Good evening, everyone. I am valerie paley. I am director of the center for womens history, and i and so delighted to welcome you to the york the New York Historical society and womens center. We are the first such center within the walls of a major museum in the United States, and its about time. [applause] valerie i will not take too much time away from the panel, but i do want to do a special shout out to our moderator. She is the postdoctoral fellow in womens history in public history here at New York Historical. She is a fantastic scholar, human being, and colleague and i am so glad they are with us at an important moment. I also want to do a special shout out to the womens foundation, four years ago they melon foundation, four years ago they gave us a giant vote of confidence and a lovely grant to get the center up and running. We are here, and we are here to stay. Really happy about that. She went to Columbia University and got their phd there, as did i more than a couple of years ago. But starting in september of 2019 he will be an assistant professor of labor and public history at the university of massachusetts in boston. He is very fortunate. [applause] valerie his first book is under contract with the university of illinois. He is the curator of womens work, womens activism, which is the exhibition right outside this room, which is what is inspiring this conversation this evening. [applause] thank you, good evening. Thank you for being with us on this final friday of womens History Month. It has been a remarkable month, and i want to take a moment to say a bit about what we do and what makes this possible. This month alone we have held our Fourth Annual diana conference on womens history. We have brought in well over 1000 people, which makes me very excited. I want to acknowledge the two people that make this happen. Starting with our special assistant. [applause] she has done all the details and we cannot have done this without her. We want to think valerie paley, who built the center from the ground up. Please give her a hand. [applause] i should say, we will take it a little slower. Every month is womens History Month here at the New York Historical society. Our exhibitions will be on the fourth floor and our gallery. We also work closely with our vacation division. We have an online womens curriculum guide for middle and high school classes. We relied on work from another project. The first ever online work of class of womens history. It is online. [applause] lets get up to date with everything happening, sign up for our email list and get more involved with the center. We hear about events like these and you could check out this literature. We are here to support the womens history corporate counsel. We would like to acknowledge our trustee. It is because of their generous involvement that we can do all that we do. The exhibition we will discuss tonight is inspired by whose commitment to labor history has been used. Our Opening Event for this exhibition, with womens activism, a you can see it on the way out. It tells the story of women workers and organizers and the International Womens garment workers in the 20th century. It is how their work shaped the Labor Movement and the Womens Movement across these years. It is very big topics. Which is why we convened this panel. We are joined tonight by three scholars who will help us examine and understand this in all its complexity. This is the chair of the scholarly Advisory Board for the center for womens history here at the historical society. She is a professor at columbia. Her book was awarded the bancroft prize in 2002, and she has recently republished women have always worked. I have a copy of her very first article in the journal of studies of labor history. Jeanette gayle, im thrilled to have her, an assistant press assistant professor of history focused on africanamerican women in labor history, the black struggle for freedom of the struggle for workers rights, focused on black female migrant dressmakers as they transitioned from homebased production to the Garment Industry in the early to mid 19th century in new york city. Her book tracks the migration of black dressmakers from the south and British West Indies to new york, and examines their role in the black wave of conferences consciousness, the fashioning of a new negroid identity a new negro identity. Margaret chan is an associate professor of psychology at Hunter College and is the daughter of chineseamerican parents. She is an author and is currently finishing a book manuscript on Asian Americans, examining how Asian Americans reach management and the american workplace. She is also working on another project, she is a faculty associate at the cuny Asian American institute. Please join me in welcoming our speakers. Please join me in welcoming our speakers. [applause] you may have noticed cameras in the back. Cspan is filming this filming this event. Our conversation will last about one hour. Please join us for refreshments and conversation afterwards. I have been talking enough already. I will briefly say a few things about the show. This was inspired by a woman who was very involved in the ilg. In new york on monday we honored the anniversary of the triangle shirt waist factory fire that changed the course of the ilg, changed the course of labor legislation, particularly Occupational Health the United States. After