On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in the Asch Building in New York City, claiming the lives of 146 workers. Many of the fire’s victims—the majority of whom were women, and many of them teenagers—became trapped on the building’s upper floors because the exit doors had been locked by their bosses, as an anti-theft policy. With no means of escaping, some of the workers jumped to their deaths to escape the flames.
As Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti write in the introduction to the new essay anthology Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire “assaulted the senses of middle- and upper-class New Yorkers. People saw smoke, bodies plunging out the windows, to be smashed on the ground below, firemen standing around helplessly with broken nets.”
Talking to the Girls explores the wide-ranging effects of the 1911 fire on victims’ and survivors’ family members, artists, teachers, and labor activists.
Talking to the Girls explores the wide-ranging effects of the 1911 fire on victims’ and survivors’ family members, artists, teachers, and labor activists. With many of its essays written by authors with personal connections to the disaster, Giunta and Trasciatti have woven together a collection that not only memorializes the tragedy but covers the ways, as they told The Progressive, it “continues to act as a catalyst for many forms of activism, from the street to the classroom.”
Ellen Gruber Garvey’s “The Triangle Factory Fire and the City of Two Who Survived,” for example, relates the tale of her great-uncle’s father, a Triangle worker who survived and who may have received money from the factory owners for changing his testimony about whether or not the factory doors were locked (testimony for which she can’t blame him, as it helped him “protect his own small corner of the universe”).
Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall’s essay “The New Deal Began with My Grandmother,” co-authored by Charles Hoffacker, offers family memories of Coggeshall’s grandmother Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, who implemented labor advances such as the forty-hour workweek, a ban on child labor, and a national minimum wage.
In the essay, “Another Spring,” artist and activist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto describes her own work memorializing Triangle victims while simultaneously fighting to assert her own right to housing (artists and activists in her generation, she notes, are being gentrified out of their own New York City apartments and homes).
In “Teaching the Triangle Fire to Middle School Students,” Kimberly Schiller details her work as an educator, helping her eighth-grade students learn about the Triangle fire and the stories of its victims. The photograph used on the book’s cover was taken by Schiller, and it shows her students holding aloft “shirtwaist kites” commemorating the fire victims at a memorial march in New York City in 2019.
In “Solidarity Forever!,” union organizer May Y. Chen relates her history with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), not only sharing its history but also a 1982 strike by garment factory workers in New York’s Chinatown.
During a recent presentation, sponsored by the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles, the editors and two of the book’s contributors spoke about what they hoped to accomplish with its publication. Mary Anne Trasciatti’s description of the book stands out: “Doing the book was itself a commemorative act . . . this was a labor of love, and it was a work of memory activism.”
What do the editors mean by “memory activism?”
The term, Giunta and Trasciatti explain, refers to “individuals whose encounter with a historical narrative shapes their knowledge of the past and understanding of the present, inspires their vision for the future, and motivates them to engage in some sort of action to realize that vision.”
It’s an appealing idea—that a connection to and sustained study of a historical event, like the horrific Triangle fire, can serve a purpose in the future. Clearly, the editors and many of the book’s contributors have their eyes on the future.
In “Triangle in Two Acts: From Bubbe Mayses to Bangladesh,” Annelise Orleck introduces readers to both her grandmother, a woman who once worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, as well as to Bangladeshi garment union leader Kalpona Akter.
In the book’s concluding essay, artist Richard Joon Yoo describes the process through which the forthcoming Triangle Fire Memorial was created and will soon be installed. When the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition held a competition in 2013 to design a permanent memorial to the fire, Yoo and his fellow artist Uri Wegman submitted the winning design. Involving the public in the memorial’s creation was always part of the plan: The pair hosted public events at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, where more than four hundred attendees and more than one hundred volunteers began work on a huge ribbon, which will be cast in metal and installed on the Brown Building—as the Asch Building is now known—in 2023.
The workplace fires and disasters are still with us, even if we can’t witness them as plainly as a factory fire on our city block.
The Triangle fire may have assaulted the senses of middle- and upper-class New Yorkers in the early twentieth century, but unsafe and exploitative work conditions persist in garment factories throughout the country and the world.
Giunta and Trasciatti tell The Progressive that, “no matter the time or place, the unfettered pursuit of profit is a dangerous undertaking.” They also note that “stories of workers’ struggles to keep safe during the pandemic and of inhuman conditions at meat-packing facilities, Walmart stores, and Amazon warehouses right here in our own backyards remind us that workplace safety is just as urgent a concern for American workers today as it is for workers anywhere else in the globe.”
The workplace fires and disasters are still with us, even if we can’t witness them as plainly as a factory fire on our city block. But the Triangle fire disaster continues to inspire and, as the editors put it, “many of the workers now organizing and fighting against their exploitation know the story of Triangle and are inspired by it.” This includes the Amazon workers on Staten Island, who recently voted to unionize: “For them, Triangle is not a story from the distant past, but one that rings true because their situation is not so different from that of the workers who came before them.”