After the turn of the century, the locus of action moved into the community. Home and workplace were, in any case, very intertwined; outwork and sweatshops, peddlers and street shop fronts, seasonal work and a strong sense of community show how important it is to see the Jewish labor movement in New York primarily in terms of the class as a whole, not according to employment status.
The workplace militancy of the 1890s flowed into the meat boycotts and rent strikes of the first decade of the twentieth century. Calling them “great folk struggles,” the radical Yiddish-language newspaper the Forward drew attention to the links: “The meat strike was a child of the trade strikes . . . and the rent strike, in turn, comes from the same source.”
An increase in the retail price of kosher meat from twelve to eighteen cents per pound in May 1902 outraged housewives. A poorly organized boycott by butchers caused Fanny Levy, the wife of a unionized cloakmaker, to respond, “This is their strike? Look at the good it has brought! Now, if we women make a strike, then it will be a strike.” She and another woman mobilized in the neighborhood. A few days later, a crowd of twenty thousand women set out. “They raided butcher’s shops, tore the meat to pieces, flung some into ash barrels, and what they could not carry they sprinkled with kerosene.” One newspaper reported that “an excitable and aroused crowd [mostly of women] roamed the streets . . . armed with sticks, vocabularies and well-sharpened nails.”
Police arrested eighty-five people for disorderly conduct. The Herald reported that the women “were pushed and hustled about [by the police], thrown to the pavement . . . and trampled upon.” The police didn’t have it all their own way, however — one woman retaliated by slapping a cop in the face with a moist piece of liver!
The Forward welcomed the protest with the headline, “Bravo, bravo, bravo, Jewish women!” By contrast, the New York Times called for the repression of this “dangerous class . . . especially the women [who] are very ignorant [and] . . . mostly speak a foreign language.”
When a magistrate asked one woman why they were rioting, she replied: “We don’t riot. But if all we did was to weep at home, nobody would notice it, so we have to do something to help ourselves.”