Clara Lemlich

Anyway, let me get to this next question here because it follows right from that.

You talk, you know, you talk about the victims of the fire, Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, Clara Lemlich, as very sophisticated political actors and organizers.

And it is so, it was such a beautiful story to read and to hear the power of these young women who were trying to organize and the frustrations they were having were Samuel Gompers and the unions that were refusing to recognize them, so many echoes of things we still hear today.

And you tell this story over many, many pages about this meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House after the fire.

And because the union's national representatives were all men, you can imagine the stage was lined wall to wall with union men who all spoke one after the other in solidarity with the women, but always falling short of calling for a general strike or always short of calling for a vote.

And this went on for hours, until finally this young woman named Clara Lemlich had enough.

She was a worker who had immigrated from what we would now call Ukraine, and she had just survived a vicious beating days earlier on the picket line.

And so as she pushed her way to the stage, people could see all these cuts on her face.