Holding up More than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948‐92

Citation

Lee Vance, M. (2003), "Holding up More than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948‐92", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 463-466. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810310484208

For many people enamored by the latest clothing fashions, the garment business might evoke images of fancy designer houses named Dior, Klein, or Channel. Visions might also include seeing highly paid “beautiful” but emaciated models wearing outrageously expensive outfits, stomping sulkily down runways, lined on both sides with gawking celebrity customers. Yet, from the perspectives of the unseen “workers”, the garment business has never been considered a glamorous business. For them, visions of “sweat” factories, frightened immigrants hunched over rows of sewing machines in locked factories, crowded and unsanitary living conditions, insufficient salaries, gender and racial discrimination, and classicism more accurately reflect the realities of the working‐class garment workers from the past and, to a lesser degree, the present.

The title of this book is a slight variation to a phrase attributed to the late Chairman Mao Zedong, “women hold up half the sky”. Roger Daniels speculates in his Forward that Bao added the word “more”, to add emphasis to the fact that Chinese female garment workers were exploited in the workplace. The term “more” could also be reasonably associated with the fact that Chinese women in the States historically suffered abuses not only in the workplaces, but also in their homes. However, evidence of domestic abuse of Chinese female garment workers has not been widely discussed or documented until recent years.

Takaki (1993) refers to the first Chinese women in America as “twice a minority”. He states that Chinese women who came to America in the 1800’s invariably arrived to situations that were twice the hardships faced by their male counterparts. Not only did the women have to face the same kind of discrimination that their male counterparts faced in the new world and at work, but the women also had an escalated and unique version of repression based on their gender, that eluded their male counterparts. Bao observes that for many Chinese women, working in the garment business was crucial for family survival. Yet, when jobs began to shrink during post‐Second World War, many men vented their frustrations on their spouses, resulting in cases of family breakup, domestic violence, and wife abuse. According to Foo (2002), Asian American women may be at higher risk of domestic violence than any other group of women.

In Holding up More than Half the Sky, Bao beautifully ties together the stories told to her by 176 Chinese women willing to talk about their garment industry experiences in New York City. Bao spent over a decade collecting and organizing their stories, and traveling the world to meet the interviewees, as some had returned to China or moved elsewhere. She traveled to different parts of China so that she could more accurately trace the cultural and historical experiences of the women, and did extensive research on the American garment labor movement as well as the economic picture. The end result is a unique, well‐written historical and sociological slice of Americana, as told by the Chinese female workers themselves.

Until about 1820, Bao writes that ready‐made clothing for males was considered inferior to custom made clothes made by male tailors, and was referred to as “slop work”. Male tailors refused to make ready‐made clothes, preferring to relegate those types of assignments to women seamstresses. Initially, only women used sewing machines, as the tailors resented the machines as menaces to their craft, and considered them too “labor saving”. Women using the machines were paid less than the men sewing by hand. With the advent of the American Civil War, improvements in the sewing machine by Isaac Singer, increased European immigration, and changing women's fashions, the garment industry began to rapidly grow. By 1855, of the total 12,609 tailors and 9,819 dressmakers and seamstresses in New York state, 12,109 tailors and 6,606 dressmakers and seamstresses were foreign‐born and mostly from Europe. By the late nineteenth century as the economic benefits of ready‐made clothes became evident to businessmen, males ironically claimed sewing machines were too “labor demanding” for women, and took over their operations, as well as the higher profits that came with them.

After the Second World War, the Chinese Exclusion Acts were repealed. As a result of the additional repeals of the War Bride Acts, Displaced Persons and Refugee Relief Acts, a radical shift in the gender ratio of the Chinese community occurred. Before 1940, the ratio of the Chinese male‐to‐female ratio was thought to be three to one across the nation, and there weren't enough total Chinese in the garment business to be noticeable. By the end of the war, Chinese women outnumbered the men, and the Chinese women began entering the garment business in larger numbers. Their stories, told in their own words, are rich with details. The women describe how it was to juggle the needs of their children, family, extended family, and employers. They relate how and why they chose the garment business, and how they were treated by the industry. Even more fascinating and revealing are the graphic stories that the women related about their union experiences, and their leadership development process. For many women, rising to union organizer status and higher was something unimagined. Given the traditional backgrounds that the women were born and raised into, one can only admire what they endured, as they defied superiors to negotiate better salaries, work conditions, and healthcare.

