I feel so honored and happy to introduce Jessamyn Hatcher as a new contributor to this blog (soon we will add a face to the name). Jessamyn has been a source of inspiration for me as I continue to learn how to frame the work that is so easy for me to DO, but so difficult for me to EXPLAIN in words. My conversations with Jessamyn have taken place across several states, drinks, emails, and phone calls. I am so excited to expand upon those in-depth conversations here with you—beginning today. Please show a big, hearty, and embracing welcome to Jessamyn—our newest contributor and a part of the growing heart and soul of Alabama Chanin.

BETTER JOYS

My name is Jessamyn Hatcher. I met Natalie in the fall of 2010, through our mutual friend Sally Singer, when I was preparing to teach a yearlong course at New York University on the history of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. One hundred years ago, 70% of the nation’s women’s clothing and 40% of men’s was produced in New York City, mostly in the factories and sweatshops that stretched from the Lower East Side of Manhattan up to Washington Square Park. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, located on the 8th and 9th floors of a building right off of Washington Square, was one of the biggest shops. Very young people—mostly between the ages of 14 and 21, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants, mostly women and girls—manufactured a kind of women’s blouse there called a shirtwaist.

On March 25, 1911, 146 workers died in a fire while making the blouses. It was the biggest workplace disaster in New York City before September 11, 2001. As the archivists at Cornell’s Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives write:

The Triangle Fire tragically illustrated that fire inspections and precautions were woefully inadequate at the time. Workers recounted their helpless efforts to open the ninth floor doors to the Washington Place stairs. They and many others afterwards believed they were deliberately locked—owners had frequently locked the exit doors in the past, claiming that workers stole materials.

The tragedy was compounded by the fact that in 1909, workers had attempted to improve these working conditions. A spontaneous walkout by 400 shirtwaistmakers at the Triangle Factory, protesting conditions and advocating for a living wage, launched the “Uprising of the 20,000,” the largest strike by women to date in U.S. history.

The building where Triangle was housed is now one of the main classroom buildings at NYU; for members of NYU community, the history of Triangle is local history. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is also critically important for U.S. history: it spurred important changes to the nation’s laws, particularly those protecting the rights of workers and the safety of buildings, and it galvanized the country’s labor movement.

For the course I was teaching, I was given an unusual opportunity: as part of an honor’s program, the university would pay for the members of the seminar to take a trip, and we could travel anywhere in the world. My colleagues—and probably most of the students—assumed we’d visit either a fashion capitol (Paris came up a lot), or one of the many places in the world where the conditions that prevailed at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory are the status quo today.