years of bad news and declining union density, workers led by women often were walking up their jobs, teachers, flight attendants, speaking out about me too and others. So the questions we try to ask, how these actions shape the Womens Movement more broadly, i hope we can shed some light on that. You might expect a massive show in our gallery, if you know the history of the ilg. There are about 2500 linear feet of ilg records at cornell alone, so for a small shell we have a show we have a big topic. I wanted to start by asking our speakers to tell us who these Women Organizers were, how ethnic and racial backgrounds shaped their organizing, and also constrained it, and how they faced inequalities on the job and beyond. Thank you for that introduction, and thank you to the gallery as always, for the wonderful programming that you do. Let me start by telling a story. It is 1968, and yes, i am that old. [laughter] i had just completed my doctoral dissertation at rutgers on the jewish Labor Movement in new york in the 1890s. I got my first job lined up and suddenly i realize, there is a Womans Movement out there, just beginning, and i dont have a single woman in my dissertation. How could that be . Well, it is the 1890s, of course labor in the 1890s, labor in the 1950s and 1960s, that didnt have anything to do with women, it had to do with men, male workers, at least in my consciousness at that point. But when the Womens Movement exploded and i became immediately active in it, i realized there was no way i could publish a dissertation on the Labor Movement, especially not the jewish Labor Movement, without looking for the women, so i went back to work and i started looking for the labor organizers in the unions my big excuse was that i was in the unions. My big excuse was that i was working on the 1890s, and women joined the ilg in large numbers not until the early 1900s. So i escaped my blame game. But here was an industry, the Garment Industry in new york, which already in the early days, it was probably about 70 of the workers jewish, about 30 italian and a sprinkling of other people. But the industry was dominated by immigrants, and Something Like 85 of the workers in the industry and the operators, the sewingMachine Operators, were female. So how could it be that i had missed all the women . Could it have been that the women were unimportant in the formation of a union . The ilg was founded, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was founded in 1901 formally, and joined the American Federation first, the united hebrew trades, the American Federation of labor shortly thereafter. The early founders were skilled male operators, the cutters in the industry, the fur workers, those were have those who were have said to have brought to the industry the skills to design at cut and make the garments which they had been given. But the labor in the industry, almost all of it, was done by females, sometimes at home and workshops, but much of the time in what were called small contractors shops, and then in early burgeoning factories, which began in the early 1900s with the expansion of the shirtwaist industry. We will talk about what the shirtwaist is in a moment. But the majority of the workers in the industry were not members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. By 1903, 1904, they were agitating to become Union Members, because as Union Members they understood that they would be protected from arbitrary rules of employers. You can imagine those arbitrary rules. They were charged finds for coming in late or docked if a garment was badly sewn. They were sometimes charged for the needles they used, the sellingmachine needles they sewing machine needles they used and for the threads that they used. At the beginning they had to supply their own machines, so they had to go out and rent the machines and bring them to the workplace, and on and on and on. And of course the days were endless, not just six days a week, but six and a half days a week usually, and long hours. So these women really wanted to organize, and the man in the industry resisted it. They didnt want women because women were said to be unskilled. Well, you and i would ask questions about, what did they mean by skilled . They defined scale in terms of skill in terms of the work that men did, and if it was work that women did, it was by definition unskilled, even though we could be a good sewing Machine Operator in a particular task. But women nevertheless pushed, and a special moment that has gone down in history as an uprising of the 30,000, some say 20,000 but i will stick with the 30,000 number, in 1909, the women became particularly agitated by wage cuts in the industry. They were doing piecework and there were cuts on those pieces, and they were angry, angry, angry, that they were being asked to work endless hours of seasonal work, suddenly the work was done and they would have six weeks of no work at all, and sometimes starvation in those six weeks. Generally they lived with families, generally they were singled women single women, daughters of immigrants, maybe even immigrants themselves. And when they lost their jobs, even if it was only six weeks, the whole family suffered. So the women in 1909 went on strike. They did it over the objections of the men. There are famous stories about a meeting that the women called and said, i have had enough of