REBECCA REISMAN
“One of the girls in our political club got naturalized not long ago so that she might vote for school committee. Another organized a tobacco strippers union.”
Rebecca Reisman had a busy year as an activist in the women’s suffrage and labor movements, filling all four of the roles described by Ida Hall in the Boston Globe article on the Young Women’s Political Club, an early suffrage league founded by and for working women. Not only was Reisman involved in the YWPC, she organized a tobacco strippers union, filed for US citizenship and was one of the first women to vote in municipal caucuses of Boston.
Chambers Street, Boston’s West End, 1910.
Boston Public Library
Rebecca Reisman was a Jewish tobacco stripper who had immigrated from Russia to the West End of Boston in about 1892. She lived with her teenage siblings in an apartment on Chambers Street under the same roof as her older brother, a cigar maker, and his family. Her unskilled job of tobacco stripper supported the higher-skilled job of cigar-maker held by her brother.
“The preliminary process of ‘stripping,’ which includes ‘booking,’ is the preparation of the leaf for the hands of the cigar-maker. The large mid-rib is stripped out, and if the tobacco is of the quality for making wrappers, the leaves are also ‘booked’—smoothed tightly across the knee and rolled into a compact pad ready for the cigar-maker’s table. Even in the stripping-room there are different grades of work, all unskilled and all practically monopolized by women and girls.” (Abbott, 2)
Whittle and Copes Cigar Factory, Norfolk St., Boston, ca. 1900.
from Bostonpastblogspot.com
Cigar making was both a tenement industry and a factory industry. Female workers and children who monopolized the unskilled workforce were underrepresented by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and had no vote in most local, state or federal elections. Undeterred, women like Rebecca Reisman organized their own unions.
Rebecca helped lead the all-female Cigar Factory and Tobacco Strippers Union in Boston, which was formed in December 1899, just months after the YWPC. For the labor union, she headed the Education Committee and helped oversee elections of officers. Union records show that it “organized activities to bring in new members, called for boycotts of certain businesses, heard grievances from members relating to working conditions in their respective factories, and tasked committees with the investigations of these grievances.” (Kieran)
Clearly influenced by the Young Women’s Political Club, Rebecca Reisman became the single female delegate from the West End (Ward 8) in the Boston municipal caucuses of 1901. According to a contemporary reporter, “Women in a municipal convention to nominate candidates for Mayor, Street Commissioner and members of the School Committee is something new in the political history of Boston.” (The Boston Globe, Nov 11, 1901)
The caucuses must have been an eye-opening experience for Reisman, who had been taught that women voters would help clean up politics. Boston politics were not for the faint of heart, as evidenced by a contemporary description of “The Maelstrom at Ward 8” on caucus day.
The Warden in charge of Ward 8 elections viewed long-time ward boss Martin Lomasney “with rapt adoration,” and must have coordinated a plan with fellow supporters to open the ward room at 1:15pm, 45 minutes before the polls were scheduled to open.
“The Maelstrom at Ward Eight,” in the Boston municipal convention of 1901, Boston Globe, 16 Nov 1901, p. 4.
“So when the doors were opened at that unexpected hour it was one solid bunch of Lomasneydom that swept down the steps into the ward room and up to the rail. All of this happened without a policeman in site…. [When their opponents, the] Horganites…began to arrive on the scene…a score or more with two or three husky and lusty negroes formed a wedge in the rear of the room and went sailing up against the line of Lomasneyville…. Blows were swapped in the most promiscuous manner and then the greater numbers of Lomasney did the work…. The big negro in the center was sent flying through the door and he kept on in his fight until he was well down the street. He came back however after the arrival of the police. Promptly at 2 o’clock master of ceremonies Whelton allowed that the polls were opened.” (The Boston Globe, 16 Nov 1901)
Needless to say, the Democrat and anti-suffragist Martin Lomasney won the nomination and the election, holding on to his reign as the undisputed boss of Ward 8 from about 1885 to his death in 1933. We do not know whether Rebecca Reisman, a Social Democrat, voted for or against his nomination, but Lomasney’s anti-suffrage views suggest that she would have supported his rival Francis Horgan.
Despite what must have been a harrowing experience for the only woman in the Ward 8 caucuses of 1901, Rebecca Reisman was determined to vote. She must have been very involved in the Young Women’s Political Club rally to register women voters from the North and West Ends of Boston (Wards 6 and 8) on November 17th. Just days after the November convention and rally, she filed for U.S. citizenship so that she could vote in the elections of December 10th. Her vote—and the votes of all women of Massachusetts—was limited to School Committee elections.
Nearly a decade later, the same anti-suffrage ward boss who had manipulated the 1901 Ward 8 elections would surprise women suffragists by sponsoring the use of the West End ward hall for a mass rally aimed at potential female voters in the tenements. This 1910 rally organized by upper middle class women suffragists from Boston’s elite neighborhoods was mistakenly thought to be “the first of its kind in Boston.” (Strom, 74-75) However, Jewish immigrants involved in the Young Women’s Political Club like Rebecca Reisman had taken the initiative to rally their family, friends and neighbors in the West End tenements many years earlier.
By the time of the ward-boss-sanctioned 1910 suffrage meeting, Rebecca Reisman had married and moved to Seattle, Washington. She named her eldest son William Morris, in tribute no doubt to the utopian socialist and founder of the English Arts and Crafts movement who advocated for small worker-owned manufacturing shops that give workers greater personal control of their lives.
REFERENCES
“Women in Municipal Convention,” Boston Globe, Nov 11, 1901, p. 1.
“Excitement in Ward 8: Horganites Plan To Get To the Rail But the Warden Somehow Helps Out His Friend Lomasney,” Boston Globe, Nov 16, 1901, p. 4
“Young Women Anxious to Vote,” Boston Globe, May 1902.
ancestry.com
Abbott, Edith. “Employment of Women in Industries: Cigar-Making: Its History and Present Tendencies,” Journal of Political Economy, Jan 1907, vol .15, no. 1 (Jan 1907), p. 1-25.
Boris, Eileen. Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris and the Craftsman Ideal in America. Temple, 1986.
Boris, Eileen. Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Cigar Factory and Tobacco Strippers Union Records in the Boston Central Labor Union Records, Massachusetts Historical Society. Many thanks to LJ Woolcock for their help in locating Rebecca Reisman in these records.
Kieran, Brendan. “Woman and Organized Labor in Early 20th-century Boston,” The Beehive, Massachusetts Historical Society, Mar 22, 2017. http://www.masshist.org/beehiveblog/2017/03/women-and-organized-labor-in-early-20th-century-boston/
Morris, William. News from Nowhere, 1890.
Strom, Sharon Hartman. Political Woman: Florence Luscomb and the Legacy of Radical Reform. Temple University Press, 2001.
Stonehurst Curator Ann Clifford wrote this biography in conjunction with “Anxious to Vote: Students, Workers and the fight for Women’s Suffrage,” a curriculum and public education project developed in partnership by Stonehurst the Robert Treat Paine Estate and Waltham Public Schools in commemoration of the national suffrage centennial in 2020. STONEHURST is a National Historic Landmark owned by the City of Waltham. The once-private estate of generous social justice advocates whose ancestors helped establish the democratic foundations of this country is now appropriately owned by the people.
The Friends of Stonehurst received support for this program through “The Vote: A Statewide Conversation about Voting Rights,” a special initiative of Mass Humanities that includes organizations around the state.
This program is funded in part by Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
