‘Not everything that the bourgeois world created is bad’: aesthetics and politics in women workers' education

Abstract

In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education, Cohn left a rich body of labour literature, wherein art is central in the ways she conceptualized, designed and organized women workers' educational programmes and curricula, as well as cultural activities for more than 50 years. For Cohn, however, art and politics were tightly interwoven in what I have called the artpolitics assemblage of women garment workers' life and work. It is entanglements between ethics, aesthetics and politics, considered in the light of the Rancièrian notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’, that I discuss in this paper.

Keywords:

• artpolitics assemblage
• aesthetics and politics
• gendered labour history
• garment industry
• women workers' education
• trade union sexual politics

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the NYPL Manuscripts and Archives Division and the BHVP archivists for facilitating my research there and for giving me permission to cite from Fannia Cohn's, