A Power among Them

the long version

"Karen Pastorello's 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)." "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."--BOOK JACKET.