your conversation, to the men who resist striking, i say we should go out on strike, and the famous south, if i betray the oath, if i betray the oath i now make, let this hand i shake shriveled, im paraphrasing there. But you get the picture. [laughter] and thousands of women went on strike. The strike lasted several months. It was not entirely a success. In fact, perhaps one third of the industry decided to accept unionization, and those shops became union shops, and the people that worked in those shops became Union Members, but two thirds did not, and yet it was that strike that convinced men that women were organizable, that they could organize, and that was that strike that raised to the forefront the names of the women that we now recognize as female strike organizers, polly newman, brooke schneiderman, not yet one of my favorite people, she didnt emigrate to the United States until a few years later, but those names of those women have gone down in history as continuously confronting first the men who didnt want them to strike, and then working with the men to create what was one of the most enduring trade unions. Why was this important . Why did it matter that these women joined the union . First of all, the International Ladies Garment Union, without women in it, would have maybe 10 of the membership that it had with women with women in it. With the huge membership, the union has clout and the Union Movement in general became something that, not only employers in the Garment Industry had to respect, but then employers everywhere had to know this, that far from being unorganizeable, women were organizeable, and could create strong unions. So the ilg inspired unitization among females, textile workers, shoe workers, garment workers and male clothing, chicago, for example. But there was a second issue that makes it important. The men had organized a union to get better working conditions and better wages. Women wanted that, too, and there is a famous phrase Rose Schneiderman apocryphally said, we want bread, but we want roses too. Not only do we want better wages and shorter hours, but we want you to provide us with the goodies that come from the heart of the community. Those goodies included night classes, english classes for immigrants, women, sports teams, vacation places that working women could go and have a vacation, dances, musical performances and so on. This idea that the union was a functional institution, we a social institution, we sometimes call it a social union, was a context of women brought into the union. You will hear more about it in the 1930s, but it begins right in the year of that strike. And there is a third thing we need to remember, and that is that the trade Union Movement, which was led by men even after this strike was over, most of the leadership still remained male leadership, nevertheless needed to acknowledge that women were workers and that as workers, they were as economically responsible as the men were for family support, not for the support of wives and children necessarily, but for the support of parents, siblings, their own children, they were Single Parents and so on. And that recognition was never lost after the ilg. Now you understand why i am captivated. Ms. Paley thank you. That was wonderful. They say that history is biographical and in my history, that history is biographical and in my case it is. I am an immigrant, i went to university and started doing history, very much interested in immigration, what women were doing. The story is is that you had these women coming from the south and the great migration and also from the British West Indies, and they worked as domestic servants. That is what they did. And then we came across a book and there was one line that said there were also garment workers. And i was just fascinated because this was a new narrative. So i decided i was going to trace this, and i discovered that certainly in the beginning years of the Garment Industry, there was a sprinkling of black women. I think in 1910 there might have been about 200 maximum, really a drop in the bucket. World war i made a difference, it gave black folks an opportunity to break into industry because of the vacancies that were created, because you had men going to war. But secondly, in the case of the Garment Industry in new york, the cessation of transatlantic shipments, shipping, meant you didnt have the supply, the traditional supply of workers from eastern and southern europe. That was the traditional labor supply for the Garment Industry. Well, there were all of these black women and this was their opportunity, so in the closing years of world war i is when you get black women going into the industry. By 1920, you have 2500 black women in the industry. So now i knew that these women were not just working as domestic servants, they were working in the Garment Industry, they are skilled workers. Many were from the British West Indies, they brought scales with skills withewing them that they learned in school. And im able to give specific numbers from the south less clarity because of the lack of documentation, because it is an internal migration. Nevertheless there is anecdotal evidence that many of these women also brought dressmaking skills with them to new york city. So they go into the Garment Industry, and this is one of the things about the ilgw, which is different than every ot then