Common Sense and a Little Fire

Abstract

Over twenty years after its initial publication, Annelise Orleck's Common Sense and a Little Fire continues to resonate with its harrowing story of activism, labor, and women's history. Orleck traces the personal and public lives of four immigrant women activists who left a lasting imprint on American politics. Though they have rarely made more than cameo appearances in previous histories, Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and Pauline Newman played important roles in the emergence of organized labor, the New Deal welfare state, adult education, and the modern women's movement. Orleck takes her four subjects from turbulent, turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe to the radical ferment of New York's Lower East Side and the gaslit tenements where young workers studied together. Orleck paints a compelling picture of housewives' food and rent protests, of grim conditions in the garment shops, of factory-floor friendships that laid the basis for a mass uprising of young women garment workers, and of the impassioned rallies working women organized for suffrage. Featuring a new preface by the author, this new edition reasserts itself as a pivotal text in twentieth-century labor history.

Working-Class Women and the Progressive Era Development of Public Administration: The Case of Margaret Bondfield

“…Louis Brandeis argued that scientific management experts whom he considered agents of reform should invite workers to speak at their meetings in order to learn their actual point of view ("October meeting", 1915). Some upper class women such as the founders of the New York Women's Trade Union League's (NYTUL) included working class women in their organizations to improve the organization's credibility as a voice for labor (Orleck, 2017). But, in general, the Progressive tendency to valorize university obtained expertise left the ordinary understanding of working people out of the conversation on urban reform (Bledstein, 1976).…”

Race, class, gender and social entrepreneurship: extending the positionality of icons

“…Such an analysis would probe the particular problems even the most successful of these social entrepreneurs faced along with the strategies they developed to forge ahead and develop viable organizations. Such an extension would allow women from traditionally marginalized groups not only to be seen as victims but as active agents of organizational change (Orleck, 2017).…”

“…Again, the strike made changes in the lives of countless working women. By 1919 half of all female garment workers were members of trade unions (Orleck, 2017).…”

“…In the 1930s, her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, who she had met in 1919 through a Women's Trade Union League sponsored International Conference of Working Women, led President Franklin Roosevelt to appoint Schneiderman to the National Labor Advisory Board (Schneiderman, 1967). In that post Progressive era position she had input into provisions in important New Deal social legislation including the National Labor Relations Act, Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act (Orleck, 2017).…”

They Came to Scoff, But Stayed to Peel Onions: Reproductive Labor and Collective Action in the 1936–1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike

“…As a result, the women themselves decided on the name and structure of their organization, another distinction between the UAW auxiliary and other union auxiliaries of the period. 45 Dollinger knew "what we needed to call it. It was the first time in labor history that we didn't use the word 'ladies' auxiliary' like all of the other unions, and we gave our reasons for that."…”