Bao painstakingly details the rise of the garment business unionization process, and their more notable struggles, where gender and race played prominent economical roles. In brief, garment workers began to organize a union to represent themselves by 1825, eventually forming the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). By 1937, the Chinese Ladies Garment Workers Union, ILGWU Local 341 was founded, at the request of a group of Chinese women in Chinatown who had been outraged over their treatment (gender inequity) by the National Dollar Store. Shortly after the factory was unionized, the owners decided to sell to the Golden Gate Company, who refused to accept the union's demands. The result was the longest strike in the history of Chinatown, lasting 105 days, and ending only after the new owners decided to meet most of the demands. It was the first time that the Chinese workers, mostly women, had demonstrated their collective strength. Unfortunately, the owners then turned around and closed the shop, moving the business to a new location where it did not need to comply with any of the demands. Despite the setback, the strike was nevertheless historic, and introduced the strikers to the importance of collective bargaining.

Meanwhile, in New York City, the unionization of Chinese workers was taking a more leisurely spin. There was an estimated 900 Chinese members in the ILGWU in 1959. After 1970, the Chinese membership began to grow rapidly, with over six thousand Chinese members reported in 1974. During the summer of 1982 more than twenty thousand Chinese garment workers, again mostly women, joined two union rallies. Through their efforts, they successfully pressured employers to sign union contracts, and made history by bringing class conflicts to the front. On the downside, union violations became wide spread, and the strike became a marking point for the deterioration of the Chinese garment industry. In 1995 ILGWU merged with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a men's wear and textile union, to form the Union of Needletraders, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE!).

According to Bao, the Chinese women in the shops were encouraged to call each other by paternalistic kinship names such as: elder sister, aunt, granny etc. according to their ages and marital status. Since competition among the women was encouraged, attempts to build friendships and camaraderie were undermined. Yet, in the case of two women, once bitter rivals on the floor, they were able to develop a close friendship when one of the women was undergoing a particularly difficult domestic period. As they exchanged stories, they began to compare their experiences and perceptions, and eventually discovered that the women from China were being treated differently from the other workers.

Another woman resisted injustices all her life, beginning when she was a young girl and upset with her family's rule that boys ate first at meals, and ate the better quality food. Railing against her father at a wedding banquet, she publicly humiliated him, but succeeded in having future meals be equitable for both boys and girls. Later as a floor watchdog, she successfully waged a strike against the owner, after reasoning failed when the owner tried to close the shop during a slack time in order to avoid paying employee wages. The strike ended her relationship with the owner, who was also a cousin. However, she gained a reputation for being a dedicated fighter for workers, and for being someone who put righteousness above family loyalty.

These examples of dawning understanding of unfair practices evolved into a solidarity among the women, resulting in a level of unimagined political activism and militancy. Unlike their male counterparts, solidarity and labor activism for the women was not a result of economic conditions and outrage, but was more the result of a sense of mutual sympathy, shared family values, and/or similar work status. Such activism shatters the images of the stereotypical Asian American female, as portrayed by the well known musical team Rodgers and Hammerstein in their enduring musical The Flower Drum Song. Bow (2001) cites one popular line in the musical, when the leading Asian American female starts to chortle: “When I have a brand new hair‐do, with my eyelashes all in curl, I float as the clouds on air do – I enjoy being a girl!”

In addition to the oral stories, perhaps of equal or greater value to the historian, labor scholar or anyone interested in the Chinese American experience are: the detailed charts and illustrations mapping out the provinces where the workers originated from in China; the demographic maps of New York City describing where the workers lived; the Census charts detailing the numbers of the Chinese population, by borough; the tables identifying the Chinese immigration pattern by year, numbers, gender and region of birth; the vivid photographs of the workers and their environments from past and present; and the highly researched glossary, chapter notes and bibliography.