The East Side Freedom Library invites you to our monthly Labor History discussion, The Labor Movement: Race, Gender, and Class—The Energy of New Organizing, a conversation with historian Jenny Carson, Associate Professor of History, Toronto Metropolitan University.

Register here to join this event on Zoom.

Dollie Lowther Robinson, New York City, undated, Sam Reiss, ACWA Photographs, Kheel Center.

We are in the midst of an exciting period of organizing and activism in the labor movement, much of it driven by young workers, women, workers of color, and much of it taking place in industries which have not historically been unionized. How might a conversation between the past and the present help us understand these developments?

Jenny Carson, a Toronto-based labor historian, has recently published a book, A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice, which reconstructs and analyzes the experiences of women of color in New York City’s industrial laundries from their self-organization in the 1930s to their incorporation into the institutional labor movement of the 1940s-1960s. Jenny is offering us her article, posted by the Labor and Working Class History Association: “The Laundry Workers’ Uprising: The Fight to Build a Democratic Union in the 20th Century.” The article is available using this link. There is much to learn from exploring how these women organized and from their complex relationships with the existing labor movement.

Jenny Carson is an Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada where she teaches courses in American History, with a particular focus on 20th century American Women’s Labor History. In 2021 she published A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice (University of Illinois Press), the first book-length examination of laundry work and laundry worker organizing in the United States. Her work has also appeared in Labor Studies Journal, Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society, and the Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working Class History. She notes that she is very grateful to be a member of a faculty association.

Free and open to all