Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti (eds.), Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti (eds.), Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, New York, New Village Press, 2022, pp. 335, $ 26.95
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1I was born in San Francisco, an Italian American working-class girl. My mother, Rose Giannini, started her first official job in 1939 at age 12 on the factory line of the Golden Grain® Macaroni Company, famous for later becoming the makers of Rice-A-Roni®, sealing boxes of pasta. Her sister, my aunt Eugenia Giannini, started her working life in 1930 at age 15 behind the delicatessen counter, alongside other unmarried immigrant daughters, at San Francisco’s open-air Grant Market. Both my mother and aunt would tell me, as I was growing up, what a great day it was when my aunt was able to join the Retail Clerks Union, which was formed in 1890, and then subsequently merged with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) in 1979. In my aunt’s later years, just before each birthday, I would drive her to the local ufcw office in order to renew her union membership through which she earned a livable wage, paid overtime, secured medical benefits, as she maintained a retirement pension until her passing at age 95. I still keep her treasured union card in my desk drawer at home.
2It was with this familial female labor lineage that I took the train, and left home for the first time, as the only person in my family to obtain a college education at the University of California, Davis. In my first quarter as an undergraduate in 1980, I had the amazing good fortune to enroll in the course «Introduction to Women’s History» taught by the Jewish feminist scholar Ruth Rosen. In a sizeable lecture hall, Professor Rosen would stand in front of the class, wearing a small microphone to project her voice, and teach us the very field in which she was an academic pioneer. In one of our assigned texts, America’s Working Women: A Documentary History: 1600 to the Present (1976), edited by Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordan, and Susan Reverby, we read «The Triangle Memorial Speech» by trade unionist Rose Schneiderman, as Professor Rosen centered the experience of the 146 mostly Jewish and Italian girls and women who lost their lives in the fire as a watershed tragic moment in labor history and women’s rights. I was astounded, not just at learning about the event, but that I was actually studying women’s history in a college classroom. At that very moment in my own young life, Ruth Rosen showed me that Jewish and Italian descended women mattered via their stories and the material realities of their lives – and deaths.
3It is from harkening back to these formative memories that I came to read the edited collection Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (2022) brilliantly edited by Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti. The highly skilled editors have brought together memoir voices of a vital mix: descendants of the fire, historians, teachers, artists, activists, labor organizers, and the memorial project’s co-architect, while curating across identifications of ethnicity, race, class, gender, global political positions, and economic class. In so doing, this anthology stands as its own landmark contribution to Jewish Studies, Italian and Italian American Cultural Studies, labor history, Women’s and Gender Studies, Global Studies, Working-class Studies, and the art of foregrounding the memoir form to teach us, in part, how «Triangle links past and present in solidarity» (p. 207).
4Devoted to proclaiming and reclaiming the history of the March 25th, 1911 fire and its more than century-long legacy, the anthology is effectively organized in five Parts with three to four self-contained chapters that can be read on their own and/or in concert with overlapping and dovetailing essays. In «Part One: Witnesses,» the chapter entitled «The New Deal Began with My Grandmother Frances Perkins,» cowritten by Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall and the Reverend Charles Hoffacker, traces the impact that witnessing the fire from outside of the building had on Coggesswell’s grandmother’s developing labor activist consciousness. Perkins would become the first woman in a presidential cabinet when Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed her the first woman to serve as United States Secretary of Labor in 1933. Serving the entirety of the Roosevelt administration, she was an invaluable force in helping to create the foundational programs of social security, unemployment insurance, federal minimum wage as well as many other Democratic enacted labor safety rights and assurances. Coggeshall explains the impact of the fire on Perkins, «Although Franklin Delano Roosevelt would not be elected president until 1932, my grandmother later recognized March 25th, 1911, as the day the New Deal began» (p. 47).
5All of the authors of «Part Two: Families» have a direct family link to the fire. This and other sections of the book underscore the power of multi-generational memory. In «The Two Roses: A Great-Niece Remembers,» Annie Schneiderman Valliere writes an historical tribute to the vast contributions of Rose Schneiderman, before and after Triangle. Immigrating from Poland with her Jewish family in 1890, Schneiderman became an accomplished union leader helping to found «the first women’s local of the Jewish Socialist United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers’ Union» (p. 124). In short order, she also became one of the most effective strike organizers in New York history in her prominent roles as vice-president of the National Women’s Trade Union League and the New York Women’s Trade Union League. Memorably, she was a principle coorganizer of the collective shirtwaist strike in 1909, famously known as the Uprising of the 20,000 (p. 125).
6Throughout «Part Three: Teachers» there is a skillful pivot bringing the voices of Triangle to the classroom; importantly, the editors do so by embracing intersectional approaches to understanding Triangle’s pedagogical meanings for today. In a fascinating chapter entitled «Remembering the Triangle Fire in California,» Italian and Italian American scholar Laura E. Ruberto, begins with a discussion of talking with her 8 year-old daughter Alma Goldstein Ruberto, who unexpectedly comes home from school with a worksheet about the fire. This is the springboard for Ruberto to make historical ties to another labor disaster, this one a plane crash in the Los Gatos Canyon of California, in 1948, when 28 Mexican citizen workers were killed. Building on the work of Tim Z. Hernandez, Ruberto offers significant connections between the exploitation of the Bracero workers, lost in the fiery plane crash, to the fate of the Triangle workers who burned behind the locked doors in which they were trapped. Ruberto writes, «Again and again, this history of the Triangle fire takes me back to other stories about exploited and forgotten immigrant workers» (p. 178). Within the chapter, there is also a compelling visual image of Ruberto chalking the names of the Triangle dead.
