Working Women

Stylish Striking Shirtwaist Workers
Working women in fancy dresses
"The Song of the Shirt," a 1908 film, plays clips of a poor young woman garment worker, whose mother is dying, begging for work to raise money for medicine to save her. The film juxtaposes those clips against clips of rich people dancing and drinking at a nice restaurant in fine clothing.
The Shirtwaist Dress is shown in this 1906 magazine clipping. The shirtwaist was a staple of 1910s fashion.

In the early 20th century, more women than ever before worked. As Lois Palken Rudnick says in her essay, American Women Modernists, “In fact, there were more women college students, and more women professors and professionals, as a percentage of the population, in the 1920s than in the 1960s. By 1910, women were 40 percent of college students and 48 percent of artists.”

The 1908 film "The Song of the Shirt," based on the poem of the same name, portrays the bitter difficulty of being a garment worker. This problem has not been resolved to this day. However, while garment workers' work was, and is, undervalued, as demonstrated by their treatment, clothes are highly valuable. During the Great Shirtwaist Strike of 1909, one of the working women's demands was a safe place to keep their hats while they worked. Hats and clothing, they knew, were not merely superficial and shallow. Clothes that people wear impact their lives.

Rudnick, Lois Palken. American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910-1945. Edited by Marian Wardle et al., Brigham Young University Museum of Art in association with Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J, 2005.

Gabin, Nancy, and Nan Enstad. “Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” The American Historical Review 106, no. 4 (October 2001): 1380. https://doi.org/10.2307/2693024.