History of Education, 2013

Vol. 42, No. 4, 509527, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2013.795615

SOURCES AND INTERPRETATIONS

Educating the seamstress: studying and writing the memory of
work
Maria Tamboukou*
University of East London, UK
(Received 4 April 2012; nal version received 5 February 2013)

Bryn Mawr, August 4th, 1922

My dearest Comrade:
This will be the last letter you will receive from Bryn Mawr. Next week this time, I
will be with you again in the dusty city doing my daily work in the shop and spending the evenings with you in the little ofce, planning to organize the non-organized.
Really, dear comrade, when I look back into the past, not very long, oh say only two
months ago, I nd such a change in my thoughts. Let me share with you my new
discoveries.
To begin with I might proudly say that the pulse of the US beats in Bryn Mawr at
this very moment. We have students from each state and of course you will agree with
me that each state has its own way of living, with its joys and sorrows; with its customs, traditions etc that reects on the children of that state they use different
methods, but they all love the work. As an example Ill take a state in the south,
Tennessee. We have quite a few girls from there. Most of them are timid, have very
little knowledge, general knowledge I mean. Most of them are loyal members of
the Y which has sent them here and is supporting them nancially. They know very
little of the outside world, but you just tell them in the South the negro is discriminated against, and you will hear them talk! They are born aristocrats and as such they
cannot stand criticism of their deeds. The Northern group is rather more progressive.
You hear discussions in Unionism, some are even ofcials in their local unions also
members of the A.F. of L. Their minds are open for conviction, more or less some are
real hard boiled, but you could get along with them nicely. Most of these girls do not
take an active part in the movement outside of their union, but they have heard of the
Sacco-Vanzetti case, the famine in Russia, of course through their local unions. The
very extreme groups are the radicals, various opinions, various groupings, various
methods to attain the freedom of mankind but they all work for the cause.
The faculty varies also in groups. Some are more progressive, even revolutionary
(I am referring to a few girls idealists, who went out to picket the shops the other
day; they wanted to be arrested so that it will stir public opinion). Of course since we
have this experience, and are having it in our every-day life, I knew that nothing will
come out of it, but the thought that these girls are idealistic enough to sacrice for the
welfare of others, does approve of their daring act. They use new methods, others use
different methods, but they all love the work, you feel it when you come in close
*Email: [email protected]
2013 Taylor & Francis

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M. Tamboukou

contact with each one of the faculty. They are not here to put things over us, they
simply explain us what we do not know and then we ourselves are discussing the
question if some of us are wrong, the instructor will always call our attention. Of
course we cannot expect that every one gained equal knowledge for this short period.
I believe that this school is a start for those who know nothing, and training school
for those who do know a little and need a thorough review of what they know. I
found out that for these two months I gained a little, imagine I gained with my lazy
head, so imagine that the others gained a great deal more.
I hope you will not fall asleep while reading this uninteresting letter. I was and
remain a prosaic.
With comradely love and greetings to all1

In August 1922 a young woman was writing a letter to her comrade and colleague in a New York garment shop. The sender was Rose Pesotta, writing from
Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she had just completed a summer
school for women workers. Short as it is, the letter brings together a cluster of
themes, ideas and practices that were crucial in the way women garment workers shook and changed the world in the rst half of the twentieth century in the
US and Europe. Taking Pesottas epistolary trace of her educational experience
at Bryn Mawr as my starting point, in this paper I want to look into a rather
grey area in the eld of gender and education: women workers intellectual lives
and their dynamic intervention in the socio-historical and cultural formations of
the twentieth century.

Narratives, assemblages and the memory of work

Although there have been some important studies in the gendered aspects of
workers education,2 my intention in this paper is to excavate womens memory of
work through a genealogical approach to narrative analysis. As I have written elsewhere at length, Foucaults genealogical approach scrutinises micro-practices in the
constitution of the social and the self and critically interrogates truths, discourses
and practices around humans and their world.3 In continuing with my work of writing
1

Letter from Rose Pesotta, dated August 4, 1922, General Correspondence, Rose Pesotta
papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox,
and Tilden Foundations (RPP/NYPL).
2
See Rita Heller, Blue Collars and Blue Stockings: The Bryn Mawr Summer School for
Women Workers, 19211938, in Sisterhood and Solidarity: Workers Education for Women,
19141984, ed. J. Kornbluh and M. Frederickson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1984), 10745; Heller, The Women of Summer, a documentary lm, directed by Susan Baumer, 1985; Heller, The Women of Summer: The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women
Workers, 19211938 (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1986); Karyn L. Hollis, Liberating
Voices: Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004); Kornbluh and Frederickson, Sisterhood and Solidarity;
Hilda Worthington Smith, Women Workers at the Bryn Mawr Summer School (New York:
Afliated Summer Schools for Women Workers in Industry and American Association for
Adult Education, 1929); Smith, Opening Vistas in Workers Education: An Autobiography
(unknown binding, 1978).
3
See Maria Tamboukou, Women, Education and the Self, A Foucauldian Perspective.
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003) and Tamboukou, In the Fold Between Power and Desire:
Women Artists Narratives (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010).

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511

feminist genealogies, I follow Hannah Arendts conceptualisation of narratives as

crucial in making sense of the human condition.
Drawing on the Aristotelian notion of energeia, Arendts thesis is that action as
narration and narration as action are the only things that can partake in the most
specically human aspects of life.4 In acting and speaking together, human
beings expose themselves to each other, reveal the uniqueness of who they are
and through taking the risk of disclosure they connect with others. In this light
narration creates conditions of possibility for uniqueness, plurality and communication to be enacted within the Arendtian conguration of the political. As the only
tangible traces of human existence, stories in Arendts thought evade theoretical
abstractions and contribute to the search for meaning by revealing multiple perspectives, while remaining open and attentive to the unexpected, the unthought-of; they
respect the contingency of action5 and express the unpredictability of the human
condition. In doing so stories ultimately recongure the sphere of politics as an
open plane of horizontal connections, wherein freedom can be reimagined.
In this light women workers narratives constitute the grey dusty documents6
of the genealogical method; they re-enact marginalised voices and subjugated
knowledges from the archives of the memory of work. As the relevant literature in
this eld indicates,7 it is the minutiae and forgotten details of the world of work
that allow glimpses in its past. Women workers narratives textualise the conditions
of their lives and map material and discursive entanglements between workspaces
and personal spaces; they foreground the intimate, intense and often invisible ways
through which women workers live their workspaces, populate them with ideas,
emotions, beliefs and everyday practices, but also imagine them differently.
In looking into women workers auto/biographical8 writings, I follow narrative
lines from Pesottas life by sketching her pen-portrait. As I have written elsewhere,
however, drawing on Arendts ideas about meaning and understanding,9 a portrait
can reveal meaning without dening it.10 What I mean here is that a pen-portrait,
like a painting, can open up a performative scene, a dialogic space wherein the
subject, the researcher and the reader meet, interact and negotiate meaning about
subjects and their world. In this light the portrait becomes a site of mediation and
communication enabling the emergence of multiple meanings and traces of truth.
Moreover the auto/biographical subject of the analysis, Pesotta in the case of this

Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans,. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2001), 41.
5
Olivia Guaraldo, Storylines: Politics, History and Narrative from an Arendtian Perspective
(Jyvskul: Sophi, 2001), 214.
6
Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul
Rabinow, trans. D. Bouchard and S. Simon (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1986), 76100.
7
See Juan Jose Castillo, The Memory of Work and the Future of Industrial Heritage: New
Issues Five Years Later, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social
Research, 12 no. 3 (2011), Art. 3.
8
Liz Stanley rst introduced the slash in auto/biography in 1992, as a grammatical mode of
denoting the porous boundaries between autobiography and biography as sub-genres of life
writing. See Stanley, The Auto/biographical I (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1992).
9
Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998/1958), 324.
10
Tamboukou, In the Fold, 57.

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M. Tamboukou

paper, far from being essentialised, pinned down in a xed subject position, or
encased within the constraints and limitations of her story, becomes a narrative
persona,11 who responds to the theoretical questions and concerns of the researcher
without necessarily validating them with the evidence of experience.12 Still by
following storylines from Pesottas life I explore a crucial question that Adriana
Cavarero has raised in responding to Arendts take on narratives: does the course
of every life allow itself be looked upon in the end like a design that has a
meaning?13
Since I have already referred to women workers and the cultural life of the
working classes, I should also clarify that my take on both gender and class
follows trails of assemblage theories.14 I have written elsewhere at length about this
approach, particularly framing it within the eld of gender and education.15 What I
want to highlight here is that both gender and class are not conceptualised as
reied generalities, but as assemblages of components that form relations of interiority and exteriority within and between them. Moreover, although assemblages are
formed by multifarious and heterogeneous components and their relations, neither
assemblages nor their components are reducible to each other. Components are,
rather, independent of their assemblages and they can stand without them. In this
light, assemblages and their components hold together as a dynamic formation: they
are traversed by lines of ight and are in a continuous process of becoming
other. As crucial notions in Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy, becomings and
lines of ight offer new conceptual ways through which we can theorise
resistance, accommodation and agency.16 As I will further argue, Pesottas autobiographical narratives are saturated and traversed by lines of ight that keep
uprooting her from geographical, social, political and cultural territories; it is therefore charting lines of ight in becoming a woman, an anarchist, a garment worker,
a trade-union activist and a writer that I will now turn.

Rose Pesotta: a pen portrait of an anarchist trade-union leader

Born in a well-off Jewish family in November 1896, Pesotta grew up in Derazhnya,
a small town in the Ukraine. She received a relatively good education, both formal
and informal, and was inculcated in the radical underground democratic circles of
pre-revolutionary Russia, alongside her older sister Esther, who migrated to the US
in 1907. Escaping an arranged marriage, Pesotta followed her in November 1913.
In her autobiography Days of our Lives Pesotta has vividly painted her early
revolutionary activities, which were interestingly very much related to enlightenment and education:
11

Ibid., 179.
Joan Wallace Scott, The Evidence of Experience, Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 77397.
13
A. Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman
(London: Routledge, 2000), 1.
14
See Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social
Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006).
15
Tamboukou, In the Fold.
16
See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988). See also Tamboukou, In the Fold,
for a deployment of these notions in the eld of gender and education.
12

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513

I was fteen then, old enough to have been accepted as a full-edged member of our
secret circle. I had learned and changed a good deal since the days when Esther used
me as a carrier of forbidden leaets wrapped around my middle. Now I was taking an
active part in the propaganda to enlighten the people, reading aloud to the illiterate
and teaching some of them to read and write.17

Pesottas decision to escape to the US was coloured by high hopes of freedom, but
life was not easy for a young migrant woman arriving in New York in the rst
decade of the twentieth century, shortly after the tragedy of the Triangle re.18
Through her sisters letters, Pesotta had already an idea of women workers
struggles in the garment industry:
in December Esther sent news of a different sort. She was taking part in a big
sabastovka, a strike with twenty thousand girls like herself, all shirtwaist makers, in
protest against wage-cuts and unjust working conditions. Father read aloud a recital of
her experiences how she had attended a mass meeting where the girls took things in
their own hands by voting a walkout in the whole shirtwaist industry of New York.19

Pesottas reference to her sisters letter skilfully inserts some crucial moments in
womens labour history in the plot of her autobiographical narrative. Clearly the
epistolary reference of a supposedly ignorant young girl in pre-revolutionary Russia,
directly refers her American readers to a critical event in the history of the labour
movement, the 1909 Shirtwaist Makers Strike in New York, which came to be
known as the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand. Pesotta refers to this strike in
passing, as she is clearly versed in the body of labour literature that had already been
amassed around it and tacitly anticipates that her readers know about it as well. Still,
by referring to it, she adumbrates the historical context within which her own political work is situated. Indeed the Shirtwaist Makers Strike was a crucial turning point
in the history of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Over
the years the commemoration of the strike had become an event that gave women
workers an opportunity to reect upon the history of their union and take heart in
confronting the bleak circumstances of their present. As Edward Casey has aptly put
it, commemorating is an intensied remembering it enables us to honour the past
by carrying it intact into new and lasting forms of alliance and participation.20
Here it is important to highlight Fannia Cohns work in the ILGWU Educational
Department in creating an archive of memories of struggle. Cohn (18851962) was
an inuential gure in the trade union movement in the garment industries in the
United States in the rst half of the twentieth century. Coming from a wealthy
Russian Jewish family, she emigrated to the US in 1904, got actively involved in
trade union struggles and became the rst woman vice-president in the history of
17

