Gender, Class Consciousness, and Ethical
Consumerism:
Women’s Garment Industry
Michelle Kleehammer
In
1887, an article appeared in The North
American Review investigating the status and utility of union labels. The author, W. E. J. Kelley, claimed that
the success of the union label, then still relatively new to the labor
movement, was dependent on two important prerequisites: first, that there be a
trade union willing to devote its resources to the adoption and promotion of
such a label among its employers, and second, that there exist a demand for the
label on the part of the consumer.[1] In Kelley’s assessment, what she calls the
“purchasing public” would have to alter its buying patterns based on an appeal
to ethical considerations rather than immediate economic needs.[2] This early description of ethical
consumerism, as it would be perceived over a century later by Lawrence B.
Glickman in A Living Wage, depended
upon a type of consumer consciousness, one in which the purchasing public,
through choosing where to invest its resources, thus transformed consumerism
into a type of ownership of production.
Glickman writes that the label movement converted the meaning of
ownership from the “tools and ‘fruits’ of production” to the moral choices of
the consumer.[3] As Kelley wrote, “the stress is no longer on
production or exchange but upon consumption.
The consumer... is the real maker of goods.”[4]
From the time of Kelley’s article until
around the turn of the century, women were not an important consideration among
those who advocated the use of labels.
Kelley astutely identified the irony of this oversight by stating that
“neither men nor women have yet come to a realization of the economic
importance of women either in production or consumption. Women as producers are unorganized and they
fail to appreciate their importance as purchasers for themselves and their
families.”[5] Kelley was writing about working-class
women, both those who worked outside the home themselves and those who were the
dutiful housewives of union men.
Middle-class women were also motivated to reform working conditions in
the garment industry, but for different reasons. This emerging consumer movement thus sprang from parallel yet
competing groups.
The garment label movement in the
Progressive Era exemplified the growing awareness on the part of women to
utilize their power as consumers.
According to Dana Frank, women in general grew to comprise up to 80 or even
90 percent of the purchasers of goods for their families.[6] Consumerism in fact spanned class as well as
gender divisions. Middle-class women,
affected in new ways by urbanization, industrialization, education, and
subsequently gendered spheres, were simultaneously seeking outlets for their
social and ethical concerns. The
National Consumers’ League’s (NCL) White Label and Insignia campaigns in the
garment industry exemplified such leisure-class attitudes toward moral
consumption. Among the working class,
concerns regarding their own conditions prompted the powerful International
Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) to advocate a union label campaign of
its own. The Prosanis label challenged
working-class women to utilize their consumer powers and a sense of class
loyalty in support of the label movement.
The clash between the NCL’s and the ILGWU’s labels is demonstrative of
the larger struggle between middle-class philanthropy and working-class
demands.
Consumerism was not contrary to the
gendered roles of the Progressive Era.
Allis Rosenberg Wolfe writes that women such as those in the NCL “sought
to organize around the one function they performed as housewives which tied
them to industrial society - their role as society’s chief consumer.”[7] Kathryn Kish Sklar has identified the early
twentieth century as the beginning of a consumer consciousness for white
middle-class women, brought about primarily by a new understanding of the
economic importance of consumers.[8] League members took this role seriously, and
the notion of using that power for bettering society logically followed from
the increasing power of the consumer.
An early motto of the League stated “To live means to buy, to buy means
to have power, to have power means to have duties.”[9] Sklar argues that the White Label campaign
of the NCL instilled this moral crusade in the mentality and rhetoric of
middle-class women in the first decade of the twentieth century.[10]
All women, whether working class or
middle class, whether working outside the home or solely within, were the
economic managers of the family and the household’s primary consumers. For these reasons, maternalistic labeling
campaigns and the union label movement
of the Progressive Era targeted female purchasers and thus acknowledged women’s
integral role in the emerging consumer culture. Both the League’s labels and union labels were grounded in the
notion of ethical consumption, which simultaneously challenged and solidified
separate gender spheres and to some degree racial divisions. Each type of label
sought supporters from different economic positions which ultimately divided
“the shopper with a conscience” along class as well as gender lines, evident in
the increasingly tense relations between the middle-class Consumers’ League and
its labeling competition, the working-class ILGWU.[11]
The first documented use of labels
occurred not with regard to gender roles but rather in response to race. Sometime between 1859 and 1874, white San
Franciscan cigarmakers responded to the perceived threat of lower-paid Chinese
“coolie” labor with a union label initiative.[12] The label stated, “the cigars herein
contained are made by WHITE MEN.”[13] As Dana Frank points out, the white label
was called so simply because it signaled that the cigars had been manufactured
by white unionized workers and not Chinese workers who were prohibited from
joining the established craft unions of the day.[14] The label affixed to the cigar boxes was in
fact blue, and later became known as the blue label, though the symbolism of
white worker solidarity was maintained.
