Silk Stockings and Socialism: Class, Community, and Labor Feminism in Kensington, Philadelphia, 1919-1940

Abstract

Between 1919 and the establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Kensington's American Federation of Hosiery Workers (AFHW) built a remarkable movement for social justice in Philadelphia, that played an important role in the establishment of the CIO, the New Deal, and labor-based feminism. Most historical accounts have portrayed the years following World War I through the early 1930s as a period of reversals and apathy for both the labor and women's movements. Fractured by factionalism, racial and ethnic conflict, and government repression, it would not be until the Great Depression, and within the "culture of unity" of the CIO and New Deal, that this "doldrums" would be overcome enough to spark a revived labor movement and a "labor" feminism that emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s. The roots of the social movements of the 1930s and beyond are, however, longer and much more complex. In several places, working-class men and women continued to advance throughout the period of perceived "doldrums." In fact, the 1920s and early 1930s were a period of organizing, education, and network building that laid the groundwork for the later movements. This dissertation uses the AFHW and Kensington as a lens to examine these developments. A left-wing-Socialist-led union, the hosiery workers developed a subculture of radicalism that drew on the long working-class traditions of the textile unions of the community of Kensington. Representing an industry whose very product, silk full-fashioned hosiery, epitomized the "flapper," the union developed a movement that celebrated--and subverted--the 1920s "New Woman" and the culture of the Jazz Age youth rebellion. Hosiery workers developed a romantic, rights-based movement that promoted class solidarity across differences of age, ethnicity, race, and gender. Over the course of a campaign to organize the industry and rebuild labor, the AFHW developed a heroic movement that utilized pathbreaking female-centered imagery and propelled women and the union onto the national consciousness. Their activities put them in the forefront of a movement for social democracy and led in direct ways to the CIO, the New Deal, and labor feminism.