Lara Vapnek

What would you say to Lilly Ledbetter if you had the chance to meet her?  I pondered this question as I headed to Queens College yesterday for the Virginia Frese Palmer Conference.  Joyce W. Warren, a professor of English and Women’s Studies at Queens College, organized the conference to bring together activists, scholars, and educators to discuss Gender in the Workplace.  Lilly Ledbetter gave the keynote address.  She spoke directly and movingly about her experiences seeking restitution for the wages she had lost due to Goodyear’s unequal pay scale for men and women.  In a phrase that resonated across centuries of struggle for civil rights and women’s rights, she explained: “We [women] want to enjoy the fruits of our labor.”  In their own ways, the other speakers echoed this theme, although they approached the problem of women’s place in the workforce from very different angles.

Patricia Francois described how Domestic Workers United is fighting for “dignity, respect, and recognition” for domestic work.  As Francois, an immigrant from Trinidad, who has worked as a nanny explained, “we came here searching for economic opportunity and we found a lawless environment.”  Her stories of abuse echoed the complaints of the 19^th century working women, which I described in my presentation.  Francois urged all of us to join in supporting a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, which would extend all existing labor laws in New York State to cover domestic workers.

Many of the speakers mixed the personal with the political.  Sheryl McCarthy, a Distinguished Lecturer in Journalism at Queens College shared her experiences breaking into journalism as an African-American woman.  She advised the audience, which included many students, not to be afraid to ask for a promotion or a raise. Following up on connections Lilly Ledbetter had drawn between women’s need for equal pay and their roles as family supporters, Carmella T. M. Marrone, the founder of the Queens College Women & Work program insisted that “healthy communities can not exist without economically viable families.”

Hester Eisenstein, a professor of Sociology at Queens College and Janet Gornick, a professor Political Science and Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, framed the issues globally.  Eisenstein encouraged us to think critically about where women fit into the story of economic development around the world, and to look critically at the relationship between feminism and capitalism.  Gornick’s transnational research demonstrated how little family support American workers enjoy compared to their European counterparts—leaving us with longer working hours and less public care for children than any other industrialized nation on the planet.

Together, the presentations captured the complexity of women’s roles as workers and as caregivers and showed the connections between politics and economics. Ultimately, what I said to Lilly Ledbetter was simply this: “Thank you for everything you’ve done.”  It was inspiring to meet someone like her, who was not afraid to stand up and fight for what she believed in, knowing that any victory she achieved would aid future generations of women in their long battle for equality at work.

On Thursday, I had the pleasure of giving a Breadwinners book talk at the Tenement Museum, one of my favorite cultural institutions in NYC.  I focused on Leonora O’Reilly (1870-1927), who grew up nearby.  At one point, she and her mother, Winifred, lived on Division Street, just a few blocks away.  Even after she became a well-known labor organizer and suffragist, Leonora O’Reilly identified with the women of the tenements, who waged a fierce struggle to support themselves and their families.  In 1909, O’Reilly clashed publicly with Mary Dean Adams, an immigration inspector and an anti-suffragist, who warned that women who lived in the tenements would “sell their vote for a pound of macaroni.”  O’Reilly defended the rights of tenement house dwellers to vote, explaining that women in the workforce needed suffrage to protect themselves from exploitation.  Female labor organizers like O’Reilly played an important role in the campaign for suffrage in New York State in 1917, drawing public attention to women’s roles as care givers and family supporters, and helping to convince working class men to support votes for women.

In the Feminist Review (February 21st, 2010), Frances Chapman writes:

“Between 1870 and 1890, the number of women working for wages, outside of agriculture, doubled. The period covered byBreadwinners was marked by industrialization and urbanization and encompassed the rise of unfettered capitalism and development of the women’s suffrage and union movements.”

“Lara Vapnek focuses on the working women of Boston, New York, and Chicago and tells their stories through very human profiles of the few working women who left a historical trace. Each chapter illustrates a step, or rather a facet, of this historical change.”

“Vapnek teases out the complications: the impetus to protect women from the brutalities of industrialization, the sexism of organized labor, the working class woman’s perspective on political rights, and ethical consumerism, and boycotts. She writes with directness about the class rifts that emerged in social movements and the difficulties of women workers trying to keep their own organizations from being hijacked by more affluent supporters who ‘know better.’”