M. A. Tierney in San Francisco’s Labor
Clarion wrote in 1902 to other organized workers that this pioneer label
distinguished between “cigars made by a first-class workman under proper
sanitary conditions, and by a member of an organized union, as opposed to
inferior, rat shop, coolie or filthy tenement-house workmanship.”[15] Tierney’s readers would have understood that
only white workers fit the first description and that Asian workers were most
likely to fit the second.
This “morally ambiguous” beginning for
union labels, as described by Glickman, focused not on the inferiority of the
Chinese-made cigar but rather on the inferiority of the Chinese standard of
living, and their subsequent underconsumption.[16] By convincing San Franciscans to purchase
only white-made cigars, cigarmakers were encouraging whites to maintain their
higher standard of living and simultaneously to contribute to the unemployment,
poverty, and ultimate expulsion of Chinese laborers.[17] Further, argues Glickman, the use of such
labels by the cigarmakers, and the subsequent spreading of consumer
consciousness to the garment industry, points out the “inherent conflict in
working-class consumerist tactics.”[18] This paradox was stated simply by an ILGWU
educational pamphlet: “As a producer,
Jones wants high wages. As a consumer,
he wants low prices.”[19] It was from this dilemma, Glickman asserts,
that working-class women’s needs and attitudes became pivotal.[20]
By the early twentieth century the
garment trades, particularly the manufacturing of women’s apparel, held some of
the poorest working conditions and lowest wages among its labor force, which
included vast numbers of women and youth.
Early in the American industrial boom, over 80 percent of clothing
workers were women. By the 1930 census,
the majority of those employed in the garment trades continued to be female.[21] Sweatshops were common substitutes for
modern factories and many women performed contract or piece-work in
tenement-house settings.[22] Louis Levine, an early historian of the
ILGWU writing in the 1920s, identified the three main features of sweatshops as
“insanitary [sic] conditions, excessively long hours, and extremely low wages.”[23] In the crowded immigrant districts of such
cities as New York and Chicago, workers of all ages could be seen through the
tenement windows “bending over their machines or ironing clothes at the window,
half naked.”[24] In these shops, by the turn of the century,
the hours worked ranged from 60 to 84 per week with a great deal of overtime in
the busy seasons for extremely low pay.
Levine summed up the garment workers’ experience “as a ‘system of making
clothes under filthy and inhuman conditions’ and as a ‘process of grinding the
faces of the poor.’”[25] In these horrific working conditions,
unionization seemed the only positive route for laborers, and for middle-class
purchasers of women’s garments, consumer activism became the logical method of
securing quality products made under acceptable conditions. The National Consumers’ League thus became
the model for middle-class involvement in improving the treatment of garment
workers.
From 1899 to 1932 the National Consumers’
League was led by a tireless crusader for social reform. Florence Kelley, a complex figure who served
in the maternalist tradition became one of its most important leaders. She argued that middle-class associations
which aided the working class brought about mutual advancement and therefore
“furthered the cause of socialism.”[26] For Kelley and other like-minded women,
gender discrimination did not necessarily serve as a hindrance to gaining
public influence. Rather, women’s
status as mothers and as protectors of society garnered them the influence they
enjoyed as Progressive reformers. As
Theda Skocpol argues, the creation of the maternalist welfare state was
dependent upon woman’s role as nurturer and man’s role as breadwinner.[27] Thus, female middle-class reformers operated
under the auspices of stretching women’s natural role of moral protector into
the public sphere through social policies.
