H S T Y   3 0 7 9   W E B   R E V I E W

a m e r i c a n   h i s t o r y   o n   t h e   w o r l d   w i d e   w e b

 
I N T R O D U C T I O N

This review examines websites specifically about or related to women's working conditions in American factories and sweatshops during the early twentieth century, with particular reference to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. In the course of my research, I found a broad range of sites pertaining to the subject area, including a variety of primary sources, secondary sources, academic, and popular histories. However, almost all these sites had similar approachs and assumptions about the organisation of historical information, and very few explored the possibilities presented by the hypertextual medium in particularly interesting or innovative ways.

For the purposes of this review I chose to discount most bibliographic and links-only sites, and sites about female factory workers before the 1890s and after the 1920s. I found the majority of websites through the popular search engine Google, and through links pages on those sites. I also searched for material at the Library of Congress online archives and the History Matters teaching resources site. The latter two sites were rich sources of primary materials but contained little by way of secondary sources or historiography. Of the other sites on the web, some included both primary sources and analyses, but the majority were purely secondary in nature, and often popular rather then academic histories.

Google
Library of Congress
History Matters

O V E R V I E W   O F   S I T E S

The reviewed websites have been loosely grouped into three categories. Firstly, research resources: sites containing primary sources but little or no historical contextualisation. Second are academic and scholarly sites - some of which include primary sources, some of rather dubious quality, but all presenting some form of historical and critical analysis. Last, popular history sites, which provide minimal analysis and references to sources; these are also more likely then sites in the former two categories to be of a commercial nature.

Primary sources

For historians researching and seeking primary sources on early twentieth century factory workers, access to online materials has some advantages in terms of speed, convenience, and available resources.

An eclectic assortment of primary sources was readily available from the History Matters site alone. A simple word search (e.g. "triangle shirtwaist fire") yielded immediate results, including an audio interview, poetry, excerpts from legal testimony, a contemporary speech, and newspaper articles.

Searching the American Memory collections at the Library of Congress (LOC) was a more fraught process, involving a combination of word searches across collections, within collections, and in selected time periods. I am still skeptical as to whether these searchs found all the archived materials that might be useful. However, even these limited results were of great interest and included some unique items that would be extremely difficult to access without the internet - notably, the short films of women workers at Westinghouse in an early films collection. Also available from the LOC site are full text versions of books and articles, photographs, and cartoons.

Other notable sources for primary material online included: "The Working Girls of New York" (a chapter from a full-text version of Jacob Riis' contemporary book "How The Other Half Lives"); a collection of photographs of Triangle fire in the New Deal Network Photo Gallery; and a United Press International site featuring a contemporary news report on the Triangle Fire.

These sites functioned solely as primary source collections for researchers and historians, and as such the History Matters site was particularly outstanding. However, for users without sufficient prior knowledge of the subject area, these sites would of relatively little use, as their content was presented without any or only minimal historical contextualisation or interpretation. This is particularly an issue with regard to LOC and History Matters - the scale of these archives and the primarily search-based rather then categorical navigational structures results in sites that are not particularly conducive to free-form browsing.

History Matters
-Pauline Newman
-Rosenfeld's Requiem
-Two Firemen Testify
-Rose Schneiderman
-The World
-Jewish Daily Forward
-Agnes Nestor

Library of Congress
-The Radical Impulse
-Elegy for Fire Victims
-More sources: see [1]

Working Girls of New York
New Deal Photo Gallery
United Press report

Academic and scholarly sites

For historians seeking critical analyses on women factory workers and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the paucity of websites that engage in historiographical discussion is disappointing. The more interesting - but rarer - sites offer both primary sources and historical analysis, and the most historiographically satisfying make attempts to coherently link source and interpretation together. However, the overall quality and depth of analysis is inconsistent, and there is simply not enough depth of criticism online to accurately reflect or further academic debate.

The Triangle Factory Fire site, a project of Cornell University's Kheel Center and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE!), is the most prominent website on the internet within the topic area. The site centres on standard historical narrative on the women's union movement, the Triangle fire, and the fire's impact on labour legislation. Alongside the narrative are links to a wide range of primary source material including textual, audio, and visual materials.

As a site explicitly aimed at high school and secondary education level history students, it succeeds admirably in providing a good overview of the origins of the women's labour union movement and the significance of the Triangle Fire to that movement. However, the conventionality of its analytical content means that in that respect it has little to offer historians and researchers. While its primary sources collection is quite impressive, the sources are presented as addendums rather then being cohesively tied into the historical narrative.

Triangle Factory Fire
Kheel Center
UNITE

A website with similar strengths and weaknesses is the American Social History Project Center for Media and Learning's promotional site for docu-drama "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl: Immigrant Women in the Turn-of-the-Century City", covering the slightly different though overlapping topic of female immigrant factory workers.

Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl

More successful is Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1775-1940. This site features a series of strongly document-based projects, including "Workers and Allies in the New York Shirtwaist Strike, 1909-1910" and "Women and the Lawrence Textile Strike, 1912". These essays attempt to utilise hypertext links to bind historiographical debate to primary sources, and to an extent succeed. Also interesting is the National American History Museum's online exhibition "Between A Rock and a Hard Place: A History of American Sweatshops, 1820 to Present". Although less in-depth and historiographically-oriented, the visual- and source-based exhibit uses hypertext links and image-mapping to connect images to historical background and information.

Women and Social Movements
-New York Shirtwaist Strike
-Lawrence Textile Strike

Between A Rock and a Hard Place
-Sweatshops 1880-1940

Such is the rough extent of critical or historiographically useful writing on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and women factory workers. Other sites no doubt exist, but I did not come across them in my research. However, some highly-placed and broadly historiographically-related sites that Google came up with included: an excerpt from "Women's Rights on Trial", including a section on the trial of the Triangle Factory owners; a frankly dubious undergraduate essay on the Triangle Fire; and a more credible, because from an established journal, but not much more useful, high school essay on the same topic.

Women's Rights on Trial
Leap for Life, Leap of Death
Sample Essay

Popular histories

Of the sites and pages surveyed for this review, popular histories of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire were the most numerous. Typically these consist of a single page within a larger (usually non-historical) website, providing a brief factual narrative of events and outlining the Fire's wider significance; or a biographical, personality-centred angle is taken, e.g. biographies of Rose Freedman, the last survivor of the Triangle Fire.

These popular histories would be informative only to those with little prior knowledge of the Triangle Fire, and are of minimal use to historians seeking primary sources or historiographical debate. However, this is not to say that these sites are without any historical merit. The ways in which the fire is represented illuminates the "uses of the past in the present." [2] The contextualisation of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire as a single page in a website results in subtly different interpretations of its continued, contemporary meaning.

For example, several union and workers' associations websites use the example of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory strikes and the 1911 Fire to draw out the parallels between the struggles of sweatshop worker struggles today and in the past. The article from the New York City Fire Museum newsletter lends emphasis to the role of firefighters and rescue workers in the tragedy; and the excerpt on the Fire taken from the Encyclopaedia of New York is provided as a selling point for the book.

C O N C L U S I O N

At present the world wide web is of use to those seeking a general understanding of the major events of the early women's union movement and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and to a lesser extent those seeking primary sources. However, there is simply not enough depth of scholarship or multiplicity of views on women's labour history on the internet to significantly supplement, reflect or further historical discussion.

In some respects, most notably in the research of primary sources, a researcher of female factory workers in the early twentieth century would probably benefit from investigating online resources. The reproduction of certain primary sources and book extracts benefits historians outside the US who may not be able to readily find such materials, and the internet vastly diminishes the logistical difficulties of gaining access to sources such as early film clips and other unique items from the LOC, or audio interviews from Cornell University's Kheel Centre.

But in terms of debate and criticism, the internet is far from a substitute for existing historical literature. On the web, the history of female factory workers and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire is almost constantly represented in the form of a traditional, singular historical narrative, and the meanings behind these narratives is largely uncontested. For example, the passing of labor protection laws following the tragedy Triangle Shirtwaist Fire is presented in most websites as an unambivalently positive outcome for female workers - Susan Lehrer's argument that such laws also reinforced the role of women as primarily homemakers, whose status as workers remained secondary to men, remains unanswered and unmentioned. [3]

Finally, through almost all the websites surveyed through this review, there was one common deficiency: the minimal, and in some cases non-existent, exploration of the expressive properties of hypertext. Every website was more 'additive' then 'expressive', in many cases simply directly transferring information onto the internet in more or less the same format as it exists in the real world - even the terminology of 'archives', 'libraries', and 'exhibits' remains the same. The Kheel Centre's primary sources on the Triangle Fire are now potentially available more swiftly to larger quantities of people then they were previously, thanks to the Triangle Factory Fire website, but the ways in which history is presented and practised on the site remains essentially bound by print-technology paradigms of chaptering, linear sequencing, and the pre-eminence of the text over the sources. The possibilities opened up by the procedual, participatory, spatial and encyclopaedic properties of the digital environment, as proposed by Janet Murray, are barely suggested. [4] Disappointingly, the potential of hypertext as a medium remains unexplored.

N O T E S

1. To find these items, run a search within their respective collections:

• "From Pinafore to Politics", F. Harriman - Woman Suffrage
• "The Trade Union Woman", Alice Henry - Woman Suffrage
• "Coil winding machines, Westinghouse works" - Inside an American Factory
• "Taping coils, Westinghouse works" - Inside an American Factory
• "Girls winding armatures" - Inside an American Factory
• "Girls taking time checks, Westinghouse works" - Inside an American Factory

2. M. O'Malley and R. Rosenzweig. Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web. The Journal of American History, vol. 84, no. 1, June 1997; p. 139.

3. S. Lehrer. Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women, 1905-1925, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987; pp. 234-236.

4. J. Murray. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Cambridge 1997; Chapter 3.

Bessie Cohen, Survivor of 1911 Shirtwaist Fire, Dies
http://www.ishipress.com/shirtwai.htm
Michael T. Kaufman. Last accessed 7 May 2002.

