Clara Lemlich was born March 28, 1886, in the former Russian, now Ukrainian town of Gorodok, to a Jewish family. She immigrated to the United States with her family in 1903, following a pogrom in Kishinev. Lemlich was able to find a job in the garment industry upon her arrival in New York. Conditions there had become even worse since the turn of the century, as the new industrial sewing machine allowed employers to demand twice as much production from their employees, who often had to supply their own machines and carry them to and from work. Lemlich, along with many of her co-workers, rebelled against the long hours, low pay, lack of opportunities for advancement, and humiliating treatment from supervisors. Lemlich became involved in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) and was elected to the executive board of Local 25 of the ILGWU.

Lemlich quickly made a name for herself among her fellow workers, leading several strikes of shirtwaist makers and challenging the mostly male leadership of the union to organize women garment workers. She combined boldness with a good deal of charm (she was known for her fine singing voice) and personal bravery (she returned to the picket line in 1909 after having several ribs broken when gangsters hired by the employers attacked the picketers).

On November 22, 1909, to rally support for the striking shirtwaist workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and Leiserson Company, approximately 20,000 out of the 32,000 workers in the shirtwaist trade walked out in the next two days: the Uprising of the 20,000.

Lemlich took a leading role in bringing workers out, speaking at rallies until she lost her voice. The strike lasted until February 10, 1910, producing union contracts at almost every shop, but not at Triangle Shirtwaist, which became a synonym for "sweatshop" during the following year when on March 25, 1911, nearly 150 garment workers died as a result of a fire that consumed the factory.

Blacklisted from the industry and at odds with the conservative leadership of the ILGWU, Lemlich devoted herself to the campaign for women's suffrage. She founded the Wage Earner’s Suffrage League, a working class alternative to middle class suffrage organizations.

Lemlich married Joe Shavelson in 1913. The couple had three children and for the next thirty years she devoted herself to raising a family and organizing housewives. Jewish housewives in New York had boycotted kosher butchers to protest high prices in the first decade of the twentieth century and the Brooklyn Tenants Union led rent strikes and fought evictions. Lemlich and Kate Gitlow, mother of Benjamin Gitlow, attempted to organize a union of housewives that would address not only consumers' issues, but housing and education as well. The United Council of Working Class Housewives also raised money and organized relief for strikers in Passaic, New Jersey during the bitter 1926 strike.

In 1929, Lemlich launched the United Council of Working-Class Women (UCWW), which eventually had nearly fifty branches in New York City, as well as affiliates in Philadelphia, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit. UCWW led a widespread boycott of butcher shops to protest high meat prices in 1935, using the militant tactics of flying squadrons of picketers that shut down more than 4,000 butcher shops in New York City. The strike became nationwide and the UCWW won support outside the Jewish and African-American communities to which it had been limited in New York.

Lemlich was active in the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs, which raised funds for Magen David Adom, protested nuclear weapons, campaigned for ratification of the United Nations' Convention on Genocide, opposed the War in Vietnam, and forged alliances with Sojourners for Truth, an African-American women's civil rights organization.

Lemlich was also active in Unemployed Councils activities and in founding the Emma Lazarus Council, which supported tenant rights. The Emma Lazarus Council declared in 1931 that no one would be evicted in Brighton Beach for inability to pay rent, then backed that up by rallying supporters to prevent evictions and returning tenants' furniture to their apartments in those cases in which authorities attempted to effect eviction.

Lemlich remained an unwavering member of the Communist Party, denouncing the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs. Her passport was revoked after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1951. She retired from garment work in 1954, then fought a long battle with the ILGWU to obtain a pension. In 1960, she married Abe Goldman, an old labor movement acquaintance. After Goldman's death in 1967, she moved to California to be near her children and in-laws. At age 81, she entered the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles. As a resident, she persuaded the management to join in the United Farm Workers boycotts of grapes and lettuce and helped the orderlies there to organize a labor union. A fighter until the end, CLUW honors Clara Lemlich!

In Lasting Unity,