Revealing Division:The Philadelphia shirtwaist Strike, the Jewish Community, and Republican Machine Politics, 1909–1910

This declaration, made by fifteen-year-old shirtwaist worker Alice Sabowitz in December 1909, embodied the spirit of the shirtwaist workers' strike that took place in Philadelphia during the harsh winter of 1909–10.¹ The strikers, approximately 85 percent of whom were Jewish women and girls from Russia, refused to return to work until their demands for better working conditions and union recognition were met.²

The strike was, among other things, a contest between young immigrant workers who sought to build power and a municipal government that sought to expand its own.³ These opposing goals met with resistance beyond the immediate space of the strike. The actions of young sweatshop workers revealed generational, political, and economic fissures within Philadelphia's Jewish community. Further,...