Essay On The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

A fire started in a rag bin on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building in Manhattan, New York on Saturday, March 25, 1911. There were six hundred people working in the factory at the time of the fire, and almost all of them were poor, immigrant, teenage women. A total of one hundred forty-five people died as a result of the unsafe building: the fire extinguishers had hoses that were rusted shut, the doors at the bottom of the stairwell were locked, the stairwell was not fireproof, and the workers panicked and had no idea what to do because there had never been any fire drills. Fire trucks responded quickly, but their equipment was inadequate: their ladders were too short and their safety nets ripped easily. The fire was

It discusses the wages and working conditions in the factory. In the article, there’s a quote from Pauline Newman, one of the workers in the factory, which was published in the book American Mosaic: The Immigrant Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It. She says, “They were the kind of employers who didn’t recognize anyone working for them as a human being. You were not allowed to sing. … You were not allowed to talk to each other. … If you went to the toilet, and you were there more than the forelady or foreman thought you should be, you were threatened to be laid off for a half a day, and sent home, and that mean, of course, no pay….” This source will help me answer my research question because I can argue that stories like these were used as propaganda to shock Americans, which caused them to want to fight for women’s

Interview with Mary Domsky-Abrams. My Reminiscences of the Triangle Fire. Cornell University.

This interview was conducted by Leon Stein, who interviewed Mary Domsky-Abrams, at an unknown date after the factory fire. She was one of the survivors who worked on the ninth floor as a blouse operator. On the day of the fire, she says that a girl asked the manager why there wasn’t any water in the buckets and told him that there would be nothing to put the fire out with. He was infuriated and responded with “If you’ll burn, there’ll be something to put out the fire.” This source will help me with my research paper because Domsky-Abrams and her coworker, Minnie Bornstein, survived only because she wasn’t afraid to talk back to the manager. If Domsky-Abrams spread her story about how she survived by doing this, then it would have persuaded women everywhere that they should get together and do this too. It would show them that refuting men’s power and fighting for equal rights was their only chance of