afl affiliated unions, is that the ilgw was open to black folks. Almost all of the other unions were not. There were a few black women who joined the union by the 19 by 1920. The 1920s is a period where the ilgw is in internal disarray, there is a struggle for control between socialists and communists, and they start to make a real effort to organize black women by 1920 because of their significant numbers. There are 2500. They are interrupted by this internal dissent, the disarray in the union. Then the union comes out of that in 1928. In 1929, the union starts to reach out. They actually employed the first black woman who has a really interesting history, she comes out of the brooklyn ywca, the segregated branch, she says to the brookwood she goes to the brookwood Labor Institute on a scholarship which is funded in part by the naacp, and by now people realize it really is important for black folks to become part of the industrial workforce, and to join interracial unions. The Campaign Starts in september 1929. One month after, you are into the depression era, it is very interesting and alice and i have an interesting take on that. Definitely the depression matters in that i think that the conditions caused by the depression, i dont think that that is what gets them to join the union. But the nra, it is not the National Recovery act that does it either, but i think a response by the unions to the nra says, we have to organize, this protected labor legislation is not all that it is out made to be. And it energizes the union, and by then black women are ready. The foundations, i think, were laid in the early 1930s. The watershed moment is august 16, 1933, when the ilg dressmakers call a strike overnight. Black membership in the union grows from 400 to over 40,000. To over 4,000. That is the moment. And they become very, very active in the union from the moment they go in. And part of this, most of them are in the local that is run by charles zimmerman, and he has a particular take, he is committed to this idea of a social union ism. And he takes it seriously. And black women really embraced it, they are on the executive board of local 22, they are active in all aspects of the union, and my work traces them from the union into the Civil Rights Movement. This is a pathway. The skills they develop in management, in what i call the democratic life of the union, really prepares them as a part of the vanguard of the black Civil Rights Movement in the 1940s. The fair employment practice commission, there is a massive rally at Madison Square gardens when people are organizing in 1946. We never get a permanent fepc, but it is an important step that takes us to 1964. So, all of these steps, writing this history, i said, that didnt work. But i think it is really important that all of these steps, these women are integrally part of the constant way of working for rights, particularly workers rights and civil rights, and they both come together. They are very active in the 1960s for raising funds for the civil rights struggle in the south, and they are there in the 1963 march on washington. That is the story that i tell. I want to say thank you to nick and valerie for having me. From world war ii as when you actually begin to see chinese immigrants going into the Garment Industry. Very early on chinese immigrants are here, and the way they come in to the u. S. , which is structured by Immigration Laws, will tell you exactly how many people were here. Before world war ii, the chinese exclusion, there were very few women here because of chinese exclusion, but there were americanborn men. They were in world war ii and when they came back they had access to the g. I. Bill, and the very few that had access to the g. I. Bill, they said, we cant actually do laundry again, because before they left to go to war a lot of chinese did hand laundry. When they came back, washing machines were invented. So, they looked to their neighbors in chinatown, or the jewish community, who actually had garment shops. And they thought, maybe we can do this . And many of them who had access to the g. I. Bill got money for that, and the chinese world war ii vets were actually allowed to bring war brides to the u. S. So this was the beginning of women in greater numbers coming to the u. S. , and when they came with their husbands, the sex these exgis, and they needed jobs. Some of the very early garment shops. There were very few. Documents show there were maybe a dozen at that point. We dont see huge numbers of chineseowned contracting shops in chinatown until after 1965. 1965 was the next major Immigration Law that allowed chinese emigrants to come in. They came in in huge numbers after that, and by the late 1970s and the 1980s, we begin to see 500 garment shops in chinatown. That is the height. So all those years with immigration, we see women coming in, women needing work, women who couldnt speak english, women who lived in chinatown, and in chinatown, i guess there refuge or their work was in these garment shops. And we see a proliferation of them. One reason why they were allowed to open and were able to open was the massive exodus of blacks and italians and jewish women shops, in the midtown area as well as the downtown area. So you actually see the chinese, some of them, going into the exact same shop locations, but the work has changed. They didnt speak italian anymore, they