In this way, the Progressive Era favored a gender consciousness defined
by sexual difference and, adds Skocpol, methods of “public education and
lobbying through widespread associations” which were the predominant ways women
chose to pursue their sociopolitical goals.[28]
In the League, Florence Kelley created a
small but effective advocate for protective labor legislation for women and
children in a manner that Skocpol called “a pure embodiment of gender politics
around a social-democratic agenda.”[29] However, Kelly did not advocate what she saw
as earlier motivators of “fear and pity” for the workers. Instead Sklar states that “[f]ear and pity
were less effective and less sustained mobilizers of collective action than knowledge
and morality,” which motivated Kelley.[30] The NCL’s 1928 publication “Behind the
Scenes in Candy Factories” described well the purpose of the League. Lillian Symes wrote
evidently fair wages and fair conditions
cannot be left to the altruism of the individual employer where the worker is
unable to enforce her own demands.
...[O]n the whole, the young unorganized worker must look to the public
for some protection until she is able to protect herself.[31]
This
quotation clearly states the maternalist ideologies of the middle-class League
members and the skeptical attitudes of the NCL toward manufacturers. Allis Wolfe has argued that middle-class
women, discouraged from working, sought to participate in the larger reform
movement of the Progressive Era.
Recognizing their developing role as consumers, they found an outlet for
their philanthropic desires.[32] Women’s preeminent role among the
purchasing public clearly created a focus for organizing toward social reform.
This reform impulse began with the introduction
of the White List in 1891, the New York City Consumers’ League’s earliest
project even before the formation of the national organization. The League’s White List was a list of
department stores that met certain standards of labor based upon equal pay for
equal work, paid overtime, minimum wage for sales girls, child labor concerns,
and labor relations. British trade
unions, which found the publishing of such lists avoided the legal problems of
the alternative blacklist, influenced the idea of the White List.[33] Black lists, as used by trade unions,
indicated employers for whom unionists were advised not to work. The alternative white lists acknowledged
workplaces and employers considered acceptable. The NCL’s version of the White List in America was never very
successful, due in part to the problem of advertising its findings to the
public and the lack of cooperation by manufacturers.[34]
When Florence Kelley took over the newly
consolidated National Consumers’ League in 1899, she replaced the White List
with a White Label campaign.[35] White Labels worked similarly to the list,
but could be placed in each appropriate garment produced in a compliant
factory, making them more accessible to the public consumer. The appearance of the White Label was that
of a bow tie shape, with the center stating “Official Label National Consumers
League Registered Nov 17 1899.” The
left side read “Made Under CLEAN AND HEALTHFUL Conditions” and the right side
stated “Use of Label AUTHORIZED After INVESTIGATION.”[36] According to a copy of the contract,
granting of the White Label demanded complying with state laws, manufacturing
all goods on the premises, the employment of no children less than 16 years of
age, and maximum workdays of 10 hours, 6 days per week.[37]
In both cases, it fell on the League
itself to research the factories, a responsibility which encompassed much of
Kelley’s time in her early years as General Secretary. In a strategic decision, the NCL chose to
focus its energies on the white, cotton muslin underwear industry, which
comprised the largest sector of goods produced for and by women and children.[38] In a similar fashion to the blue
label of the San Francisco cigarmakers, the White Label of the NCL implicitly
perpetuated the nativism of its white middle-class membership and the white
workers that were on the receiving end of such programs. African-American women were excluded from
department stores and the garment industry at this time, and thus were not
among those aided by the NCL’s attempts.[39]
In the end, the White Label campaign
enjoyed limited success. It
economically aided the larger manufacturers who could afford to comply with the
standards of the League, irrespective of their concessions to workers or
unionization of employees. Such
advantaged producers were able to create large exhibits of the acceptable goods
in their department stores. The NCL
thus provided a “moral aura” to the leadership of certain businesses, helping
their economic power to grow.[40] Such challenges to the authority of
the NCL label only added to the competition with contemporary union labels in
the garment industry, such as those labels of the International Ladies’ Garment
Workers’ Union.
The ILGWU was formed in June 1900 with a
charter from the American Federation of Labor, and the earliest ILGWU label was
a simple label, promoted from the Union’s inception in 1900. A 1901 resolution stated the purpose of “the
introduction of our label... which will raise our trade to the level which,
owing to its importance, it is lawfully entitled to hold.”[41] These lofty ambitions did not prove to
ensure the success of the label. By
1902 only 4 garment companies utilized the label, by 1903 it increased only to
10, and no more than 12 firms ever adopted the ILGWU label before the 1920s.[42] The union label thus faded in importance,
and it was not until the more prosperous era of the 1920s that the ILGWU
attempted to revive its purpose, this time under the Joint Board of Sanitary
Control.
