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Book Reviews
Constructing the Turn-of-the-Century Sweatshop
| BENDER, DANIEL E. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. x + 272 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, index. $62.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8135-3337-6; $23.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8135-3338-4.
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Sweated Work, Weak Bodies, set in turn-of-the-century New York, takes on a subject that will be familiar to labor historians but invests it with new meaning. As his subtitle indicates, Bender's focus is on language and its ability to shape industrial policy, sexual divisions of labor, union strategies, and perceptions of workers' bodies. Fundamentally, Sweated Work is about definitions and their consequences. Its central contribution is its refusal to embrace the sweatshop as a timeless and self-evident concept. By tracing its changing and contested meanings, Bender shows that "sweatshop" has a history. |
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Journalists, factory inspectors, and politicians coined the term in the 1890s. Drawing on older notions of sweated labor, they defined sweatshops as establishments run by subcontractors, usually located in squalid tenements. Sweatshops enlisted the labor of men, women, and children, violating cherished distinctions between home and workplace. Exposés of sweatshop conditions published in fin de siècle newspapers, magazines, and government reports focused on the garment industry in general and Eastern European Jewish immigrants in particular. Indeed, many observers attributed sweatshops to a uniquely Jewish affinity for filthy surroundings. Sweatshops, as numerous reformers saw it, bred disease and physical degeneracy, thereby threatening both the health of middle-class consumers and civilization itself. Jewish immigrant workers likewise criticized sweatshops as dangerous to their health. Unlike their middle-class counterparts, however, they interpreted workers' feeble, sickly bodies as evidence of the evils of capitalism. |
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Inspectors and reformers, and, eventually, garment workers found the antidote to the sweatshop in its putative opposite, the "modern factory" (78). They conceived of the latter as large, efficient, sanitary, and well lit—and literally manned by healthy male breadwinners who earned family wages. In contrast to sweatshops, modern factories situated themselves at considerable geographical distances from the residential districts of the Lower East Side. Taking the modern factory to its logical—if bizarre—extreme, some philanthropic organizations erected workshops that doubled as sanitariums, allowing tubercular breadwinners to labor while they recovered, a strategy aimed at keeping their wives out of the workforce. |
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After the formation of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in 1900, increasingly powerful union leaders joined with middle-class reformers and factory inspectors (some of whom were Jewish immigrants themselves) in a campaign to eradicate the sweatshop. Like all coalitions, this one had its benefits and costs. It gave the ILGWU power to control the conditions under which its members labored: the Joint Board of Sanitary Control (JBSC) set standards that workers enforced by lodging formal complaints. The JBSC had the power to compel improvements and even close "defective shops" (84). But the much-heralded disappearance of the sweatshop was in part illusory. By restricting the definition of "homework" to the labor Jewish women performed at home for the garment trades, the JBSC overlooked industries like artificial flowermaking, dominated by Italian women who also carried out paid labor in their homes. |
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