spoke chinese instead. So when they came to the area to work, how did they become unionized . Ilg was very interesting. They did not know how to organize the Chinese Workers at all, so they organized them by actually organizing the contractors. So these women did not know that they were members of the union, although they loved the union benefits. So when you speak to women, Chinese Women, and you ask them, what was your union benefit like, they actually called the Union Membership, they called it in chinese, my blue cross card. [laughter] so what do you think they valued from the union most . Health insurance. Health insurance. So when they worked in the garment shops they knew they would become a member of the union and actually get health benefits. Health benefits. So that is how they became accustomed to the union. Not until way later in the 1980s, there was this massive strike of 20,000 Chinese Workers in 1982, and the summer, they walked out of there shops and they demanded to stay and remain in the union. By the mid1980s there was huge global competition, so it was harder to maintain their wages, and a lot of the contractors said that we dont really need the union, we can keep these women working for us because they are basically captives here, they dont really know english, they cant really find another job, that is how the contractors saw us, but the women didnt want to put up with that, they wanted the union, not only for the Health Insurance but also for the dental insurance, also for the pension they could get, the sick leave, and also for the Immigration Project that actually taught them english so they could become u. S. Citizens. They also wanted it for their pay stubs. Why would they want pay stubs . Because a lot of them would become u. S. Citizens, and they would use those pay stubs to file income taxes to actually learn about getting credit to show their income taxes to immigration authorities so they could bring their family members over. That changed their power within their households, the women actually had much more power. They also had access to banking, knowing the credit system, knowing the mortgage system. So many of these early garment workers ended up buying homes outside chinatown in queens and brooklyn and other places, and that is the beginning of the spirit so in the 1980s and yawned after the strike, we begin to see Chinese Women become representatives in the union, the union actually hired them. Although i have to say they didnt move that far up, but at least the Garment Union was beginning to recognize the value of Chinese Workers in the union. And through the 1990s we see the competition increase, globalization increase, the decrease of workers, the increase of undocumented workers come in by the 1990s, competing with chinese unionized workers, so there was this friction. But the unions decide, not only are they social, but they decide to have a workers project, and immigrant workers project where they would actually organize the undocumented to teach them that everybody should have a workers wage that is responsible, and everybody should support each other, we would have that end it wouldnt be cutthroat against the Union Workers on the nonUnion Workers who werent documented. And over time, we actually begin to see a decline, and the major decline in the Garment Industry was in 2001, especially in chinatown. In 2001 after september 11, the world center the World Trade Center was only 10 blocks from chinatown, so 10 blocks away from chinatown meant that when the World Trade Center buildings fell, chinatown was impacted tremendously. There were blockades on 14th street and down to canal street, which meant that trucks that had fabric could not go into chinatown to deliver, and trucks couldnt go in to take out the garments that were sewed, and all of that was shut down. There was no telephone service, no work could be done. But by 2000 there was incredibly sophisticated Computer Technology were people could just send their designs overseas, and a lot of these shops took over. As of today there are very few garment shops left in chinatown, very few left in midtown, and the largest devastation was after 9 11. I can talk more later. [laughter] we will end there. Thank you all so much. [applause] preaching to the choir since 20 came to the event, but this illustrated to me so much, we always say womens history is American History, and this history is essential to understanding not just garment work, but wars, the depression, the Civil Rights Movement, the human rights movement. So much takes shape after learning what we have from these scholars. Ofant to pose a couple questions, all of your pic was in interesting since we dont have a ton of time. We tell the stories often. We want to tell stories simply about the Labor Movement, of knowsses, but we also there are these tensions, and they happen at many scales. The fact that this is womens work, how does that change home . Ed dynamics in the we also have interesting new unions, how the Union Response to black workers, to Chinese Workers, and then we have these challenges in the wider world, how the labor union faces increasing challenges in each generation from efforts to move shops overseas, efforts to break the union in a variety of ways. Each of you answering each of these would rapidly put us over time, but i thought i would pose those questions and allow