Pesotta, Days of Our Lives (Boston: Excelsior Publishers, 1958), 19192.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire, at the heart of Greenwich Village in Manhattan,
New York, is one of the most tragic events in American Labour History: 146 young women
garment workers died on 25 March 1911 while trying to escape the burning building within
which they were locked. This horrible event led to a series of changes in labour legislation
and occupational safety standards but also marked the rise of womens active involvement in
the labour histories of the twentieth century. For a historical account of the event, see
amongst others, L. Stein, The Triangle Fire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962).
19
Pesotta, Days of Our Lives, 169.
20
Edward Casey. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2000), 257.
18

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M. Tamboukou

the ILGWU, between 1916 and 1925. She was instrumental in organising the ILGWUs educational and cultural activities and served as executive secretary of its
Educational Department between 1918 and 1962.21 During the many years of
Cohns tireless work in advancing workers education, the Uprising of the Twenty
Thousand was not only established as an annual commemorating event, but also
became a central theme of the different versions of the ILGWU history that were
written and published either as books or pamphlets.22 Moreover, the force of the
strike inspired a number of labour skits that Cohn herself wrote, directed and
produced as part of the ILGWU cultural activities23 and also became the topic of
historical ction writing, as Malkiels Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker.24 The strike
was nally analysed and theorised in a series of journal articles, course-works and
essays, as well as doctoral and masters dissertations in the growing research literature of the labour movement.25
In thus reading Pesottas auto/biographical narratives, we need to map their
political, historical and cultural context, but we also need to situate the author and
her work in a genealogical line of inuential women organisers, who actively
intervened in the male-dominated trade union politics at the beginning of the
century in the US. Indeed, what is particularly striking about Pesotta is the fact that
she was writing as a highly involved political actor and not as a student or an
academic, as was mostly the case with the existing literature of the time. But what
were the conditions of possibility for Pesotta to emerge as an organic intellectual26
of the labour movement? This is how I take up the thread of Pesottas political
biography again.
On arriving in New York in November 1913, Pesotta found a job as a
seamstress and started learning English in a night school class for foreigners.
21

See Ricki Carole Myers Cohen, Fannia Cohn and the International Ladies Garment
Workers Union (PhD thesis, University of Southern California, 1976).
22
See Fannia M. Cohn, The International Ladies Garment Workers Union: Its History and
Development (21 chapter essay, n.d.). Fannia M. Cohn papers. Manuscripts and Archives
Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. (FCP/NYPL,
Writings, 19201950). For an early published record of the ILGWU History, see Louis
Levine, The Womens Garment Workers Union (New York: Huebsch, 1924), for later versions between 19201950s, see Max D. Danish, The Story of the ILGWU (New York:
ILGWU, 1947); There is also a series of pamphlets on a range of ILGWU Locals. For a
comprehensive bibliography see the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (IRL), http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/ILGWU/bibliography.html.
23
The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand: A Play with Pageant Implications, by Fannia M.
Cohn, 1934, ve scenes, 45 pages (FCP/NYPL, Writings, 19201950).
24
Theresa Serber Malkiel, The Diary Of A Shirtwaist Striker: A Story Of The Shirtwaist
Makers Strike in New York (New York: Co-operative Press, 1910).
25
For early accounts of this literature, see amongst others, Theresa Wolfson, The Woman
Worker and the Trade Unions (PhD dissertation, Brookings Institution, 1926), also
published in the same year by International Publishers in New York; Julia Saparoff Brown,
Factors Affecting Union Strength: A Case Study of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, 19001940 (PhD. diss., Yale University, 1942); Hyman Berman, The Era of the
Protocol: A Chapter in the History of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union,
191016 (PhD. diss., Columbia University, 1956) and J.B.S. Hardman, The Needle-Trades
Unions: A Labor Movement at Fifty, Social Research (Autumn 1960): 32158.
26
I refer here of course to Gramscis distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals.
See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1971).

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515

As recounted in the autobiography of her early years, she was not particularly
impressed by the pedagogic practices of this school:
I made painfully slow progress at night school. Our teacher, of immigrant stock herself, a colorless young woman, obviously disliked her pupils, most of whom were
adults with some education from their former homeland, but who could not readily
adopt her way of pronunciation. I hung on to the end of the rst term. But when
summer vacation came I devised my own method of learning the new language. In
the East Ninety-sixth Street Public Library Harlem branch, I found an excellent Russian section, and began re-reading my favourite authors. And meanwhile I learned
to read the daily press and magazines.27

Pesottas revolutionary spirit was clearly not restricted to challenging educational

practices. She enthusiastically immersed herself in the agonistic spirit of her times
and soon became involved in trade union politics:
On May Day eve we were working in a small dingy dress shop at Wooster and Grand
Streets. The owner and his family toiled all hours of the day, night, and holidays. But
his employees, a half-dozen of us union girls insisted on working only forty-nine
hours a week. We had decided to take part in the big labor parade next day. When
the boss got wind of this, he delivered an ultimatum. Everybody must come to work
tomorrow. Whoever doesnt show up is red. We answered with a shrug of our shoulders. In the morning we met as agreed in front of the shop, and marched in a body.
En route we came to the scene of the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire. As
we halted there, several of our union ofcers spoke briey, in Yiddish, Italian and
English: Here they died, martyrs to greed. But we who live vow that shall never
happen again. Lets dedicate ourselves to the cause of labor.28

Pesotta and the other union girls returned to their shop the following day and
asserted their right to work as union members, while the agonistic politics of her
early days as a dressmaker would decidedly shape the course of her life. As her
friend and comrade Clara Rothberg remembers those early days of activism: Rose
and I would work all day at the sewing machines and then march on the picket
lines from 1:00 a.m. to 5.00 a.m. and then return at 7:00 a.m. to a full day of work
in the shop.29
Pesottas active involvement in two historically important ILGUW locals, Local
25 and Local 22, ultimately paved her way to the union hierarchy: following
Cohns lead, she became the third woman ever elected as vice-president of the
ILGWU and served in this position as the only woman member of the Executive
Board between 1934 and 1942. But as I will discuss later on, the harshness of the
gender politics within the union eventually led her to resign from the leadership
role, although she went on being politically active both in union matters and in
wider political circles till the very end of her life. Indeed her involvement in the
Sacco and Vanzetti case30 and her lifelong correspondence with Emma Goldman
27

Pesotta, Days of Our Lives (Boston: Excelsior Publishers, 1958), 2467.

