"Bread and Roses" is a political slogan as well as the name of an associated poem and song. It originated in a speech given by American women's suffrage activist Helen Todd; a line in that speech about "bread for all, and roses too" [1] inspired the title of the poem Bread and Roses by James Oppenheim. [2] The poem was first published in The American Magazine in December 1911, with the attribution line "'Bread for all, and Roses, too'—a slogan of the women in the West." [3] The poem has been translated into other languages and has been set to music by at least three composers.
The phrase is commonly associated with the textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, between January and March 1912, now often referred to as the "Bread and Roses strike". The slogan pairing bread and roses, appealing for both fair wages and dignified conditions, found resonance as transcending "the sometimes tedious struggles for marginal economic advances" in the "light of labor struggles as based on striving for dignity and respect", as Robert J. S. Ross wrote in 2013. [4]
The first mention of the phrase and its meaning appears in The American Magazine in September 1911. In an article by Helen Todd, she describes how a group of women from the Chicago Women's Club, after listening to advice from Senator Robert La Follette, decided to initiate an automobile campaign around the state of Illinois for the right of women to vote in June 1910. [5] The women who made up the first automobile campaign were Catherine McCulloch, a lawyer and justice of the peace; Anna Blount, a physician and surgeon; Kate Hughes, a minister; Helen Todd, a state factory inspector; and Jennie Johnson, a singer. Each of the speakers was assigned a subject in which they were an expert. McCulloch gave a record of the votes of the representatives and senators to their home constituents. Blount's subject was taxation without representation as concerns women. Hughes gave her speech on the history of the women's suffrage movement. Johnson opened up the speeches with a set of suffrage songs which was intended to focus and quiet the audience for the subsequent speeches. Helen Todd, as a factory inspector, represented the working women and discussed the need for laws concerning wages, work conditions, and hours. [6] [7] [8]
It is in Todd's speech on the condition of the working women that the phrase is first mentioned. A young hired girl expressed to Todd, who was staying with the hired girl's family overnight during the campaign, what she had liked the most about the speeches the night before: "It was that about the women votin' so's everybody would have bread and flowers too." Todd then goes on to explain how the phrase "Bread for all, and Roses too" expresses the soul of the women's movement and explains the meaning of the phrase in her speech.
Not at once; but woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life's Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.
— Helen Todd, 1910. [1]
Helen Todd became involved in the fall of 1910 with the Chicago garment workers' strike, which was led by the Women's Trade Union League of Chicago. [9] The Women's Trade Union League worked closely with the Chicago Women's Club in organizing the strike, picket lines, speeches, and worker relief activities. Helen Todd and the president of the Women's Trade Union League Margaret Robins made a number of speeches during the strike and manned with the thousands of striking garment workers the picket lines. [10] During the strike, it was later reported that a sign was seen with the slogan "We want bread – and roses, too". [11] [12] [13]
In 1911 Helen Todd went out to California to help lead the suffrage movement in the state and campaign in the state's fall election for proposition 4, which sought women's suffrage. [14] [15] The women's suffrage campaign proved successful, and the right for women to vote passed in the state in November 1911. [16] [17] During the California campaign, the suffragettes carried banners with several slogans; one was "Bread for all, and Roses, too!"—the same phrase that Helen Todd used in her speech the previous summer. [18] [19]
The phrase was subsequently picked up by James Oppenheim and incorporated into his poem 'Bread and Roses', [19] which was published in The American Magazine in December 1911, with the attribution line "'Bread for all, and Roses, too' – a slogan of the women in the West." [20] After the poem’s publication in 1911, the poem was published again in July 1912 in The Survey with the same attribution as in December 1911. It was published again on October 4, 1912, in The Public, a weekly led by Louis F. Post in Chicago, this time with the slogan being attributed to the "Chicago Women Trade Unionists". [21]
The first publication of Oppenheim's poem in book form was in the 1915 labor anthology The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest by Upton Sinclair. This time the poem had the new attribution and rephrased slogan: "In a parade of strikers of Lawrence, Mass., some young girls carried a banner inscribed, 'We want Bread, and Roses too!'". [22] The Lawrence textile strike, which lasted from January to March 1912, united dozens of immigrant communities under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World, and was led to a large extent by women. The Women's Trade Union League of Boston also became partially involved in the strike, and set up a relief station, which provided food.
