No Further Patience for Talk

No Further Patience for Talk is the first and definitive biography of Clara Lemlich Shavelson, a godmother of the modern labor movement who spent a lifetime raising immigrant working-class women from invisibility to lasting power. Clara’s radicalism sprang from upheavals on two continents: the rise of revolutionary movements in Russia, her flight from poverty and pogroms, and the tensions between America’s democratic promise and the demeaning treatment of female sweatshop workers. Braving beatings and imprisonment, she sparked the first major women’s strike in American history with a harangue to thousands of teenaged shirtwaist girls in the Great Hall of New York City’s Cooper Union. Clara’s protests for women’s suffrage, rent “strikes” and boycotts of high-priced milk, meat, and bread during the Depression, and unrepentant radicalism at the height of the McCarthy era reveal the shifting possibilities and limits of peaceful democratic change in American politics. In our own day, when democracy appears fragile, the record of Clara Lemlich’s struggles and triumphs stand as proof that people committed to organized action for equality can make history even from the margins of wealth and power.