Ibid., 2501.
29
Cited in Elaine Leeder, The Gentle General, Rose Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 19.
30
Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian anarchists who were convicted of armed robbery and
murder in Massachusetts in 1920. Their trial was highly controversial and the anarchist
movement in the USA formed a defence committee in which Pesotta was an active member.
Despite a series of appeals, however, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927.
28

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M. Tamboukou

are revealing of the political questions and issues that were prevalent in the US
political scene in the rst half of the twentieth century.31
Upon withdrawing from the leadership of the ILGWU in 1942, Pesotta followed
lines of ight from the sexism of her union by throwing herself into writing: her
political autobiography, Bread upon the Waters, was published in 1944, while her
more private recollections of her early years in Russia, Days of Our Lives, appeared
in 1958. Indeed, Pesotta delved into the world of writing and lecturing while also
going on with her work as a dressmaker. As she wrote to her friend Sue Adams on
November 11, 1943:
As for myself I am doing nicely, thank you, working in the shop during the season
and staying at home in slack time. Doing what? You will ask. I am writing a book.
It is almost done, save the last chapters. It is about my activities in the last ten
years. It is written so that it can be understandable to the women whom I organized
and their like, who would never read such books as the Needle Trades by Siedman
which are too technical for them.32

As already noted in Pesottas letter above, the possibility to combine writing and
sewing was enabled by the particular material conditions of garment workers: the seasonal character of their work and particularly the slack periods would allow them to
intervene in the rhythm of their work and life. What is also interesting in the above
epistolary extract is that in writing the book as an intellectual, she was very clear and
strategic about her audience: the book was explicitly addressed to women who were
otherwise tacitly excluded from the usual literature in the eld, although it would also
become part of the academic literature of the time. As Amy Hewes, a Mount Holyoke
economist and Bryn Mawr faculty member, was writing to Pesotta on 15 January
1944, shortly after Bread upon the Waters had been published: Are you enjoying all
the nice things that are being said about your book? My students are reading it with
great pleasure and I am sure it is the means of interpreting unionism to them.33
But apart from her two published autobiographical books, Pesottas papers at
the New York Public Library Archives include numerous forms of political and
creative writing such as essays, novellas, short stories, book reviews, poetry and an
unnished novel, as well as two incomplete autobiographical manuscripts; these
writings go back to the early years of arriving in New York and continue throughout her life. A preoccupation with the importance of education is central in these
writings, which seem to have been inspired by her involvement in The Writing
Table of an Art Workshop between 1930 and 1932; this was a creative writing
group of 10 working women, who met on Thursday evenings at East 37th Street,
under the tutelage and direction of William Mann Fincke, an inuential gure at
the Brookwood Labor College for Workers, an educational institution that was
organically related to the trade union movement in general and the ILGUW in
particular.34 According to Fincke, creative writing means a forceful way of
31

For Pesottas wider political work, see Elaine Leeder, The Gentle General.
Letter from Rose Pesotta, dated November 11, 1943, (RPR/ NYPL/General Correspondence, 1943, April).
33
Letter from Ay Hewes to Rose Pesotta, dated January 15, 1944, (RPR/ NYPL/General Correspondence, 1943, April).
34
For a history of the college, see amongst others, Charles F. Howlett, Brookwood Labor
College and the Struggle for Peace and Social Justice in America (Lewiston, NY: Edwin
Mellen Press, 1993).
32

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517

expressing and developing working-class culture in a way that would have a wider
impact on the formations of culture:
It would seem logical that the experience of industrial workers in writing groups
established throughout the country might have a signicant event upon our national
literature. In the beginning of articulateness among those more close to the borderline of survival and those who participate rsthand in processes productive of lifes
necessities, we have the promise of a vastly greater literary perspective.35

Here again, Cohns close involvement with the founding and development of
Brookwood College as an educational institution of and for the workers has to be
noted.36 Pesottas educational trajectory was clearly inuenced by Cohns vision
and politics around workers education: two years after completing the Bryn Mawr
summer school, she became one of the rst students of Brookwood College, which
she attended between 1924 and 1926, at the very beginning of its educational history. Education, both formal and informal, had therefore been catalytic in Pesottas
life; having herself greatly beneted from the ILGWUs attention to the importance
of workers education, it is no surprise that during the eight years of her leadership
as an ILGWU vice-president, she took great interest in promoting and supporting
workers education, by organising educational and cultural activities and events. In
her view, workers education should be conceived as a multi-level space where
workers could not only develop as assertive trade unionists and responsible citizens,
but also and perhaps more importantly as fully cultivated human subjects:
For toilers of hand and brain, the union is both primary school and university rolled
into one. It is there that they learn how to plan and to assume responsibility. From the
struggles of the organisation there is rmly impressed in them lessons, which they
could never have hoped to learn in any classroom. But the International recognized
that our members could develop into much more effective trade-unionists and citizens,
when to the experience they had gained by day activities of their unions there was
added the benet that could be derived from a serious study and discussion of important social problems under the guidance of a competent instructor. Nor did we ignore
the stimulating effect that the enjoyment of literature, the drama and music would
have on our members intellectual and emotional development, as well as their value
in fostering a sympathetic understanding and sensitive approach to others.37

Pesottas ideas about workers education were clearly framed within Deweys
philosophy of progressive education as enacted by two extraordinary ILGWU
women: Juliet Stuart Poyntz, educational director from 1915 to 1918, and Fannia
Cohn, as already discussed earlier. It has to be noted here, however, that by the
time Pesotta had climbed the hierarchy of the union many things had changed in its
educational vision and practices. As Susan Stone Wong has succinctly put it, the
history of the ILGWUs educational movement could be charted as a downside
curve from soul to strawberries.38 What started in the 1920s as a vision for workers education that would become the soul of the union movement for social change
was ultimately transmuted to a narrow project of labour education as a source of
35

Cited in Hollis, Liberating Voices, 127.

