow cast by her husband, Sidney Hillman, with whom in 1914 she founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which he then served as president until his death in 1946.
In 1915 Bessie became the first female member of the union’s General Executive Board. The next year she married Sidney. As both felt that together they should earn only one ACWA salary, she resigned from the GEB and spent three decades as an unpaid volunteer. “Bessie was exceptional,” Steven Fraser noted in his biography of Sidney ("Labor Will Rule"), but not until this volume do we have a full account of how truly remarkable she actually was.
Born in 1889 in Linoveh, a village in White Russia (now Belarus), Bessie never forgot her origins. Pastorello relates how (according to daughter Philoine) she reacted to a scene in the Broadway production, Fiddler on the Roof, depicting a young woman’s distress when facing an arranged marriage. “That’s me! That is what happened to me!” she said as sprang from her seat and pointed to the stage. In a remarkable opening chapter, Pastorello recreates Bessie’s European background. Deftly piecing together available evidence and her own conjecture, she describes the world Bessie Abramowitz felt compelled to leave for America.
She landed in Chicago, where she worked under sweatshop conditions as a button-hole sewer in the men’s clothing industry. Intent on improving the lives of the mainly women workers in the industry, she found valuable allies in Jane Addams of Hull-House and Margaret Dreier Robins of the Women’s Trade Union League. On the other hand, she discovered indifference on the part of Thomas Rickert and his elitist trade union, the United Garment Workers. In October 1910 a strike of 8,000 Hart, Schaffner, and Marx employees, supported by a much greater walkout of workers from other firms, extended into the next year. The results were violence, partial success, and growing dissatisfaction with the UGW leading to secession from it. Pastorello brilliantly describes this strike and the subsequent founding of the Amalgamated.
The Hillmans had two daughters, Philoine and Selma. With the cooperation of Philoine through numerous interviews, and the archival resources of the Kheel Center of Cornell University, Pastorello describes a woman who ran a household, maintained a career, and belonged to a network of like-minded women. Throughout Pastorello’s pages are references to people who were very much part of her life. Included, for example, are Elinore Herrick, President of the New York Consumers’ League, Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Esther Peterson, Assistant Secretary of Labor under John F. Kennedy, all rather impressive company.
Bessie Hillman was a woman with apparently limitless interests and energy. She would organize anti-union “runaway” garment shops and laundries, persuade women to vote on the American Labor Party line for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reelection to the presidency, and advocate civil rights for blacks and equal economic rights for women. In sum, she was a trade union activist whose career ended only with her death at age eighty-one in 1970, twenty-four years after her husband’s passing.
It is to Karen Pastorello’s great credit that she keeps Bessie Hillman’s personality and career front and center and demonstrates both her partnership with Sidney as well as her independence of spirit. By supplementing clear prose and thorough research with numerous family and archival photographs, the author puts finishing touches to a model biography.
The annals of needle trades unionism contain the names of many women who contributed heroically to the quest for social and economic justice in America. Most frequently cited in this regard are Clara Lemlich Shavelson, Pauline Newman, Rose Pesotta, Dorothy Bellanca, Rose Schneiderman, Maida Springer and Bessie Abramowitz Hillman. Thanks to a growing number of scholars, such as Alice Kessler-Harris, Annelise Orleck, and now Karen Pastorello, their stories are being properly told. Pastorello’s biography of Bessie Abramowitz Hillman does more than merely credit her contributions. It rescues her from the enormous shadow cast by her husband, Sidney Hillman, with whom in 1914 she founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which he then served as president until his death in 1946.
In 1915 Bessie became the first female member of the union’s General Executive Board. The next year she married Sidney. As both felt that together they should earn only one ACWA salary, she resigned from the GEB and spent three decades as an unpaid volunteer. “Bessie was exceptional,” Steven Fraser noted in his biography of Sidney ("Labor Will Rule"), but not until this volume do we have a full account of how truly remarkable she actually was.
Born in 1889 in Linoveh, a village in White Russia (now Belarus), Bessie never forgot her origins. Pastorello relates how (according to daughter Philoine) she reacted to a scene in the Broadway production, Fiddler on the Roof, depicting a young woman’s distress when facing an arranged marriage. “That’s me! That is what happened to me!” she said as sprang from her seat and pointed to the stage. In a remarkable opening chapter, Pastorello recreates Bessie’s European background. Deftly piecing together available evidence and her own conjecture, she describes the world Bessie Abramowitz felt compelled to leave for America.
She landed in Chicago, where she worked under sweatshop conditions as a button-hole sewer in the men’s clothing industry. Intent on improving the lives of the mainly women workers in the industry, she found valuable allies in Jane Addams of Hull-House and Margaret Dreier Robins of the Women’s Trade Union League. On the other hand, she discovered indifference on the part of Thomas Rickert and his elitist trade union, the United Garment Workers. In October 1910 a strike of 8,000 Hart, Schaffner, and Marx employees, supported by a much greater walkout of workers from other firms, extended into the next year. The results were violence, partial success, and growing dissatisfaction with the UGW leading to secession from it. Pastorello brilliantly describes this strike and the subsequent founding of the Amalgamated.
The Hillmans had two daughters, Philoine and Selma. With the cooperation of Philoine through numerous interviews, and the archival resources of the Kheel Center of Cornell University, Pastorello describes a woman who ran a household, maintained a career, and belonged to a network of like-minded women. Throughout Pastorello’s pages are references to people who were very much part of her life. Included, for example, are Elinore Herrick, President of the New York Consumers’ League, Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Esther Peterson, Assistant Secretary of Labor under John F. Kennedy, all rather impressive company.
Bessie Hillman was a woman with apparently limitless interests and energy. She would organize anti-union “runaway” garment shops and laundries, persuade women to vote on the American Labor Party line for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reelection to the presidency, and advocate civil rights for blacks and equal economic rights for women. In sum, she was a trade union activist whose career ended only with her death at age eighty-one in 1970, twenty-four years after her husband’s passing.
It is to Karen Pastorello’s great credit that she keeps Bessie Hillman’s personality and career front and center and demonstrates both her partnership with Sidney as well as her independence of spirit. By supplementing clear prose and thorough research with numerous family and archival photographs, the author puts finishing touches to a model biography.