Between A Rock and a Hard Place: A History of American Sweatshops, 1820 to Present
Sweatshops, 1880-1940
http://americanhistory.si.edu/sweatshops/history/1880.htm
National Museum of American History. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Concord Review: Sample Essays
http://www.tcr.org/triangle.html
Hadley Davis. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Encylopaedia Britannica - Women in American History - At the Crossroads, 1880-1920
http://women.eb.com/women/crossroads01.html
Last accessed 7 May 2002.

Google
http://www.google.com
Last accessed 10 May 2002.

Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl:
Immigrant Women in the Turn-of-the-Century City
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/heaven/index.html
American Social History Project Center for Media and Learning. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

History Buff, The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire - Discovery.com
http://www.discovery.com/guides/history/historybuff/library/refshirtwaist.html
Mirror: http://www.historybuff.com/library/refshirtwaist.html
Last accessed 6 May 2002.

History Matters - The US Survey on the Web
http://historymatters.gmu.edu
American Social History Project Center for Media and Learning. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Jensen, Joan M. The Great Uprisings: 1900-1920 in A Needle, a bobbin, a strike: women needleworkers in America, ed. Joan M. Jensen and Sue Davidson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1984.

Last Survivor of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
http://www.wiskus.com/news.htm
Rick Moran, Firehouse Magazine. Last accessed 7 May 2002.

Lehrer, Susan. Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women, 1905-1925, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Library of Congress - American Memory
http://www.loc.gov
http://memory.loc.gov
Last accessed 8 May 2002.

Living Century
http://www.thelivingcentury.com/html/concept1.html
Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Cambridge, 1997.

New Deal Network Photo Gallery
http://newdeal.feri.org/library/d_4m.htm
Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

NPR - Weekend All Things Considered: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
http://www.npr.org/programs/watc/features/2001/010325.triangle.html
Last accessed 6 May 2002.

O'Malley, Michael, and Roy Rosenzweig. Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web. The Journal of American History, vol. 84, no. 1, June 1997.

Out of the Sweatshops: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy. ed. Leon Stein. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co. 1977.

Rose Freedman and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
http://www.injuredworker.org/Letters/Rose_Freedman.htm
"Injured Workers' Alliance has dedicated this page to a patriot for worker safety." Last accessed 7 May 2002.

Stop Sweatshops! At Work in Garment Industry Sweatshops
Photos from Yesterday and Today
http://www.uniteunion.org/sweatshops/photos/photos.html
UNITE. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Triangle Factory Fire
http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/
Cornell University, Kheel Center, and Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory - NRHP Travel Itinerary
http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/pwwmh/ny30.htm
From National Register of Historic Places. Last accessed 7 May 2002.

Triangle shirtwaist fire
http://wiwi.essortment.com/triangleshirtwa_reun.htm
Anonymous commercial site. Last accessed 7 May 2002.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire: After 90 Years, Still Relevant
http://www.paceunion.org/Info/triangle.pdf
Article from Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers International Union. Last accessed 7 May 2002.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 - Leap for Life, Leap of Death
http://www.csun.edu/~ghy7463/mw2.html
Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire - NYC Fire Museum Newsletter
http://www.nycfiremuseum.org/newsletter/Fall2000/triange.htm
Robert B. Smith. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire - The Encyclopaedia of New York City
http://www.yale.edu/yup/ENYC/triangle_shirtwaist.html
Donald J. Cannon. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees
http://www.uniteunion.org/index.htm
Last accessed 6 May 2002.

UP's Coverage of 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire
http://www.auburn.edu/~lowrygr/fire.html
Bill Shepherd, United Press International. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Women and the Lawrence Textile Strike, 1912
http://womhist.binghamton.edu/law/doclist.htm
Kerri Harney, Women and Social Movements in the Unites States, 1775-1940. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1775-1940
http://womhist.binghamton.edu/index.html
Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender, State University of New York. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Women's History Month - Women's Rights on Trial
http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/whm/trials/triangle.htm
Gale Group. Excerpt from Women’s Rights on Trial. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Workers and Allies in the New York Shirtwaist Strike, 1909-1910
http://womhist.binghamton.edu/shirt/doclist.htm
Deirdre Doherty, Women and Social Movements in the Unites States, 1775-1940. Last accessed 6 May 2002.

Working Girls of New York
http://www.cis.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/chap20.html
Chapter 20 from complete online text of How The Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, 1890. Last accessed 7 May 2002.

Alison Leung (0005590) - aleu0967@mail.usyd.edu.au
 

General histories:
-The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
-Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
-2nd Last Survivor Dies
-Encyclopaedia Britannica: Women
  in US History 1880-1920
-Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
  (mirror site)

On Rose Freedman:
-NPR: Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
-Injured Workers' Alliance
-Living Century
-Last Survivor of Triangle Fire

Union-focused histories:
-Pace Union: Fire Still Relevant
-UNITE - Stop Sweatshops
-Injured Workers' Alliance

Encyclopaedia of New York
New York City Fire Museum