anyone. O pick up on it maybe i should begin by years,even in the early there are multiple players of , and maybe if i can sort of outline some of them, you can see how they continue, some diminishing, some continue. The first level of tension, i think, comes from the ways in which the industry is organized. The industry is and we talked contracting shops. Heres how the industry is organized some small, usually male, person decides [applause] [laughter] sorry about that. Thats correct. Thats correct. [laughter] this male not last very long, but it is a wonderful example of how the union and contractors can actually join with each other to benefit the workers and the system, so thats one kind of tension. The second kind of tension the men dont want the women to organize. They do not think they can organize. Where do they get help organizing . From other women. From middleclass women, and those women organized in the Women Trade Union league supply the money and resources and organizational knowhow to help , with nonent women of these knowledge bases to organize. It produces even greater tension between the women and the union because the women are getting benefits from the middleclass women who they dont particularly care about the union. They care about organizing these poor women, but it also produces tensions among the women, some present. Egin to one of the most famous of them there are interesting stories. She happens to be gay. She lived her life with other women. Shes an organizer. She cannot tolerate middleclass women who have this sort of, you know, american ideal of Family Structure and so on, which is antithetical to everything she wants. She wants to treat the workers as workers and to organize them, so there is a threelater theion that emerges when women are outside the union, when they are inside the union, who they go to for help, how the union deals with who they go to for help and so on, and then there is a third layer of tension. Dismiss that. The ilg is a jewish union. A lot of the meetings are held in a yearish, which is the language of the working folks, but there are lots of italians in the industry, and they are working in their own shops. Factoryslowly, as this system develops, they move into the factories, but the Italian Women feel completely excluded from the Union Movement because they dont understand whats going on, and until 1920, the ilg pretty much paid no attention to them, and then it begins to publish an italian newspaper and tries to involve them. The result is that Italian Women strikeike makers breakers. Why should they support a strike that they dont know what it is them. It does not involve that tension is reflected as the industry begins as early as 1912, 1913 to move south and move into the coal mining where glove factories and so on are started. Those women, the anglosaxon women, are englishspeaking and are also uncomfortable with this jewish union. Put all those players of tension together and you dont have anything that looks like a unified process, what you have is an International Ladies Garment Workers Union which is run, lead, and largely occupied in the early years by jewish immigrant people. Its just so complicated. The fourth player is the , whichst background emerges as an even greater tension in the 1920s and 1930s, but im going to leave that. [laughter] im not even going to go into that, except to say that the 1920s becomes this period where ofres so much internal sort tension between socialists and communists for who is going to control this union, but i want to take the tension and tell the make that im trying to into an article, so one of the black women that goes into the union in 1931, she is one of the who joinsack women the union. She is gung ho from the beginning. You see her in the harlem meetings, and shes speaking up, and shes a true believer. To go andhe is chosen organize black workers in chicago. His is all underground work they are serious people. She enlisted. She leaves her job. She leaves new york. She goes to chicago. She relocates. Doingends months sometimes real underground work to talk to these black women because they are scared of shes their jobs, and finally getting somewhere, and im not quite sure how many months she spends, but it seems nine months. Six to and then all of a sudden, she is just kind of plucked out of chicago and brought back to new york. Put in herle is place just as she said im just about to bring all of these things to some sort of productivity. She writes this letter to zimmerman and says i feel like i as a cattle call. It is just such an amazing phrase. She takes her name off of the aion, and this is a run woman who was on the executive committee, executive board of local 22, and she just kind of disappears after that. Anywhere afterer that, but she also says to zimmerman, be very careful how you are treating black permit workers because you will soon find another situation on your hands, and shes talking about the communists because the communists are constantly trying to work for and trying to get these workers they are particularly interested in black workers, so she kind of almost threatens zimmerman. It is an interesting anecdote that i think when you start peeling back the layered exposes raceons along the lines of but also gender. Contribute i have to to show you sort of what is going on, right . I will tell you a little bit about the