According to the owners of Book Court, “Breadwinners” has topped the Best Selling Non-Fiction at Book Court!

Join me to hear more about “Breadwinners” at the Tenement Museum on Thursday, March 11th at 6:30 p.m.

Reading and signing of “Breadwinners”: Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at BookCourt.

Tonight at 7:00 p.m., I will be reading from my new book, Breadwinners, recently noted in the NY Times.

The reading & signing will be held at:

Book Court
163 Court Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231

Please come by and check it out. Thanks.

STORY OF REMARKABLE WOMEN

WHO SHAPED EARLY FIGHT

FOR GENDER EQUALITY

‘“Breadwinners” reads almost like a prequel to “When Everything Changed,” a history of American women since 1960 by Gail Collins, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.’

—Sam Roberts, NY Times, “Bookshelf”, 11/29/09

“Vapnek chronicles the labor movement through capsule biographies of largely forgotten individuals who had a profound impact on the lives of working women.

Her account is national in scope, but New York women figure in it prominently. Among them was Leonora O’Reilly, who left school at age 11 to work in a garment factory and support her widowed mother and family. She would emerge as a leader of the 1909 shirtwaist makers’ strike and as a suffragist.”

Breadwinners reveals women’s groundbreaking struggle for workplace equality — a full century before the 1960s.

TimeOut NY listed me in their BOOKS section:

Vapnek’s Breadwinners is a historical analysis of working women from the Civil War until 1920. Tonight, she’ll ponder the differences between middle-class and working-class women’s ideas of independence, and revisit the contributions made by labor reformers of the era.

Read more:

Sam Roberts of the NY Times wrote in his Bookshelf column:

“Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920” (University of Illinois Press, $70), by Lara Vapnek, reads almost like a prequel to “When Everything Changed,” a history of American women since 1960 by Gail Collins, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.

Ms. Vapnek, who teaches history at St. John’s University, chronicles the labor movement through capsule biographies of largely forgotten individuals who had a profound impact on the lives of working women. Her account is national in scope, but New York women figure in it prominently.

Among them were Helen Campbell, a journalist and poverty researcher, who helped start the consumer movement in the 1880s. She urged educated women like herself to consider the welfare of the women who made their clothing and to become ethical consumers.

Another was Leonora O’Reilly, who left school at age 11 to work in a garment factory and support her widowed mother and family. She would emerge as a leader of the 1909 shirtwaist makers’ strike and as a suffragist. “Women, whether you wish it or not, your first step must be to gain equal political rights with men,” she declared. “The next step after that must be equal pay for equal work.”

I was thrilled when I saw this write up because I just sent Roberts the book out of the blue (because I follow his column). I was amazed and pleased that Roberts described the book so concisely in four paragraphs. And my friends had been referring to “Breadwinners” as a “prequel” to Collins’ book. So he totally got it.

The only downside is that the Times listed the List Price of $70.00 for CLOTH rather than the more affordable List Price of 25.00 for PAPER. You can get “Breadwinners” for $16.87 on Amazon.com.  Buy it now while supplies last!

Reprinted from Illinois Press Book Blog

Searching for illustrations for my book, Breadwinners, recapped the challenges—and rewards—of writing about working women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Documentation of women who worked as servants, seamstresses, saleswomen, and factory hands has always been thin. The popular press tended to depict working women as unruly servants or downtrodden seamstresses.

My book contests these stereotypes by telling the stories of women who used their wage work to articulate a new sense of independence and to claim full rights of citizenship. After weeks of archival research, I was thrilled when I found images that captured the spirit of the women I knew so well from their diaries, letters, speeches, and investigations. My favorite discovery now graces the cover of the book: Maggie Hinchey, an Irish American laundry worker leading a parade of working women dressed in white to signal their support for suffrage.

In 1913 and 1914, Hinchey, an organizer for the Women’s Trade Union League, stormed the states of New York and New Jersey to explain working women’s need for the ballot. Her powerful appeal earned her an invitation to spread her message west, to union men in Montana and Nevada. This picture of Maggie Hinchey captures working women’s determination to be recognized as breadwinners and shows how they organized to achieve their goals.