The Lawrence Textile Strike was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World. Prompted by one mill owner's decision to lower wages when a new law shortening the workweek went into effect in January, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers at nearly every mill within a week. The strike, which lasted more than two months and which defied the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized, was successful; within a year, however, the union had largely collapsed and most of the gains achieved by the workers were lost.
The Lawrence strike is often referred to as the "Bread and Roses" strike, or, "The Strike for Three Loaves". The first known source to do so was a 1916 labor anthology, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest by Upton Sinclair. Prior to that, the slogan, used as the title of a 1911 poem by James Oppenheim, had been attributed to "Chicago Women Trade Unionists". It has also been attributed to socialist union organizer Rose Schneiderman.
The labor slogan No Gods, No Masters originated with the strike.
Famous quotes containing the words lawrence, textile and/or strike:
“Before Lawrence, I had known a good deal about labor, but I had not felt about it. I had not got angry. In Lawrence I got angry. I wanted to do something about it.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)
“The textile and needlework arts of the world, primarily because they have been the work of women have been especially written out of art history. It is a male idea that to be “high” and “fine” both women and art should be beautiful, but not useful or functional.”
—Patricia Mainardi (b. 1942)
“Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly
different from myself,
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)