Preview of We Shall Not Be Moved: The Women's Factory Strike of 1909 Summary:

We Shall Not Be Moved: The Women's Factory Strike of 1909 tells the dramatic story of a crucial American labor action: the strike by almost thirty thousand newly unionized women to fight miserable wages, long hours, and unsafe working conditions in shirtwaist factories. It is also the story of the fledgling Local 25 of the ILGWU, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and its attempts to organize and educate its members, many of whom were young and unskilled. Jewish immigrant factory workers, most of them no more than sixteen to eighteen years old, joined forces with suffragists, female college students, and society matrons to battle for improved working conditions in the garment factories on New York's Lower East Side. They proved, perhaps for the first time on this scale, that despite tremendous differences of social class, language, and levels of education, women could unite with a view to a common...