The ILGWU’s first decade showed
remarkable growth highlighted by the 1909-1910 “Uprising of
Twenty-Thousand.” This uprising was a
series of strikes by New York City’s shirtwaistmakers, 80 percent of whom were
women and girls, which ended in relative success and pushed ILGWU membership up
to around 10,000.[43] The conclusion of these strikes also brought
the development of the “Protocol of Peace,” a guideline for arbitration that
became a model for settlements within the garment industry. The Protocol established a minimum
wage scale, 50-hour work weeks, double pay for overtime, increased paid
holidays, and preferential shops. In
return, the manufacturers could expect the union “to keep members under strict
control.”[44] One of the main purposes of this project was
the outlawing of strikes. Louis
Brandeis, the Protocol’s author and ILGWU legal counsel, wrote that the ILGWU
“substituted for the strike the machinery of the Protocol as a means of
securing the fair and reasonable exercise by the employer of those rights which
were, by law, vested in him.”[45]
Although the Protocol lasted only six
years, it established the more resilient Joint Board of Sanitary Control to
prevent strikes through a grievance system and factory inspection for safety
and sanitary conditions.[46] It was from this Board that the most
successful ILGWU label campaign, the Prosanis Label of the 1920s, grew from
within the unionized working class and with the intention of appealing to other
unionized workers.
Under the guidance of Label Division
Director Henry Moskowitz, the Board issued the Prosanis Label in 1924. It appeared as an artistic bubble-shaped
emblem containing the text “Produced under conditions approved by Joint Board
Sanitary Control.”[47] A brochure called “What the Public Want to
Know About Prosanis” described the purpose of the label as “a stamp of public
encouragement and demand for HEALTHFUL, CLEAN, SAFE, FAIR WORKING CONDITIONS
and STANDARDS - a guarantee of PROTECTION AGAINST DISEASE-BREEDING GARMENTS.”[48] Part of the argument made for clean
factories was the understanding that sick workers could infect their garments,
thereby spreading germs and disease to the purchasing public.[49] The Prosanis Label targeted the health
factors of workers for this reason. It
was issued to factories that met the “high standards of safety, sanitation and
working conditions required by the Joint Board of Sanitary Control,” which
conducted its own investigations.[50] Also, the Prosanis campaign adhered to the
moral concerns of women as consumers.
In an article by Henry Moskowitz appearing in “The Woman’s Press,” he
called the Prosanis Label “a device by which every woman can put her conscience
into her pocketbook when she shops.”[51]
The ILGWU had met with NCL leaders in
1905 to encourage the League to discontinue the use of its label except in very
limited capacities. League members
argued that their label did not compete with any union label, but the ILGWU
continued to be dissatisfied with what they considered the NCL’s overstepping
into the territory of organized labor.[52] Florence Kelley recognized the potential for
an ongoing conflict and withdrew the White Label, but this was not the end of
tension between the League and organized labor. Hostilities flared again in the 1920s when the League’s Insignia and
the ILGWU’s Prosanis Label competed for authority in the garment industry. The League’s Insignias were developed in
1923 with the purpose of acknowledging companies that adopted 8-hour workdays
and a minimum wage for women and minors, along with provisions for health and
safety.[53] The Insignia contract also demanded similar
standards to those of the previous White Label: that the manufacturer produce
all goods on premises and the NCL be permitted to inspect the factory and its
records.[54]
The Insignia went into effect despite
serious objections by local NCL officers, such as President Helen G. Rotch of
the Massachusetts Consumers’ League.
She called into question the Insignia’s potential implementation
problems in light of the demise of the NCL’s previous White Label, which she
wrote, “would seem to apply here with equal force.”[55] One of Rotch’s major objections was its
potential effect on League-labor relations.
