Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: labor, women, working-class, Jazz Age, flappers, Great Depression, Kensington, Philadelphia, labor feminism, youth culture, radical politics, 1920s, 1930s, silk stockings, rights-based unionism, textile, labor unions

Recent Publications: Silk Stockings and Socialism: Philadelphia’s Radical Hosiery Workers from the Jazz Age to the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)

The 1920s Jazz Age is remembered for flappers and speakeasies, not for the success of a declining labor movement. A more complex story was unfolding among the young women and men in the hosiery mills of Kensington, the working-class heart of Philadelphia. Their product was silk stockings, the iconic fashion item of the flapper culture then sweeping America and the world. Although the young people, who flooded into this booming industry were avid participants in Jazz Age culture, they also embraced a surprising, rights-based labor movement, headed by the socialist-led American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers (AFFFHW).

These activists ingeniously fused youth culture and radical politics to build a subculture that included dances and parties as well as picket lines and sit-down strikes, while forging a vision for social change that included a radical labor feminism. Documenting AFFFHW members and the Kensington community, this book shows how labor federations like the Congress of Industrial Organizations and government programs like the New Deal did not spring from the heads of union leaders or policy experts but were instead nurtured by grassroots social movements across America.