Fannia M. Cohn Papers (FCP/ NYPL/Brookwood Labor College, 19241938).
37
Education, Recreation and Health, unpublished essay in (RPP/NYPL/Writings).
38
Susan Stone Wong, From Soul to Strawberries: The International Ladies Garment
Workers Union and Workers Education, 19141950, in Kornbluh and Frederickson, eds.,
Sisterhood and Solidarity, 3774.
36

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M. Tamboukou

material happiness, aiming to instruct workers to cope with their world instead of
inspiring them to change it. Here, however, although I can see the context of Stone
Wongs pessimistic sketch of the intellectual decline of the ILGWUs vision for workers education, my research with Pesottas and Cohns papers has revealed a much
more complicated cartography of the movement for workers education in the US. I
expand elsewhere on this.39 Here, however, I want to focus on the stormy two-year
period between 1920 and 1922, within which Pesottas 1922 letter from Bryn Mawr
was written.
Microhistories of struggle
The 1920s was the decade when American women gained the right to vote, but this
victory seems to have denigrated rather than strengthened the feminist movement,
since many of the suffragists left the States to go to Europe leaving American
working women especially vulnerable to sexist labor practices.40 The 1920s was
also a low period for the trade union movement: in her unpublished History of
ILGWU Cohn has written in detail about the 19201922 period, which she has
identied as The Employers Offensive, discerning three waves in its deployment.41 During the rst wave, which lasted between October 1920 and February
1921, various manufacturers associations in different parts of the country made
attempts to cut wages and revise the agreement in their favor,42 but in most cases
such attempts were fought back by harsh negotiations and, in some cases, local
strikes as in Boston and New York.
The second wave was launched in April 1921 aiming at a reduction of wages,
reestablishment of the piece-work plan and greater freedom to hire and re.43 This
wave was met with defensive strikes, ending up in a compromise wherein ILGWU
was bound to a promise of better work and high productivity through a Supplementary Agreement, which did not go down well with the garment workers,
although it was ultimately accepted as a necessary defensive measure.44 The second wave ended dramatically in August 1921 with the beginning of the Philadelphia strike, one of the bitterest struggles in the local history of the trade, which
ended with a humiliating defeat after 26 weeks; this defeat, however, was overturned in March 1923, when after only a two-week strike, the Philadelphia dress
and waistmakers won a substantial victory.
The third wave started in October 1921 and was initiated by a conference of the
New York Cloak and Suit Manufacturers Protective Association in Atlantic City,
where employers returned to the demands of the rst wave, including wage-cuts
and the reintroduction of piece-work amongst other reactionary measures. The
response was a massively voted general strike by the cloak makers in November
1921, when 55,000 workers left their shops in New York, while the strike movement spread across a number of US cities, reaching its peak in December 1921,
Tamboukou, The Ideal Materialism of Fannia Cohn, paper presented at the Gender and
Education bi-annual conference, South Bank University, April 2013.
40
Hollis, Liberating Voices, 11.
41
History of ILGWU, unpublished essay, Chapter 11, 8184, (FCP/NYPL/Writings, ca.
19201950).
42
Ibid., 81.
43
Ibid., 81A.
44
Ibid.
39

History of Education

519

with 75,000 womens garment workers on strike, defending previously won labour
rights. This national upheaval ended triumphantly in January 1922 with the employers nally agreeing to re-instate the week-work system and the 41-hour week.45
The January agreement seemed to be a temporary victory, however, as the spring
and summer of 1922 were slack periods in the trade, unemployment rose and economic conditions deteriorated, a decline that was reected in the ILGUWs membership numbers (from 105,000 in 1920 to 93,000 in 1922). But by the fall of
1922, the depression in the garment trade had seen its worst days and signs of
improvement started emerging.
While Cohns History of ILGWU maps the micro-political context of the
19201922 critical period, Pesottas unpublished writings have painted more vivid
pictures of the Employers Offensive in the form of ctional diary writing:
Monday 7 A.M The alarm clock rings. How nice and warm is my bed but I cannot
stay in any longer may fall asleep again I simply must nd a job I dress hurriedly no time for breakfast shall have a coffee down town. On the way I
shall buy a newspaper. Riding in the subway, there is enough time to look over the
Want section. Am pushed out of the subway by a compact mass of humans all in a
hurry either having job, or hurrying to be the early applicants. In the proletarian
Ritz [the Automat cafeteria in the Garment Centre] I meet friends. Many are out of
work usually this is our busy season, but now it seems there will be no busy
season for us we must hurry time is short. Sipping the hot coffee, we select
an ad to answer, to get there in time I hate to stand in line begging for a job.
Tuesday, 7 A.M. I do not wait for the alarm clock to wake me. Am up early to get to
work on time. My friend is waiting at the Ritz, we are happy going to work
not looking for work. In the newly found shop again. The employer seems to be
in a bad humor. He does not even greet us. The workers throw hostile glances towards
our section a bad sign we work till noon. My work nished, I take it over to
the counter; there is nothing more for me no more work! Must again go out to look
for another job. I help my friend to nish her garments and at noon we are in the market among the unemployed again.
Wednesday, 7 A.M. Again the cursed alarm clock, the newspaper Help Wanted section, the Ritz a new job. This time it is a dark and gloomy joint. Everybody seems
to have an idea that hers is the best voice it is a Bedlam. I do not even consider
remaining here shall nish the garment begun in the morning. At noon in the market, shall inquire among friends if anyone has heard of a job.
Thursday, Ditto A.M. Work, Work, Work, I must go to work. Early to rise and late to
bed does not go very well together; I have a blooming headache, but the new job is a
fact I am going to work today. As it was predicted at the Ritz the rush is over
in my newfound factory. Nothing doing for the new worker. Those who have worked
in the shop are getting the preference. My garment nished, about ten oclock in the
morning, I must leave. It is raining, I shall seek shelter at the ofce of the union.
At the ofce someone has a job for me, but he seems to be reluctant, telling me that
it is a tough job. The employer is a lady and everyone seems to hesitate about going
to work for a LADY-BOSS. Personally I am prejudiced against lady magistrates, lady
managers and lady bosses. Somehow all three have given me a dirty deal not to be
forgotten in a long while.
45

Ibid., 83.

520

M. Tamboukou

Friday 7 A.M. Luckily it is the last day of the week. The strain is nerve wrecking!
The day is coming to an end. I am exhausted my work is still being examined. It
is the end. I shall quit now, this very minute. At ve-thirty I tell my LADY
BOSS that we seem not to like each other so I quit. She is glad. So am I. Except
that next week I shall be kept busy running from place to place collecting my earnings
will have no time to look for work.46

Pesottas ctional diary ends with some reections of how by 1923 the ILGWU
had the situation well under control, organizing the industry during the General
Strike, being the rst to introduce the Forty Hour Week into dress manufacturing.47 Her politico-historical ction creates a textual rhythm-analysis of workers
daily experiences in the garment industry and vividly complements Cohns structural analysis of the trends and forces in the garment industry. What is particularly interesting in both Cohns and Pesottas writings is the way they highlight
the incessant waves of highs and lows in the micro-histories of the garment
industry: the ongoing whirl of employers attacks and workers resistance, retreat
and also accommodation strategies. Despite the differences in the genres and
modes of their writings, there are also interesting commonalities: Pesottas reference to women workers awareness of the famine in Russia in her Bryn Mawr
letter is a point that Cohn highlights in concluding the microhistory of the
Employers Offensive:
On November 15, 1921 the cornerstone of a six-story building, the new Home of
the International was laid at 3 West 16th Street, New York City. A few weeks later
the International dispatched a shipload of foodstuff for the victims of a famine in
Soviet Russia. The cost of the gift was borne by members of the I.L.G.W.U., all
of whom donated a half days pay for this purpose.48

