Pros And Cons Of Cross-Class Coalitions

Despite the middle-class prevalence over progressivism, instances occurred where middle-class reformers worked with the working-class and cross-coalitions. Coalitions became vital for building legislation that addressed urban America. In their efforts to pass bills and reforms, cross-class alliances had to unite for a common cause. Therefore, different partnerships encompassing men and women, as well as a collaboration between the middle and working classes formed to battle the abuses of the sweatshops as a way to protect the male breadwinner through shared language and to seek women’s suffrage. Regardless of cross-class alliances, tensions and the difficulty of working together made these alliances fragile.

As noted earlier, sweatshops became

Therefore, cross-class coalitions discovered a shared gendered language to strengthen their push for reform. Throughout 1890-1910, middle-class reformers viewed Eastern European Jewish immigrant’s homes as sweatshops where boundaries of home and work became blurred, and homework forced women into the workplace. Reformers argued that sweatshop brought immigrant working men and women together, which would lead to sexual promiscuity. [18] By using immorality and racial debasement as an argument, reformers tried to avoid sexual promiscuity by conducting inspection campaigns, and proposing strict immigration and licensing laws to relocate sweatshops away from home and to distance male workers from women. Reformers also saw the homework shop, a sweatshop located in tenement home, as a danger

[22] Both workers and inspectors still viewed the sweatshop as a health menace. However, they shifted their understandings of sweated work from a language based on race and class to one of gender. The Joint Board of Sanitary Control (JBSC) was also formed to push for the eradication of women’s homework using gendered language and scientific reform as a way to strike the heart of the sweatshop. The JBSC, along with the anti-sweatshop coalition, argued removing the garment from the home to the industrial, modern, and mechanized factories in urban areas would alleviate some of the tensions. [23] Therefore, the push to modernize garment work led to the creation of spacious, sanitary, and regulated “model shops.” [24] The JBSC’s language of organizing and reform and the ILGWU’s potential to relocate the workplace helped protect workers health, and preserve the ideal of the male breadwinner. [25] As cross-class alliances defended the male breadwinner, paradoxically they also sought to help women acquire