Sweated Work, Weak Bodies

by Bender, Daniel E.

• ISBN13: 9780813533377
• ISBN10: 0813533376
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr

Summary

In the early 1900s, thousands of immigrants labored in New York's Lower East Side sweatshops, enduring work environments that came to be seen as among the worst examples of Progressive Era American industrialization. Although reformers agreed that these unsafe workplaces must be abolished, their reasons have seldom been fully examined. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies is the first book on the origins of sweatshops, exploring how they came to represent the dangers of industrialization and the perils of immigration. It is an innovative study of the language used to define the sweatshop, how these definitions shaped the first anti-sweatshop campaign, and how they continue to influence our current understanding of the sweatshop. This study links social, political, medical, and cultural histories of the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. Daniel E. Bender explores anxiety over the effects of immigration and industrialization, in particular the racial denegation of immigrants, the spread of diseases, and the breakdown of working-class families. He demonstrates the ways social refor

Author Biography

Daniel E. Bender is an assistant professor of history at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, and co-editor of Sweatshop U.S.A.: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: The Language and the Limits of Anti-Sweatshop Organizing	1	(18)
Part I Race, Class, Gender, and Defining the Sweatshop and Modern Shop in Progressive America	19	(82)
Eastern European Jews and the Rise of a Transnational Garment Economy	23	(19)
``The Great Jewish Metier'': Factory Inspectors, Jewish Workers, and Defining the Sweatshop, 1880--1910	42	(19)
``A Race Ignorant, Miserable, and Immoral'': Sweatshop Danger and Labor in the Home, 1890--1910	61	(16)
Workers Made Well: Home, Work, Homework, and the Model Shop, 1910--1930	77	(24)
Part II Women and Gender in the Sweatshop and in the Anti-Sweatshop Campaign	101	(80)
Gaunt Men, Gaunt Wives: Femininity, Masculinity, and the Worker Question, 1880--1909	105	(27)
Inspecting Bodies: Sexual Difference and Strategies of Organizing, 1910--1930	132	(23)
``Swallowed Up in a Sea of Masculinity'': Factionalism and Gender Struggles in the ILGWU, 1909--1934	155	(26)
Conclusion: ``Our Marching Orders . . . Advance toward the Goal of Industrial Decency'': Measuring the Burden of Language	181	(7)
Epilogue: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns in a New Century	188	(9)
Notes	197	(56)
Index	253