Spinning a Yarn: Newspaper Misrepresentation of Women Garment Workers on Strike

Abstract

In the January cold of Rochester, New York in 1913, thousands of garment workers took to the streets. For several months following “the streets were filled with young women marching, singing, protesting, and fighting.” The social impetus among women to participate in this strike was so strong that when the garment workers began to picket, women in other industries risked losing their jobs to march in solidarity with them, though there was no immediate material gain for them in doing so. Photographs of the strike show lines of women, bundled up in their winter coats and hats, with a handful of men in the mix, marching down the streets of the snowy Upstate New York city.