The Rising of the Women

How working-class socialist women changed the course of American history, with a foreword by labor journalist Sarah Jaffe.

In this landmark study, Meredith Tax charts the actions of women in working-class, feminist, and socialist movements during the first upsurge of the American labor movement. From the pioneering efforts of Chicago women in the 1880s to the unprecedented New York City shirtwaist strike in 1909 to the 1912 “bread and roses” strike of immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and from the Socialist Party to the Industrial Workers of the World, Tax gives us a rich narrative of women workers’ struggles.

Caught between the hostility of male trade unionists, the sexism of male socialist organizers, and the assumptions of middle-class feminists, women workers forged their own demands for economic and political justice. In doing so, Tax argues, a unique form of socialist-feminist class consciousness was created, whose ripples touched the suffrage movement. First published in 1980, The Rising of the Women is a classic of feminist labor history, presented here with a new introduction by the author and a new foreword by Sarah Jaffe.