This Day in Labor History: February 20, 1917

On February 20, 1917, leftist women in New York City, led by the anarchist Marie Ganz, held a big protest against high food prices. This led to a boycott to drive prices down. It is also a great window into the history of women and household organizing on the left.

World War I led to a rise in food prices, even before the U.S. entered the war. This upset many regular folks and led to opportunities for the left in America to agitate over it. The left was pretty sectarian at this point, but not as much as it would be after the Soviets demanded fealty to their version of socialism. So at this time, you had alliances between socialist and anarchist groups when it was required. Socialists under a group Mothers Vigilance Committee, led by Ida Harris, worked with the anarchist Marie Ganz to create protest conditions in New York over these food prices.

Ganz was an Austrian immigrant and sweatshop worker attracted to violent revolutionary change. After the Ludlow Massacre, she tried to assassinate John D. Rockefeller, Jr., which she did not do. But she did carry a gun to the entrance of the Standard Oil building in New York. She wrote about this in detail after she left her anarchist phase and was happy to tell-all.

But protesting over high food costs wouldn’t have worked had it not been deeply felt among many American women. In 1917, the New York Times took a woman into the markets to estimate the cost of dinner for a family of four. The answer was 76 cents a meal, or $22 a month. Seems reasonable, except that full time workers in New York at this time often made as little as $40 a month and they were already paying about $15 a month for rent. So between rent and food they had nothing left over and what this really meant is that people didn’t eat well. And of course this was only one meal! Then food prices skyrocketed at the beginning of 1917. The cost of two pounds of onions rose from 6 cents to 40 cents. The cost of 4 pounds of bread rose from 12 cents to 37 cents. The overall cost of the same meal went from 76 cents to $1.99. Workers just couldn’t pay these prices. They were angry. And in New York, a lot of these workers were already committed to left-wing causes and believed they should make change to the system that exploited them.

Some of this also had to do with price-gouging. For example, store owners realized that freezing vegetables made them last longer. Well, sure. No one had a big problem with that. But because they charged by the pound, now customers were paying for ice condensed on the packages. Butchers were including more bone in their cuts to raise profits. So these were concrete actions by food sellers that infuriated working women.

Agitation, led by Ganz and Harris, began spreading through New York’s Jewish communities. The first actions began on February 19. This included boycotts and also some physical attacks on vendors thought to be ripoff artists. But it was the next day that Ganz spoke and really agitated the crowd. She was arrested during the action. But the actions grew over the next few days. On February 22, women attacked New York poultry markets, liberating overpriced chickens for their own pots. Then on February 24, there was a huge rally at Madison Square Garden, with enough women interested in participating that such a space became necessary.

These women could take some pretty intense direct action. They poured kerosene over boycotted food, not so much to set it on fire as to make it unsellable. When some women tried to break the boycott, the boycotters would assault them. One person on the Lower East Side told a New York Times reporter, “We haven’t had an egg in months and potatoes are a luxury.” That’s not great.

Ganz was a bit of a loose cannon, but Harris was connected into the much more organized Jewish socialist movement and she worked with Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward for a set of concrete demands. There were two major asks–the first was for a school lunch program. They demanded that government–whether at the federal, state, or city level–provide $1 million to provide kids with lunches at school. The second was another $1 million demand to create food stores for the poor at reasonable prices. Also, there was some organizing by women in other cities, especially Philadelphia, which actually predated the New York organizing, although that city’s movement received less splashy headlines.

Of course, given the atmosphere of the moment, all of this got caught up with growing anti-German sentiment and conservatives claimed these women were the agents of the Kaiser. That’s an incredibly stupid accusation but we today are in no place to say that people of the past were less responsible than Americans of 2025.

All of this did make the city government act. Some of this had to do with the meeting where a group of women met with Mayor John Mitchel. He tried to state that he felt their pain, but that did not go over well. One shot back, “Excuse me, sir, you do not feel it. You think you feel as we do, but if you are not hungry you cannot. This morning you had your breakfast, today you will have your luncheon, tonight you will have your dinner. How, then, can you feel what it is not to have food?” Good stuff.

Again, this ended due to the city acting. First, wholesalers began lowering prices, in part because the market became somewhat better and in part due to political pressure to do so. Second, the city worked to acquire stores of low-cost food to flood the market and lower prices. This did work temporarily and the 1917 boycott ended. It did not solve food prices for very long, as they fluctuated pretty wildly during the war, in part for understandable reasons. The Wilson administration certainly took these issues seriously during the war.

Meat boycotts would remain a staple of leftist women’s organizing in New York through the 1930s, with former Uprising of the 20,000 leader Clara Lemlich organizing them after she married and moved to Brooklyn, working with leftists in cities such as Detroit to make it national. And in fact, they go back in New York at least to 1902, when women led a boycott of kosher butchers they thought were price gouging. So in the public consciousness, this is a pretty understudied part of the leftist world in the first half of the twentieth century.

This is the 551st post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.