On Dec. 26, 1907, the New York City Rent strike began. Residents, mostly immigrant factory workers, were tightly squeezed financially, as well as physically into the small apartments that often housed up to three families. Young textile workers, including 16-year old PAULINE NEWMAN, (photo here) organized a rent strike that inspired the passage of NYC rent control laws twenty years later. The strike, involving 10,000 families in lower Manhattan and lasted until January 9, 1908; about 2,000 families succeeded in having their rents reduced. Learn more in the book Kids on Strike! by Susan Campbell Bartolettii: bit.ly/YfsVfQ From the Jewish Women’s Archive there’s this about the rent strike: “One reason for the strikes success was Newmans enlistment of neighborhood housewives. While working-class activists like Newman had to work during the day, the impassioned housewives that they organized could go from tenement to tenement to convince others to strike. Thus, the success of the strike depended both on shop floor networks of teenaged girls and on networks of neighborhood housewives and mothers.” Newmans leadership of the strike began a lifetime of activism. It brought her to the attention of the Socialist party, which ran her as a candidate for secretary of state of New York the following year (despite the fact that women did not yet have the vote in New York). She used the opportunity to call for womans suffrage. Newman also began organizing female garment workers and was a key organizer in the 1909 ‘Uprising of the 20,000. Newman worked for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union for more than seventy years—first as an organizer, then as a labor journalist, a health educator and a liaison between the union and government officials.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 19:22:26 +0000
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