The Women's Trade Union League of Boston had, however, only limited involvement in the strike, since it was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which did not endorse the strike. This restraint on involvement in the strike caused a number of Boston League members to resign. One critic of the AFL's failure to endorse the strike stated: "To me, many of the people in the AFL seem to be selfish, reactionary and remote from the struggle for bread and liberty of the unskilled workers..." [23] Although popular telling of the strike includes signs being carried by women reading "We want bread, but we want roses, too!", a number of historians are of the opinion that this account is ahistorical. [24] [25] [4] [26]
In May 1912, Merle Bosworth gave a speech in Plymouth, Indiana, on women suffrage in which she repeated the discussion of taxation without representation and the meaning of the phrase "Bread and Roses" that Helen Todd and her companions gave in 1910 during their automobile campaign for the women's suffrage. [27] A month later in June 1912 Rose Schneiderman of the Women's Trade Union League of New York discussed the phrase in a speech she gave in Cleveland in support of the Ohio women's campaign for equal suffrage. [28] In her speech, which was partially published in the Women's Trade Union League journal Life and Labor, she stated:
What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.
— Rose Schneiderman, 1912. [29]
Schneiderman, subsequently, gave a number of speeches in which she repeated her quote about the worker desiring bread and roses. Due to these speeches, Schneiderman's name became intertwined with the phrase bread and roses. A year after the publication of Oppenheim's poem, the Lawrence textile strike, and Schneiderman's speech, the phrase had spread throughout the country. In July 1913, for instance, during a suffrage parade in Maryland, a float with the theme "Bread for all, and roses, too" participated. The float "bore ... a boat with three children, a boy with a basket of bread and two girls with a basket of roses." [30]
The source of Helen Todd's inspiration for the phrase "bread and roses" is unknown. [31] However, there is a quote by the Roman physician and philosopher Galen of Pergamon which closely parallels the sentiment and wording of the phrase. Edward Lane, in the notes of his 1838 translation of One Thousand and One Nights , [32] states that, according to 15th-century writer Shems-ed-Deen Moḥammad en-Nowwájee, Galen said, "He who has two cakes of bread, let him dispose of one of them for some flowers of narcissus; for bread is the food of the body, and the narcissus is the food of the soul." [33] [34] The sentiment that the poor were not only lacking in food for the body, but also flowers for the soul was a theme among reformers of the period. [35] [36] In April 1907, Mary MacArthur of the British Women's Trade Union League visited the Women's Trade Union League of Chicago and gave a speech addressing this theme. [37] Alice Henry of the Chicago League reported that McArthur's message could be summed up by Galen's quote, which she had mentioned more than once, and that although the quote warns against the materialist nature of the industrial situation, it also points in the direction in which the reformers hopes may go. McArthur's version of Galen's quote is:
If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy flowers, for bread is food for the body, but flowers are food for the mind.
Bread and Roses
As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses."
As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men—
For they are women's children and we mother them again.
Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes—
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew—
Yes, it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too.
As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days—
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes—
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.— James Oppenheim, 1911. [20]
The poem "Bread and Roses" has been set to music several times. The earliest version was set to music by Caroline Kohlsaat in 1917. [38] [39] [40] The first performance of Kohlsaat's song was at the River Forest Women's Club where she was the chorus director. [41] [38] Kohlsaat's song eventually drifted to the picket line. By the 1930s, the song was being extensively used by women, while they fed and supported the strikers on the picket line at the manufacturing plants. [42] The song also migrated to the college campus. At some women's colleges, the song became part of their traditional song set. [43] [44]
Since 1932, the song has been sung by graduating seniors at Mount Holyoke College during the Laurel Parade ceremony, part of the college's graduation tradition. [44] It is also one of the central songs at Bryn Mawr College, traditionally sung at the College's "Step-Sings". [45] The use of the song at Bryn Mawr College evolved out of the school's first-of-its-kind summer labor education program. In 1921, the school started the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers; each year, one hundred largely unschooled workers from factories, mills and sweatshops were brought to the school for an eight-week study in humanities and labor solidarity. The program served as a model for others in the labor education movement in the 1920s and 1930s. [43]
The song gained a larger audience after World War II with its publication in January 1952 in Sing Out! . [46] In 1974 the poem was set a second time to music by Mimi Fariña. This version has been recorded by various artists, including Judy Collins, Ani DiFranco, Utah Phillips, and Josh Lucker, and was performed by a slowly-growing crowd of workers in a moving/critical turning point scene in the 2014 movie Pride.
