Speech of the 18-year-old Rose Schneiderman
to a Metropolitan Opera House meeting called to protest the
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911.
FromWe Were There, The Story of Working
Women in America, by Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, Pantheon 1977.
Edited and arranged by Sarah Ryan.
I would be a traitor
to these
poor,
burned
bodies
if I came here to talk good fellowship.
We have tried you good people of the public
and we have found you wanting.
This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the
city.
Every week
I must learn of the
untimely death
of one of my sister workers.
Every year
thousands of us are maimed.
The life of men and women is so cheap
and property is so sacred.
There are so many of us for one job
it matters little
if 143 of us are burned to death.
We have tried you, citizens!
We are trying you now,
and you have a couple of dollars
for the sorrowing mothers
and daughters
and sisters
by way of a charity gift.
But every time the workers come out
in the only way they know
to protest against conditions which are unbearable,
the strong hand of the law is allowed
to press down heavily
upon us.
Public officials have only words
of warning to us --
warning that we must be intensely orderly
and must be intensely peaceable,
and they have the workhouse
just back of all their warnings.
I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here.
Too much blood has been spilled.
I know
from my own experience
it is up to the working people to save themselves.
The only way they can save themselves
is by a strong working-class movement.