This Day in Labor History: July 19, 1935
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On July 19, 1935, leftist housewives in Detroit, led by a woman named Mary Zuk, began a meat boycott in outrage over high prices. This remarkable moment demonstrates the centrality of unpaid domestic labor to our labor history and our history of radicalism in ways too often not acknowledged in larger conversations about these pasts.
The rise of consumer boycotts came out of leftist movements and the development of the Communist Party. While the CP could absolutely reinforce traditional gender norms and had more than its share of puritanical impulses, it also recognized that the home could be part of the class struggle. Housewives could and should organize around issues of production and consumption, not just in solidarity with their working husbands but as legitimate sites of struggle on their own. Women of course had organized around consumer issues before the Communist Party mattered, most particularly with the middle class fight against child labor with Florence Kelley and the Consumer League. Moreover, World War I’s domestic propaganda programs brought women into the war through mobilizing them around Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Wednesdays and the like. So the idea that women in the home could have a significant impact on larger political and economic forces was fairly well established in the nation by this time.
In New York, the leader of the meat boycott was a leftist blast from the past. Clara Lemlich, famous for her role in the Uprising of the 20,000 back in 1909, had taken a different path than the other leaders of the strike. Most of the other leading women of the strike such as Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman had moved from the Jewish radicalism of their youth into respectable reform politics. They did great work. But Lemlich, who had famously shouted down Samuel Gompers and the heads of the garment unions back in 1909 and gave a speech in Yiddish that marked the start of the strike, had both moved into the Communist Party and married and become a housewife in the proto-suburban communities near the border with Long Island. Her life circumstances had certainly changed but her politics were as fierce as ever.
Lemlich had joined the CP in 1926 and then founded the United Council of Working-Class Housewives with her comrade Kate Gitlow, a communist organization dedicated to raising support for strikers, as well as for working class collective kitchens and child care. CP leadership was initially as indifferent to anything classified as a “women’s issue” as any other leftist of the time, but Lemlich’s organizing was so effective that party leadership finally took notice and moved resources to her and her allies. Lemlich also believed that household organizing could free women from traditional gender roles, which she personally chafed against and often battled her own communist husband over. By 1929, this had become the United Council of Working Class Women (WCWW), led by a woman named Rose Nelson and then United Council for Working Class Housewives (UCWH) in 1935. It was an era of acronyms. They moved toward meat boycotts as a way to protest high prices and show their activism.
The meat boycotts started in Los Angeles in March 1935, protesting against inflated prices. That soon spread to New York, where Lemlich and Nelson led it, beginning on May 22. Some of the butchers supported it, or didn’t want to alienate customers, so many butcher shops didn’t open. They got some butchers to sign a document to support the boycott and combine to get the meat packers to lower their prices. The women knew it wasn’t their local butcher who was at fault, but the big Chicago meat companies, who were much harder for them to target directly. The New York State Association of Meat Dealers soon followed with a statement blaming the meat monopoly. The high prices combined with the Department of Agriculture under Henry Wallace and the Agricultural Adjustment Act paying farmers to plow up fields and kill farm animals to raise prices served as a powerful symbol about how people felt ignored by the government. Of course this was all more complicated and the Roosevelt administration had to juggle a lot of balls to fix the nation’s problems, but still, as an organizing tool, seeing movies of farmers destroying their produce was powerful. They got a lot of support among Black women in Harlem too, an area that already saw a lot of consumer boycotts to protest racism.
In Detroit, Mary Zuk led the struggle. She was the daughter of a miner and started working on her own in factories at the age of 12. She was the mother of two. Her husband was an unemployed factory worker. She was a communist. Why shouldn’t she be? What had capitalism done for her? The police and media tried to frame this as a bunch of outside agitating commies. After all these were just poor dumb housewives. Of course, these were impoverished but very committed housewives. By August, 400 Detroit butcheries had closed their doors and protestors picketed the scab butchers.
One thing that came of this was the Communist Party realizing more concretely just what a powerful tool housewives were. Many leading communists had denigrated or rolled their eyes at women’s activism, but this really forced them to respond. Of course, in many cases the Party tried to take credit for it, which was not accurate, to say the least. But some began to think about the family in useful ways and called husbands dominating their wives “proto-fascism,” which is not a bad way to think about abusive relationships actually.
On August 12, Zuk cabled both FDR and Henry Wallace to schedule appointments with them. Wallace agreed to meet, though certainly Roosevelt was not going to do so. But Wallace, whose sympathies were fundamentally with the farmers more than housewives, refused to commit to the government lowering prices and the meeting ended with some rancor.
Still, these protests were pretty useful. The market did respond. Prices did go down as supplies backed up and the companies realized they needed to dial back the profit-taking if they wanted to have customers. Moreover, these communist women remained active organizers for the rest of their lives.
The best book on this issue is Emily Twarog, Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America. Another great piece is Denise Lynn’s “United We Spend: Communist Women and the 1935 Meat Boycott,” published in American Communist History in 2011.
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