Cohns concluding paragraph of the two years of the Employers Offensive is

a manifestation of the writers intention to highlight two positive events at the
end of a rather gloomy period: the foundation of a new home for the union and
an act of solidarity. Bryn Mawr was also founded in June 1921, at the heart of
the second wave of The Employers Offensive: Pesottas enrolment in the summer of 1922 should thus be framed within the ILGWUs counter-strategies,
including the education of its future leaders. The movement for workers education thus emerges as creative and forward-looking in both womens writings: it
transcends material and discursive limitations and creates new conditions of possibility for workers lives.
But one should not be over-celebratory here vis--vis the trade union politics of
the period. Despite its title and women-based rank-and-le constitution, the ILGWU
was unsurprisingly led by men with womens voices and their presence was often
ignored, marginalised, stied and often suppressed.
Soon I will be with you again, Pesotta writes at the beginning of her letter,
working during the day and trying to organize the non-organized in the evening.
Feminist labour historians have used up a lot of ink on looking into the troubled
A Garment Workers Diary, unpublished essay in (RPP/NYPL/Writings), emphases in the
text.
47
Ibid.
48
History of ILGWU, Chapter 11, 84, (FCP/NYPL/Writings).
46

History of Education

521

history of gendered politics within the labour movement in general and garment
trade unionism in particular.49 They have particularly highlighted the huge difculties that women had to grapple with not only in trying to unionise a volatile body
of vulnerable migrant women workers, but also in struggling against the sexism of
their union.
Using the above epistolary phrase organizing the non-organized as the title of
her well-known essay Organizing the Unorganizable, Alice Kessler-Harris has
particularly looked at the experience of three notable ILGWU organisers, namely
Pauline Newman, Fannia Cohn and Rose Pesotta, since taken together their lives
reveal a persistent conict between their experiences as women and their tasks as
union ofcers.50 What is highlighted and carefully documented in Kessler-Harriss
inuential work is the persistency of the conict, rooted in systemic problems and
not in personal whims or idiosyncrasies. As she has succinctly observed, tensions
between women and men in trade unions have been a historical constant, but the
1920s was a particularly interesting period given womens recent enfranchisement
as well as the fact that in the 1920s womens presence in the labour force had been
nally admitted as a given, albeit reluctantly so, by trade unions. As a result,
women were welcome as dues paying members, tolerated as shop-level leaders and
occasionally advanced to become business agents and local and international
ofcers, 51 but they were marginalised within the trade union structures and were
practically excluded from its leadership. Moreover, there were no overall organisational structures or strategies in how to recruit, keep and organise women workers.
This task fell to a few women organisers, like Cohn, Pesotta and Newman, who
very much drew on educational and cultural activities not only to attract women
garment workers to the union, but more importantly to persuade them to stay.
Apart from the intellectual inuence that Cohn had upon Pesottas formation as
a union activist, the two women were in constant correspondence around
educational activities: It is good to receive your messages, because they are full of
life, vigor and motion and that is exactly what we need now in our movement,52
Cohn wrote to Pesotta on 13 April 1934, while sending her material for her
classes, which included manuscripts for study groups and lecture audiences, but
also short theatrical pieces in the spirit of the workers theatre movement, which
was in its heyday in the 1930s in the US.53
In this context, Cohns micro-histories, as well as Pesottas autobiographies,
letters and unpublished writings, leave textual traces of women unionists struggle to
promote women workers education and organise social and cultural activities,
through which the grey and cold union spaces were transformed into warm places,
where women garment workers felt welcomed and protected and were thus
49

See Nancy Green, Ready to Wear, Ready to Work: A Century of Industry Immigrants in
Paris and New York (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), Alice Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), Mari
Jo Buhle, Socialist Women and the Girl Strikers, Chicago 1910, Signs 1, no.4 (1976):
103951 and Nancy Schrom Dye, Feminism or Unionism? The New York Womens Trade
Union League and the Labor Movement, Feminist Studies 3, nos 1/2 (1975): 11125.
50
Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History, 38.
51
Ibid.
52
Letter from Fannia Cohn to Rose Pesotta, dated April 13, 1934 (RPP/NYPL/General Correspondence, 1934, MarchMay).
53
Hollis, Liberating Voices, particularly Chapter 4.

522

M. Tamboukou

encouraged to become union members. Women garment workers were indeed longing for respectability, their desire being beautifully expressed in the words of Hannah Shapiro, a leading gure of the 1910 Chicago Garment Workers Strike: we
had to strike we have to be recognised as people and, really, we struggled; it
wasnt easy.54 It is this desire for women workers being recognised as people that
was at the heart of Cohns educational planning in the 1920s, while attempting to
transform the union from a picture of middle-aged men sitting in smoky taverns
drinking and arguing interminably over the tactics of union organizing to a
community in which [women workers] could learn, meet friends and have fun.55
But what these pioneers of women workers education had not realised at the
time is that in their attempt to recongure the trade union movement in a way that
could become attractive and welcoming to women workers they were inadvertently
introducing gendered ideologies, discourses and values that the male union leaders
were happy to adopt and exploit, but these same leaders were totally reluctant to
allow them to challenge the gendered hierarchies of the union.56 It is not surprising
that Pesotta, like Cohn before her, fell out with the union and was forced to resign
from its leadership.
In the wider political sphere, the 1917 Russian revolution had become an
inspiring force for the left strands of the labour movement but it had also created a
climate of Red Scare terror and anti-immigrant sentiment, as manifested in Emma
Goldmans and Alexander Berkmans deportation in 1920, and culminated in the
execution of Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. As an anarchist migrant
worker herself, Pesotta was very much immersed in the 1920s political turbulence
as well as the erce resistance against the climate of terror and political persecution
of anarchist and socialist labour leaders. As a matter of fact Pesottas involvement
in the Sacco and Vanzetti defence committee started in an ILGWU meeting in
Boston in the autumn of 1922, just after she had completed the Bryn Mawr summer
school. Her letter of August 1922 clearly shows that she was seriously preoccupied
with this case and, as Leeder has noted, she had already researched the case for
her Local 25 executive board.57 Although Pesottas overall political activities go
beyond the scope and limitations of this paper, it is important to situate her Bryn
Mawr letter within a wider socio-political context of xenophobia, racism and labour
movement turbulence.
To the letter: narratives, truth, politics
Having sketched Pesottas pen-portrait within the landscape of her geographies and
times, what I want to do in this section is to return to the letter and by following
its prose to reconsider the analytical themes of this paper as they appear in the plot
of the epistolary story. In doing so I take up Arendts thesis that narratives esh out
53

Hollis, Liberating Voices, particularly Chapter 4.

