Summary Of Orleck's A Little Fire

This collective biography recounts the lives of Fannia Cohn, Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman and Clara Lemlich Shavelson, four working-class, immigrant, activist women who organized to dismantle state-sponsored class-based and gender-based oppression and to improve the lives of working-class women beginning in the 1900s. Having immigrated from Eastern Europe to New York City amid the women's labor uprisings of the early 1900s, each woman took in the protests, boycotts and unionizing happening around them as a call to action and remained active in the working-class movement through the 1960's. Orleck summarizes her reason for choosing these four women as a quest to give faces and names to the many working-class women whose stories are buried underneath layers of white, bourgeois feminism or the heaps of stories about sexist, white men fighting against class inequality. Orleck hopes Common Sense

Early on in the text Orleck outlines her goals for this collective biography. Orleck offers Common Sense and A Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the United States "in contrast to the myriad accounts of poor and working-class women's lives scholarly, journalistic, and otherwise which have described in detail the ways that poor women have been victimized but overlooked the ways they have acted as agents of change" and to "challenge the myth that poor women are capable of spontaneous protest but not of sophisticated or sustained political work". Orleck pursues this goal by permitting Fannia Cohn, Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman and Clara Lemlich Shavelson to exist as four, fully fleshed, multidimensional women in the text rather than dissecting each woman and only allowing them to exist as women or members of the