Phil was partially to blame for this mania of mine. One night Phil and I were drinking tea in my room. I suddenly began to suspect him of suspecting me of having a crush on him. Meanwhile I suspected him of NOT having a crush on me. Moreover I suspected him of considering me the very principle of materiality that he was at that moment attempting to transcend, and inwardly I accused him of inwardly accusing me of being mired in the realm of the flesh. From that moment forward I felt personally responsible for reversing the whole philosophical strain that saw flesh as the antithesis of intellect, so that, far from blocking transcendence, my ass could become a kind of rocket fuel. It was the time of life when one writes manifestos late at night and fills them with passages in capital letters.

It was an unwieldy task I had set myself. But what is youth if not a time to set for oneself unwieldy tasks? Certainly it was no more than what Clara Lemleich, Pauline Newman, and Rose Shneiderman had attempted, in this same city, a hundred years previous. In the early 1900s, a wave of Jewish immigration of the Russian pale brought to the Lower East Side a group of teenage girls, reared on Marx, hungry for education, and forced into sweatshops, where they would revolutionize the politics of garment manufacture. These women, who some historians call “industrial feminists,” held day jobs in sweatshops while simultaneously organizing the garment workers of the Lower East Side and forging a theory of labor that demanded more than just wages. It demanded the right to art.

As “Industrial feminists” (a name coined in 1915 by Mildred Moore), they were forced to make uncomfortable alliances between an upper class women’s movement and the male-dominated labor movement. But let me tell you why I call them hustler scholars. Clara Lemlich, for example, who made the speech that ignited the garment workers’ 1909 “uprising of the 20,000,” was born in the Ukrainian village of Gorodok in 1886.