7In «Part Four: Movements» the book further shifts from personal framing to wider past and contemporary social movements, particularly focused on race, gender, and class. In the chapter «Solidarity Forever,» long time Asian American union organizer, May Y. Chen chronicles, in part, her central role in the creation of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA and her work within the Chinatown sewing factory neighborhoods of Los Angeles and New York. In the last chapter of the section, «They Were Not There: A Rumination on the Meaning of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to Black Garment Workers in Early-Twentieth-Century New York City,» Africana Studies historian Janette Gayle writes a stunning essay on the history of the exclusion of Black women garment workers in New York City who «composed barely .003 percent of the female garment industry workforce» (p. 224). Gayle then documents the myriad ways in which Black women confronted contemporaneous racism, within existing white supremacist structures of exclusionary labor organizations, and the decision to join the Dressmakers Strike of 1933, thereby commencing to integrate the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (p. 236). Gayle reflects upon Triangle as an event, although certainly tragic, which hopefully «helped to build the bonds of interracial labor solidarity» (p. 238).
8Lastly, «Part Five: Memorials» details collective activities through which the legacy of the fire has been publicly commemorated. One unexpected avenue is delineated in the chapter entitled «And They Returned Home: Italy Remembers the Triangle Fire Women,» by Ester Rizzo Licata, translated by Edvige Giunta. Rizzo Licata is the author of Camicette Bianche (2014) which is the first book about Triangle to be published in Italy. She took on the extraordinary and original task of identifying birthplaces of each Italian-descended Triangle victim, searching the town archives of «Licata, Casteldaccia, Marineo, Bisacquino, Sambuca di Sicilia, Cerda, Mazara del Vallo, Sciacca, Cerami, Sperlinga, Noto, Casamassima, Bitonto, Armento, Polignano a Mare and Striano» (p. 309). On her journey, Rizzo Licata discovered the complete first and last names and the birthplaces of 32 Sicilians, 5 Pugliese, 2 sisters from Basilicata, and 1 woman from Campania (p. 262). As part of these efforts, the association Toponomastica Femminile circulated a national petition in which they declared the intentionality of the memorial to be an act of civic social justice: «We do so to restore not simply a vague and generic memory, but a tangible memory that is personal as well as symbolic, through the naming of a square, a street, a garden, or another public space that may give back to these women the place they deserve in the history of our country» (pp. 261‑262). There are still 7 women for whom Rizzo Licata is searching.
9The final chapter of the anthology is a fitting one, «The Fabric of Memory» by the co-architect of the Triangle Fire Memorial, Richard Joon Yoo. He vividly describes The Collective Ribbon Project, calling for individuals to sew tribute ribbons in honor of the victims; those ribbons have then been fabricated in metal to create the aspect of the memorial where the galvanized cloth will appear to flow down from the 9th floor of the original building in Manhattan where the fire took place. Yoo and his co-architect Uri Wegman have designed a companion street level component with the names of the Triangle dead etched in glass and reflected up into the sky. One of the many beautifully written chapters in the book, Yoo reflects on his own parents’ Korean immigrant experience, and sees the memorial as a problematizing yet promising site. He explains, «[I]t remembers people who died going to work. It pays respect to immigrants looking for a better life – the simple American promise that was betrayed. In this way, I see it as a memorial for peace» (p. 274). Through the ongoing efforts of the Remember the Triangle Memorial Coalition, the project is scheduled to be completed sometime in 2023.
10Interestingly, the main text of the book continues beyond its primary chapters with an Epilogue interview between Kalpona Akter, the executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity, and the editors; along with «Appendix 1: The Literature of the Triangle Fire»; an especially notable «Appendix 2: Contributors Reflect on Their Process»; a thorough Bibliography across genres of «Archival Collections and Online Databases»; «Articles, Books, and Documents»; followed by «Film and Video»; a shorter section on «Music»; and concluding with «Websites». There are also period and current photographs laced throughout the text. Though I would have benefited from having chapter endnotes, these extensive bibliographical resources serve that academic purpose well.
11Overall, this accessible and timely volume is highly recommended for your personal bookshelf, to employ as instructional materials for the classroom, and as a call to keep the enduring memory of solidarity alive. To open the anthology, co-editors Giunta and Trasciatti instruct us: «Talking to the Girls is not a book about the fire, but about the ways Triangle continues to call to us» (p. 1). Often emotionally moving in narrative content, and crucial in historical detail, Talking to the Girls is a vital contribution to cross genre and intersectional women’s labor history. As I lay my own pen down, I honor the Triangle 146, and the memory of my mother and aunt: those West Coast, working-class, Italian American union girls – who spent a lifetime talking to me.
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Roseanne Giannini Quinn, « Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti (eds.), Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire », Altreitalie, 65 | 2022, 199-203.
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Roseanne Giannini Quinn, « Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti (eds.), Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire », Altreitalie [En ligne], 65 | Luglio-dicembre 2022, mis en ligne le 02 mai 2023, consulté le 21 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/altreitalie/696 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/altreitalie.696
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