She wrote “[w]here labor troubles exist the presence of our insignia
would be even more obnoxious than was our [white] label, since Labor would
especially resent the claim of any other organization to set or to guarantee
wages.”[56] Leadership in the ILGWU branded the NCL as
“an organization whose label had been used by employers hostile to organized
labor.”[57]
Workingwomen also found the NCL’s
Insignia to be paternalistic and ineffective in eradicating poor working
conditions. They reported that the NCL
had refused to withdraw its Insignia even after a fire broke out in a
League-sanctioned garment factory caused by unsafe conditions.[58] In a 1926 letter to the Los Angeles Chamber
of Commerce, Florence Kelley described the League’s relation to labeling. She backed off from the assaults of unions
by claiming that the League’s White Label
never guaranteed anything. We set up four standards and said that the
employers listed by us and authorized by us to use our label, so far as we were
able to learn, more nearly than any other employers approached complete
maintenance of these standards in their factories.[59]
Kelley
later gave full NCL and personal endorsement to the ILGWU’s Prosanis
Label. In the same letter she states
that the Prosanis Label was a great step toward regulating the garment
industry.[60] Yet while the Prosanis Label proved more
long-lived than the NCL’s Insignia, it also suffered declining influence in
light of the general mood of the 1920s.
Internal strife within the ILGWU regarding Communist attacks and the
lack of full investigative abilities by the Joint Board led to its demise.[61] By 1929 the Prosanis Label campaign was
completely abandoned.[62]
The history of labeling in these two organizations highlights the differences inherent in these intersecting classes of women both during and after the Progressive Era. The maternalist-driven National Consumers’ League and its use of the White List and White Label exemplify the interest of middle-class women in the working conditions and quality of items produced by their poorer counterparts. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, from its earliest union label campaign, demonstrates the importance of an emerging consumer consciousness among the working class themselves. The label initiatives of both the NCL and ILGWU had similar objectives, namely the improvement of working conditions and the empowering of consumers and thus workers themselves, yet the differing membership constituencies of these two groups created conflicting interests as well. Competition and miscommunication eroded the effectiveness of both League and union labels so that by the end of the 1920s, the women’s garment trade was hardly benefiting from label campaigns. Instead the consumer label movement was becoming increasingly divided by class.
For both working-class and leisure-class
women, prevailing gender norms played an important role in their success as
consumer activists. According to
Glickman, the union label movement “muddied the waters of traditional
working-class rhetoric” regarding gender spheres.[63] The appeal to housewives as ethical
consumers with influence on the success of the union movement empowered the
women, but simultaneously reinforced rather than subverted the traditional
gender roles. The union wife was asked
in yet another way to sacrifice her time and energies to pursue the best route
for her husband, even if it meant inconveniencing herself or spending over her
budget to find union-labeled goods.[64] The centrality of the working-class woman’s
role as consumer was never in question, and was in fact regarded as necessary
to the success of union labels.
However, these women had little leeway within the prevailing gendered
divisions of labor and power, and would at times utilize their limited power as
consumers to assert their independence.
For this reason, argues Frank, working-class women were less likely than
middle-class women to “buy union,” in part because they had to stretch their
budgets and time to do so, and also because they may have been alienated from
their husband’s union activities.[65] Not until the more prosperous 1920s
and labor-sympathetic legislation of the New Deal Era did working-class women
and men enjoy some degree of control over the garment industry, evident in the
Consumers’ Protection Label of the ILGWU and similar campaigns in the 1930s.
Middle-class women, on the other hand,
experienced an authority over consumer and other social policy in the earliest
decades of the nineteenth century that they would for the most part lose with
the changes taking effect in the 1920s.
The Progressive Era had seen significant influence for women in the
public arena ironically defined by gender difference and adherence to gender
roles. Women, viewed as the moral
figures of society, carried their duties into the public realm through what was
known as “social housekeeping.” As the
economic prosperity and enfranchisement of the 1920s challenged gender norms,
women were forced to alter their strategies to better fit the prevailing public
and political culture. The passage of
the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 ushered in a new era of women’s
enfranchisement and potential political empowerment. Elisabeth Perry points out that “because of women’s long
exclusion from the vote and political parties,... women had worked for change
only in a nonpartisan fashion from within their own gender sphere.”[66] Theda Skocpol argues that ironically, as
women were enfranchised, their political influence as maternalist reformers
waned, coupled by backlashes against important social policy.[67] She attributes this diminishing stature to
the changing gender roles of the 1920s and the nature of the political system,
arguing “after the franchise was fully won, politically active women faced the
same choices and obstacles ‘within the system’ as other U.S. citizens.”[68] With the loss of special status as the
harbingers of morality, female reformers were forced to struggle within the
political system against mainstream sexist protocol, which affected their
willingness and ability to impact social policy.