John Denver also set it to music in 1988, using a melody different from the more common Mimi Fariña version.
It was again set to music in Germany by Renate Fresow, using a translation by the Hannoveraner Weiberquartett, but is since most often sung with the German translation by Peter Maiwald. [47] Composer Christian Wolff wrote a piano piece entitled "Bread and Roses" (1976) based on the strike song. [48] In 1989/91, Si Kahn wrote a song the refrain of which starts with the song's title: "They all sang 'Bread and Roses'". [49]
The poem has been translated into Russian by Russian poet Kirill Felixovich Medvedev, set to the original Kohlsaat music, and performed by the Moscow-based political activist punk collective Arkadiy Kots (Аркадий Коц), appearing on their 2016 album Music for the working class. [50]
Mimi Fariña created the Bread and Roses Benefit Agency in 1974. [51]
The logo for the Democratic Socialists of America, formed in 1982, was inspired by the slogan. "Bread & Roses" is also a name of a national caucus within the organization. [52] They have 4 (out of 16) members of the DSA's National Political Committee. [53] [54] [55]
A quarterly journal produced by the UK section of the Industrial Workers of the World ('Wobblies') is called Bread and Roses. [56]
The 2014 film Pride depicts the members of a Welsh mining community singing "Bread and Roses" at a National Union of Mineworkers lodge during the UK miners' strike (1984–1985). [57] [58]
In 2018, the song was used in a video produced by London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign to promote the #HomeToVote movement, which encouraged young Irish people living abroad to return home to vote in the Referendum on the Thirty-sixth Amendment of the Irish Constitution. [59] [60]
In 2022 the TV series Riverdale depicted families of construction workers singing "Bread and Roses" to the workers to lift a spell their boss had put on them to break a strike. [61]
The international socialist feminist organization Pan y Rosas is named after the slogan.
Miriam Schneir included it in her anthology, Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings , labelling it as one of the essential works of feminism. [62]
The Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike, was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek for women, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence. On January 1, 1912, the Massachusetts government enforced a law that cut mill workers' hours in a single work week from 56 hours, to 54 hours. Ten days later, they found out that pay had been reduced along with the cut in hours.
The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), whose members were employed in the women's clothing industry, was once one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first US unions to have a primarily female membership, and a key player in the labor history of the 1920s and 1930s. The union, generally referred to as the "ILGWU" or the "ILG", merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in the 1990s to form the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). UNITE merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) in 2004 to create a new union known as UNITE HERE. The two unions that formed UNITE in 1995 represented 250,000 workers between them, down from the ILGWU's peak membership of 450,000 in 1969.
Rose Schneiderman was a Polish-born American labor organizer and feminist, and one of the most prominent female labor union leaders. As a member of the New York Women's Trade Union League, she drew attention to unsafe workplace conditions, following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, and as a suffragist she helped to pass the New York state referendum of 1917 that gave women the right to vote. Schneiderman was also a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and served on the National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is credited with coining the phrase "Bread and Roses," to indicate a worker's right to something higher than subsistence living.
The Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) (1903–1950) was a U.S. organization of both working class and more well-off women to support the efforts of women to organize labor unions and to eliminate sweatshop conditions. The WTUL played an important role in supporting the massive strikes in the first two decades of the twentieth century that established the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and in campaigning for women's suffrage among men and women workers.
Leonora O’Reilly was an American feminist, suffragist, and trade union organizer. O'Reilly was born in New York state, raised in the Lower East Side of New York City. She was born into a working-class family and left school at the age of eleven to begin working as a seamstress. Leonora O’Reilly’s parents were Irish immigrants escaping the Great Famine; her father, John, was a printer and a grocer and died while Leonora was the age of one, forcing her mother, Winifred Rooney O’Reilly, to work more hours as a garment worker in order to support Leonora and her younger brother.
Joseph James "Smiling Joe" Ettor (1885–1948) was an Italian-American trade union organizer who, in the middle-1910s, was one of the leading public faces of the Industrial Workers of the World. Ettor is best remembered as a defendant in a controversial trial related to a killing in the seminal Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912, in which he was acquitted of charges of having been an accessory.
Arturo M. Giovannitti was an Italian-American union leader, socialist political activist, and poet. He is best remembered as one of the principal organizers of the 1912 Lawrence textile strike and as a defendant in a celebrated trial caused by that event.
