But the women’s demands went even further: as Rose Schneiderman articulated the demands of industrial feminism, “What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art…The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”

Clara Lemlich became an icon in 1909, when a walk-out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory turned into an industry-wide strike in which 20,000 garment workers walked off the job. Over the course of the strike, Lemlich had six ribs broken by policemen and company guards, and was arrested 17 times. When the strike ended in Febuary 1910, union contracts had been signed at nearly every shop, although not at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Two years later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burst into flames.

On a June afternoon ten years after I walked these streets with Phil and one hundred and four years after the fire, I am strolling through the streets of Greenwich Village, towards the site of the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. I stop at the Brown Building, where the factory used to occupy the seventh floor. The building is now owned by NYU, and I see chemists in lab coats and plastic goggles moving around in a fluorescent room.

A plaque on the side of the building commemorates it thus:

Triangle Fire

“On this site, 146 lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire on March 25, 1911. Out of their martyrdom came new concepts of social responsibility and labor legislation that have helped make American working conditions the finest in the world.”

International Ladies Garment Workers Union