Kathryn Sklar has called the initial
White Label campaign “one of the most extensive expressions of women’s
political activism before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.”[69] Yet suffrage itself undermined such
activism. As Dana Frank states,
regarding the 1920s union label movement in Seattle, “label observance was an
ever-receding pot of gold.... It was
just effective enough to keep trying but never captured the enthusiasm of the
rank and file or roused them to assiduously loyal shopping.”[70] In this increasingly delicate situation, the
label movement of both maternalist and working-class organizations
suffered. The campaigns might have been
more cohesive, and more successful, if class differences had not undermined
women’s gender solidarity as consumers.
The outcome was not imminent; the opportunity for a cross-class movement
existed but was missed. Though labeling
in the women’s clothing industry became popular again in the late 1930s, it was
never a significantly effective tool for improving the working conditions or
the quality of garments.
The dispute between the ILGWU’s label and
the NCL’s campaigns reveals the larger disunity between middle-class desires
and working-class demands. The laboring
class was in many regards hostile to the tactics of the League and other
maternalistic organizations. At the
same time the overarching economic and ideological transformations of the 1920s
debilitated the Progressive-Era methods of the NCL. Despite their ambivalent histories, the label campaigns of the
NCL and the ILGWU provide useful counterpoints for comparing and connecting two
classes of female consumer activists in the garment trades. Both campaigns intended to improve working
conditions in the garment industry, but they revealed faultlines regarding
class tensions and underlying nativism.
Women became the central actors in this struggle through their newfound
roles as consumers, yet class differences remained the central division in the
earliest decades of the twentieth century.
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[1] W. E. J. Kelley, “The Union Label,” The North American Review 165 (July 1887): 30.
[2] Kelley, 30, 33.
[3] Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca and ondon, Cornell University Press, 1997), 110.
[4] Kelley, 33-34.
[5] Kelley, 30.
[6] Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 218.
[7] Allis Rosenberg Wolfe, “Women, Consumerism, and the National Consumers’ League in the Progressive Era, 1900-1923,” Labor History 1976 16(3): 392.
[8] Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Consumers’ White Label Campaign of the National Consumers’ League, 1898-1918,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (German Historical Institute, Washington D.C.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 25.
[9] NCL, “Who We Are” (available from http://www.natlconsumersleague.org/ whoweare.htm).
[10] Sklar, 25.
[11] ILGWU, “Handbook of Trade Union Methods” (ILGWU Educational Department, ILGWU Pamphlets Vol. 1, 1934-1941), 91.
[12] Sources disagree on the exact date. Alexander Saxton cites boycotts of Chinese-made cigars as early as 1859, with the white label emerging shortly thereafter (Saxton, 74). Kathryn Kish Sklar traces the label back to 1869 (Sklar, 22). The San Francisco Labor Clarion, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Allis Rosenberg Wolfe all cite 1874 as the year the union label was adopted (Labor Clarion, 7/4/1902 p. 1 and Glickman, 108 and Wolfe, 288). Dana Frank places the initial union label sometime in the 1870s (Frank, 193).
[13] Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: UC Press, 1971), 74.
[14] Frank, 193-194.
[15] M. A. Tierney, “A Union Label Talk,” San Francisco Labor Clarion (4 July 1902): 1.
[16] Glickman, 108.
[17] Tierney, 1 and Glickman, 109.
[18] Glickman, 109.
[19] Helen Norton and Mark Starr, “The Worker as a Consumer” (ILGWU Educational Department, ILGWU Pamphlets Vol. 2, 1934-1941), 1.
[20] Glickman, 109.
[21] Jack Hardy, The Clothing Workers: A Study of the Condition and Struggles in the Needle Trades (New York: International Publishing Co., 1935), 11.
[22] Louis Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers: A History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (New York: B. W. Huebsch, Inc., 1924), 18.
[23] Levine, 18.
[24] Levine, 19.
[25] Levine, 22.