James Oppenheim was an American poet, novelist, and editor. A lay analyst and early follower of Carl Jung, Oppenheim was also a founder and editor of The Seven Arts.
Bread and Roses is a 2000 film directed by Ken Loach, starring Pilar Padilla, Adrien Brody and Elpidia Carrillo. The plot deals with the struggle of poorly paid janitorial workers in Los Angeles and their fight for better working conditions and the right to unionize. It is based on the "Justice for Janitors" campaign of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the lead union organizer, Sam Shapiro, is based on SEIU organizer Jono Shaffer.
Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, was an organizer in the early U.S. labor movement. She learned early the importance of unions from poor treatment received at her first job in dressmaking. Making a career in bookbinding, she joined the Ladies Federal Local Union Number 2703 and organized her own group from within, Woman's Bookbinding Union Number 1.
Margaret Dreier Robins was an American labor leader and philanthropist.
Fannia Mary Cohn was a leading figure in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) during the first half of the 20th century. She is remembered as one of the pioneers of the workers' education movement in the United States and as a prolific author on the theme of trade union education.
The Bread and Roses Heritage Festival is an annual, open-air festival in Lawrence, Massachusetts that celebrates labor history, cultural diversity, and social justice. It is a free, day-long event featuring live music and dance, children’s activities, theater and spoken word performances, walking and trolley tours, ethnic food, Lawrence History Live! and information from local organizations involved in social justice issues. The Bread And Roses Heritage Committee produces the event. The festival has occurred every year on Labor Day since its inception in 1986. Bread and Roses is the only broadly multicultural festival in Lawrence, the Immigrant City. The festival's name refers to the "Bread and Roses strike" of 1912, when over 20,000 immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts protested wage cuts for over two months, led by the Industrial Workers of the World. The strike was notable for its short-term success, despite ethnic divisions among the workers and the preponderance of women among the protesters.
The Wage Earner’s Suffrage League was a suffrage organization founded in New York City in 1911 that sought to bridge politics and labor towards the end goal of achieving women’s suffrage and ultimately disbanded in 1912. The Wage Earner’s League is an example of a predominately female led effort to bring working women into the suffrage movement to gain political momentum and influence.
Josephine Casey was a labor organizer and leader, and a women's rights advocate.
The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry (1921–1938) was a residential summer school program that brought approximately 100 young working women—mostly factory workers with minimal education—to the Bryn Mawr College campus, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, each year for eight weeks of liberal arts study. As part of the workers' education movement of the 1920s and 30s, the experimental program was unique in several ways. It was the first program of its kind for women in the United States; it was conceived, directed, and largely taught by women; and it was hosted by a women's college.
Maud O'Farrell Swartz (1879-1937) was an Irish-American labor organizer who worked to improve the lives of women and children. She served as president of the Women's Trade Union League from 1922 to 1926. In 1931 she was appointed secretary of the New York State Department of Labor under Industrial Commissioner Frances Perkins. She was the first woman and the first trade unionist to hold that position.
Helen MacGrgeor Todd was an American suffragist and worker's rights activist. Todd started her career as an educator and later became a factory inspector. She wrote about child laborers in factories and became concerned with working women's lack of voting rights. Todd campaigned for women's suffrage across the United States and was an envoy on the Suffrage Special. After women won the right to vote, she continued to advocate for immigrants, workers and women.
The quote comes via Arabic translation from the book Ḥalbet El-Kumeyt which was written by Shems-ed-deen Moḥammad En-Nowwájee († 1454) who attributes the quote to Galen. See pp. 167 (footnote 195), pp. 283
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)In this work, Galen does not specifically in one place state the quote mentioned by Edward Lane; however, in the first chapter of Natural Faculties he discusses the difference between plants and animals. Plants only have a physical body, while animals have both a physical body and soul. The body is fed by physical nutrients, such as bread, while the soul is fed by the senses. In this treatise, he studies the aspects of the physical body.
In any event, I am virtually certain that the song had been dormant for close on to 30 years until I came across sheet music for it while doing some research at the New York Public Library sometime in 1951. That's where the name Martha Coleman appeared. (This is just a guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if Martha Coleman turned out to be a pseudonym for Caroline Kohlsaat.) There is no evidence to indicate that this was particularly known as a song. The poem was somewhat known but not with a musical setting. The tune itself never caught on which is one reason why others have tried writing a new melody for it. I think if it was being sung prior to its publication in Sing Out! (January 1952), I would have known about it.