Rebecca Sive in conversation with Hannah Shapiro Glick, in Sive, Identifying a Lost Leader: Hannah Shapiro and the 1910 Chicago Garment Workers Strike, Signs, Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 3, no. 4 (1978): 93639.
55
Wong, From Soul to Strawberries, 44.
56
For an interesting analysis of sexism in industrial unionism in the 1930s, see Hartman
Sharon Strom, Challenging Womans Place: Feminism, the Left and Industrial Unionism
in the 1930s, Feminist Studies 9, no. 2 (1983): 35986.
57
Leeder, The Gentle General, 43.
54

History of Education

523

theoretical abstractions, reveal meaning without necessarily dening it and open up

political spaces of communication and action. As Arendt has succinctly put it in her
inuential essay Truth and Politics: philosophical truth can become practical and
inspire action without violating the rules of the political realm only when it manages to become manifest in the guise of an example.58 What I have argued
throughout this paper is that Pesottas autobiographical writings constitute such an
exemplary case, a design of a life that has a meaning and it is to her letter that I
now return.
What we rst read in its opening paragraph is that this letter is the last you will
receive from Bryn Mawr. As a fragmented archival document, the letter is a trace
of a correspondence that is now lost, but it is also a sign that writing was crucial
for women workers: it gave them the opportunity to communicate with others,
reect on their experiences and reposition themselves as subjects.59 An intense
spatial awareness was central in these writings, as forcefully expressed in the rst
paragraph of Pesottas letter where the spaces of the college are juxtaposed with
the dusty city and the shop. Indeed a number of photographs as well as a lm in
the existing literature around Bryn Mawr have visually captured the spatial
dimension of women workers educational experiences in the idyllic landscapes of
the campus.60 Summer school students reading in the portico, sitting and discussing
in the cloisters, taking a poetry-reading class on the lawn or having an economics
discussion group under the trees allow visual glimpses of other spaces and other
times in women workers lives, surely different from the cramped urban sweatshops
where they used to work. Women workers expressed their love for Bryn Mawrs
natural surroundings in their autobiographies and poetry.61
Previously in my work I have drawn on Foucaults notion of heterotopia62 to
congure the rst university-afliated womens colleges at Cambridge as
educational heterotopias, different spaces in the margins of mainstream institutions
that disrupted the normality and linearity of traditional spaces and temporalities of
femininity, allowing women to re-imagine their lives and actively intervene in the
formation of the self.63 In this light the Bryn Mawr premises could be seen as
transitional spaces, saturated by power relations and forces of desire and thus
creating conditions of possibility for new subjectivities to emerge. But given the
clearly articulated political aims and vision of the school in terms of actively
nurturing and cultivating the will for social change, the open spaces of the Bryn
Mawr campus can also be seen here as Arendtian public spaces where women
could come together and by revealing their unique existence through words and
deeds they would constitute a body politic and work together for the foundation of
freedom: the political realm rises directly out of acting together, the sharing of
58

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London:
Penguin Books, 2006 [1961]), 243.
59
Hollis, Liberating Voices.
60
Smith, Women Workers, Rita Heller, The Women of Summer, documentary lm, Hollis,
Liberating Voices. There is further a rich collection of photographs at Bryn Mawr at the M.
Carey Thomas Library at Bryn Mawr College.
61
Hollis, Liberating Voices.
62
Foucault, Des Espaces Autres, in Dits et ecrits 19541988, vol. IV, 19801988 (Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 1994), 75262.
63
Tamboukou, Women, Education and the Self.

524

M. Tamboukou

words and deeds action and speech create a space between the participants
which can nd its proper location almost any time and anywhere.64
In this light, the student body was crucial in how the policies of the school
evolved and changed during the two decades of its institutional history. As Hollis
has pointed out, through their participation in administrative and curriculum committees the students succeeded in introducing a number of changes and programme
additions: admission of African-American students in 1926, as well as waitresses
and housekeepers of all races; an extracurricular poetry class; an expanded dramatic
program; a proletarian literature course; and a Marxist instructor.65 Such
additions and changes were often controversial and rigorously debated by the
different sections of the student body. Lillian Herstein, a union labour teacher at
Bryn Mawr, has vividly depicted some hot scenes from the debates around the
admission of black students to the school:
I remember when we had the discussion at the school by the whole student body. One
lovely red head from the South said that she herself had no prejudice, but if [people
in her small town] learned that the school admitted Negroes no other girl from the
community would be sent. The students voted to admit Negroes.66

Equally controversial was the waitresses admission debate, which was challenged
not on racist but on moralistic and sexist grounds, since many of the working girls
felt that waitresses were immoral; they made dates with the men they waited on.67
Here again working-class solidarity prevailed in the persuasive argument of a New
York factory girl: if they are immoral, its because of the conditions under which
they work. If they got wages instead of tips, they wouldnt have to smile at every
man they waited on, they wouldnt be tempted.68 In the logic of the girls
argument, the struggle should not be about keeping waitresses out of the school,
but about changing their working conditions.
What is particularly notable in the above-mentioned debates is that the school created conditions of possibility for political spaces wherein students could express their
opinion, put forward all kinds of propositions whether left or right, progressive
or reactionary, radical or conservative and feel free and fearless to persuade or
be persuaded. As Arendt has noted: being seen and being heard by others derive their
signicance by the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position.69
The Bryn Mawr educational experience was thus crucially important in opening up
political spaces wherein human beings appeared to the world through words and
deeds and found freedom through making new beginnings.
But the Bryn Mawr experience was not just about institutional structures, educational policies and curricular changes: Really, dear comrade, when I look back
I nd such a change in my thoughts, the letter goes on, agging up the intense
experiences of self-transformation that both women workers and faculty members
64

Arendt, The Human Condition, 198.