[26] Wolfe, 382.
[27] Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1992), 317.
[28] Skocpol, 318-319.
[29] Skocpol, 353.
[30] Sklar, 28.
[31] Lillian Symes, Behind the Scenes in Candy Factories (The Consumers’ League of New York, March 1928), available from National Consumers’ League Records 1899-1972: Publications: Candy White List (University of California, Berkeley, microfilm 31197 reel 116), 60.
[32] Wolfe, 379.
[33] Sklar, 22 and Wolfe, 384.
[34] Wolfe, 384.
[35] Sklar, 22.
[36] NCL, “White Label Contract,” (1899?), in National Consumers’ League Records 1899-1972: Consumer Labels and Labeling: Honest Cloth (University of California, Berkeley, microfilm 31197 reel 50, first contract),1.
[37] “White Label Contract,” 5.
[38] Wolfe, 385.
[39] Sklar, 22.
[40] Sklar, 31.
[41] Levine, 108-109.
[42] Levine, 111-113, 121.
[43] Hardy, 26-27.
[44] Elisabeth Israels Perry, “Industrial Reform in New York City: Belle Moskowitz and the Protocol of Peace, 1913-1916” Labor History 1982 23(1): 8-9.
[45] Louis Brandeis, “The Purpose of the Protocol,” in Leon Stein, ed., Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy (The New York Book Co., 1977), 123.
[46] Perry, 9.
[47] Henry Moskowitz, “The Wherefore and Why of the ‘Prosanis’ Label” (1925), in National Consumers League Records 1899-1972: Consumer Labels and Labeling: Honest Cloth (University of California, Berkeley, microfilm 31197 reel 50, one page article).
[48] NCL, “What the Public Want to Know About Prosanis,” in National Consumers League Records 1899-1972: Consumer Labels and Labeling: ‘Prosanis’ Label (University of California, Berkeley, microfilm 31197 reel 50, second brochure), 4.
[49] “What the Public Want to Know About Prosanis,” 3.
[50] “What the Public Want to Know About Prosanis,” 3.
[51] “The Wherefore and Why of the ‘Prosanis’ Label.”
[52] Wolfe, 389.
[53] Robert Szold to Mr. Adler, Memo (1 August 1923), in National Consumers League Records 1899-1972: Consumer Labels and Labeling: Honest Cloth (University of California, Berkeley, microfilm 31197 reels 50-51, memo), and “Insignia Contract,” (1923?), in National Consumers League Records 1899-1972: Consumer Labels and Labeling: Honest Cloth (University of California, Berkeley, microfilm 31197 reel 50, second contract), 3.
[54] “Insignia Contract,” 3.
[55] Helen G. Rotch to Robert Szold, Letter (17 September 1923), in National Consumers League Records 1899-1972: Consumer Labels and Labeling: Honest Cloth (University of California, Berkeley, microfilm 31197 reel 50), 1.
[56] Helen G. Rotch to Robert Szold, Letter (17 September 1923), 2.
[57] Wolfe, 389.
[58] Wolfe, 389.
[59] Florence Kelley to Seward C. Simons, Letter (20 March 1926), in National Consumers League Records 1899-1972: Consumer Labels and Labeling: ‘Prosanis’ Label (University of California, Berkeley, microfilm 31197 reels 50-51), 1.
[60] Florence Kelley to Seward C. Simons, Letter (20 March 1926), 2.
[61] Florence Kelley to Mr. Brooks, Letter (30 October 1925), in National Consumers League Records 1899-1972: Consumer Labels and Labeling: ‘Prosanis’ Label (University of California, Berkeley, microfilm 31197 reels 50-51).
[62] Florence Kelley to Ruth M. Kellogg, Letter (11 September 1929), in National Consumers League Records 1899-1972: Consumer Labels and Labeling: ‘Prosanis’ Label (University of California, Berkeley, microfilm 31197 reels 50-51), 1.
[63] Glickman, 119-121.
[64] Glickman, 119-121.
[65] Frank, 218-220.
[66] Elisabeth Perry, “Why Suffrage for American Women Was Not Enough,” History Today 1993 Sept(43): 37.
[67] Skocpol, 319.
[68] Skocpol, 319.
[69] Sklar, 33-34.
[70] Frank, 243.