Join us to watch and discuss the film “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl: Immigrant Women in the Turn of the Century”

This virtual event will premiere on ESFL’s Facebook page and YouTube channel

Immigration is a hot topic today. What can we learn from studying the experiences of immigrants a century ago? What challenges did they face? What resources did they muster to fight for justice and equity?

Immigrant workers faced grueling conditions in the early twentieth-century garment industry. Employees worked long hours at an unrelenting pace for low wages, while employers sometimes tried to intimidate them or cheat them out of their wages. Many garment workers were the teenaged daughters of Jewish and Italian immigrants. Employers took advantage of their diversity to try to keep them divided. These young women also found in their consumption of popular culture, such as movies, amusement parks, and dance halls, ways to build bridges between their communities. As their numbers in the workforce grew and working conditions declined they took matters into their own hands. In 1909, these young women immigrants organized across the boundaries of language and culture to stage the “Uprising of the 20,000,” a massive strike that won union recognition and transformed the role of women in the union movement.

Like last month’s film, “1877: The Grand Army of Starvation,” this film was produced by the American Social History Project. Nan Enstad, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, author of Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Immigrant Women, Popular Culture, and Politics in Turn of the Century America, will join us before the film begins to provide us with additional historical context, and she will be available to respond to comments and questions after the film. Just tune in to ESFL’s Facebook page or YouTube channel.