women and the men and also at home, the tensions. It is tied to the union because of how much more the women get. The men and women who work in chinatown, the chinese immigrants the majority theres two basic industries in chinatown from the 1960s through the 2000s, so its restaurant work and garment work. Thats where the majority of the chinese immigrants work. Restaurant work for the men and its mostly men in restaurant work, mostly women in garment are not unionized at all. They get cash payments. The men are mostly just getting enough for wages. They dont get any benefits at all, but what it means is when the women work and get benefits, the women are actually bringing maybe not bringing more in wages at home but bringing more in terms of benefits, so the men actually feel this tension. However, the men also appreciate what the women do. What the women do especially in Getting Health Care for their kids. It is expensive to take kids to the doctor. It is expensive to do everything, but women because they are able to get all this from the union, sometimes get pushed back from the men. There are cases where i spoke to some of the women. They remember early on and even current times in the late 1990s, where there would be domestic violence, where men demanded their wages, and then all of the rest of the stuff is, you know, good, but you have to remain in your place. There are also cases where women were able to get much more power in the household because of the union. Because everything was documented, the men and women chose in their families which would be the next to immigrate to the u. S. , and once that , their relatives, even if it was the mens relatives, gave a lot of high regard, is what the men would say, or the women, to their wives, so the wives were elevated in a certain way that the men were not looked at. Those tensions are there the whole time. Whole time. And its because the union was able to provide all these extra things for the women. Just to elaborate on that a little bit, one of the big chineseces is that your women are mostly married with families. Itsn who attended not universally true, but the women who work in the Garment Industry in the early 1900s are young and unmarried for the most part, and the assumption was that you would quit work when you i mean, you would quit working for somebody else. You might continue to work for your spouse or partner, but you would not be working outside the home if you could avoid it. There were lots of people who could not avoid it. They were widows or they died and so on, but the vast majority were unmarried women, and their paychecks went to their mothers or their fathers. In other words, they did not, most of them, keep anything, unlike male workers, sons, who went out to work. The women turned their pay back over to their families, and they would sometimes give them a little spending money or transportation money or whatever. Far from resentment, the women were essential to the running of the household. Their income was an important piece of income. Aboutstion is africanamerican women. Where they married . I cannot remember the exact percentages, but its a mix. As far as wages are concerned, wages of black women have always been essential to the health of the economy because black men either work unemployed, underemployed, or worked at such lowpaying jobs that the wages of women were essential to the household and became even more essential to the survival of the household during the depression, right . One of the things i argue is that in the early years, female garment workers who are still employed in the Garment Industry, they are afraid to join unions in the early years because they fear that if they join the union, they will lose their jobs, and that is the end of the household. Where ai have cases woman loses her job, and the man is not working because the mployed amount unemployment among africanamerican men is so much, Something Like 10 or 15 points higher than white male , and families break up. They just have to break up because the womans earnings is what is holding stuff together. As far as a single women are concerned, im not sure the extent to which these young, single women are turning over there pay. I dont think it is the i dont think it is true to the extent you had in jewish households or catholic , the wages but, yeah are essential of these women who are working in town. I have a dozen more questions [laughter] but we are, in fact, out of time. Please join me in thanking our speakers. [applause] please grab a brochure, enjoy some refreshments, enjoy the weekend. [indiscernible chatter] you are watching American History tv all weekend every weekend on cspan3. John f. Kennedy was the first and remained the only catholic to be elected president of the United States. During the 1960 campaign, many protestant groups publicly opposed senator kennedy, fearing the influence of the pope and the Catholic Church on his presidency. America, reel democratic nominee john f. Kennedy on the topic of church and state, religious freedom, and tolerance. He spoke to a meeting of houston ministers. Paid for by the Kennedy Johnson texas campaign. The broadcast includes an excessive questionandanswer session, and parts of the film were later used as campaign ads. From houstons rice hotel, senator john kennedy is about to address a special meeting of the greater houston ministerial