Clara Lemlich Shavelson Photographs

Clara Lemlich Shavelson (1886-1982) forced union leaders to acknowledge the importance of female workers in the labor force, and she organized important demonstrations for worker's rights and cost-of-living issues.

Shavelson worked for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union organizing women in 1905, arguing that without women workers, any strike was doomed to failure. She forced her way into speaking at the 1909 strike meeting at Cooper Union. Her fiery speech set off the 'Uprising of the 20,000', the largest strike by women workers to that time.

Shavelson was blacklisted from factory work for a time. But, returned in 1917 to fight cost-of-living issues during the kosher meat boycott. And again in 1919 during the rent strike movement when a housing shortage raised rents. By 1929 she was helping found what became the Progressive Women's Council, which combat depredations of the Great Depression by running a meat boycott that shut down 4,500 butcher shops in New York.

Shavelson continued her activism intor her final years, organizing the orderlies at her nursing home.