Hollis, Liberating Voices.
66
Lillian Herstein, Equal is Equal Brothers, in Rocking the Boat: Union Women Voices
19151975, ed. Brigid O Farrell and Joyce L. Kornbluh, 22 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 1033.
67
Ibid.
68
Ibid.
69
Arendt, The Human Condition, 57.
65

History of Education

525

of Bryn Mawr would undergo. Such changes were not just ephemeral but went on
for life as Pesottas pen portrait beautifully demonstrates. Moreover, after leaving
Bryn Mawr, the students felt the need to spread their newly found knowledge and
social awareness and they did it through a variety of channels and means, their
trade unions, workplaces, neighbourhoods and wider communities. What is
expressed in the letter as let me share with you my new discoveries would
become a lifelong endeavour. Here again Pesottas activities in organising the
educational and cultural activities of the locals she was in charge of constitute a
brilliant example of how this sharing worked; but it is only because of and through
her autobiographical writings that we even know about such activities: Pesottas
writings have become mnemonic traces of womens struggles in the history of the
labour movement.
What is also worth remembering is that this sharing of new discoveries was
always coloured by different views, perspectives and disagreements. Such
possibilities for living with difference emerged not just from intellectual discussions,
ideological positions and mental attitudes but perhaps more importantly from the
actual material conditions and spatial conditions of the school: the pulse of the US
beats in Bryn Mawr at this very moment the letter goes on, acknowledging that
each state has its own way of living, with its joys and sorrows.
But how exactly were such critical communities of difference sustained and what
were the socio-political conditions that made them possible? The letter writer
responds to such questions in her nuanced description of the various groups within
the school: the Southern girls are born aristocrats while the Northern group is rather
more progressive. It is obvious that the author sides with the radicals while sympathising with the naivety of the revolutionary faculty members. But although she is
aware of the imbalance of power between the middle-class instructors and the working-class students, she does recognise the effects of Bryn Mawrs non-hierarchical
pedagogy: they are not here to put things over us they simply explain us what we
do not know and then we ourselves are discussing the question and if some of us are
wrong, the instructor will always call our attention, she notes.
What we can also see here are vibrant signs of cross-class encounters and
solidarity that would historically mark the Bryn Mawr experience. In adopting the
British tutorial approach,70 the school opened up spaces for dynamic encounters
between middle-class college undergraduates and working-class summer students.
According to M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawrs founding president, college women
were best suited to become tutors of working-class students, since themselves just
emerging from the wilderness, know best of all women living under fortunate
conditions what it means to be denied access to things of the intellect and spirit.71
As a matter of fact such encounters changed womens lives, beliefs and aspirations
from a variety of angles and in different directions. Factory girls had the experience
of a new world, since just being on the campus was very different in concept to
what we from the factory were even aware of only the rich knew that life,72 while
faculty members had the opportunity to revise their political stances and views: The
70
Bryn Mawr was very much inuenced by the educational philosophy, vision and tutorial
approach of the Workers Educational Association in the UK as well as by other British
models. Heller, Blue Collars and Blue Stockings, 11112.
71
Cited in Smith, Women Workers, 24.
72
Freddy Drake Paine, class of 1934, in Heller, Blue Collars and Blue Stockings, 126.

526

M. Tamboukou

students were wonderful. They were overowing with knowledge of a world I didnt
know but felt I should have because my grandfather was a sherman and my grandmother was a factory worker. The School turned my politics upside down.73
The Bryn Mawr School spanned two critical decades of the interwar period, while
each of its students experienced two months of other spaces and other times during
their working year. The letter thus concludes with a reection on temporal limitations: of course we cannot expect that every one gained equal knowledge for this
short period, Pesotta notes, further acknowledging that the experience should be
seen as a process rather than a nite outcome: this school is a start for those who
know nothing, and training school for those who do know a little and need a thorough review of what they know. The school is mapped here in the in-between spaces
and times of women workers lives and ultimately in the intermezzo of the troubling
history of the twentieth century. But as already noted, it is always in the middle that
crucial events erupt, new beginnings are made and glimpses of freedom emerge.
Such new beginnings in the middle always appear as discontinuous and fragmented events, but because they leave their traces in narratives they are not erased:
their stories create archives of memory and political action through which the future
can be glimpsed as open and radical. As Elizabeth Grosz has poetically suggested:
what history gives us is the possibility of becoming untimely, of placing ourselves
outside the constraints, the limitations and blinkers of the present.74 In writing a
letter in the middle of her experience at Bryn Mawr, Pesotta was actually imagining
a future that the bleak reality of the 1920s could not recognise; she was thus contributing to the making of counter-histories by re-inscribing women workers in the
cultural processes and formations of the twentieth century.
Gendering the archives of the memory of work
In this paper I have looked into grey areas in the archives of the memory of work
by reading auto/biographical narratives of women workers in the garment industry.
Pesottas writings have constituted an exemplar that has illuminated gendered
experiences in the memory of work, while her life story has congured a narrative
assemblage within which multiple and horizontal connections have been made
between archival documents, institutional histories and socio-political discourses
and practices. What I have argued is that a genealogical approach to women
workers autobiographical narratives unveils signicant gaps, silences and omissions
in the cultural histories of the twentieth century, but also problematises and
unsettles the writing of labour histories. Moreover these writings constitute archives
of minor knowledges, counter-memories and radical futurities and open up new
questions and perspectives in socio-historical studies of the memory of work that
need to be further explored and theorised.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank the British Academy (SG112079) and the University of East London for
funding my archival research at the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives
Division. I am grateful to the NYPL Manuscripts and Archives Division for facilitating my
research there and for giving me permission to cite from Rose Pesottas and Fannia Cohns
73

Elizabeth Lyle Huberman, 1936 Faculty, in ibid.

Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press, 2004), 17.
74

History of Education

527

papers. Special thanks to Tal Nadan for all her help and advice and to Elaine Leeder, for
warmly responding to my request for help and advice on Rose Pesottas papers.

Notes on contributor
Maria Tamboukou (BA, MA, PhD) is Professor of Feminist Studies and Co-editor of
Gender and Education. Her research activity develops in the areas of critical feminisms,
auto/biographical narratives and Foucauldian and Deleuzian analytics. Writing feminist
genealogies is the central focus of her work. She is currently working with epistolary
narratives on love and agonistic politics and on a genealogy of the seamstress, a British
Academy funded project looking into auto/biographical narratives of home-based
dressmakers and women working in the garment industry.

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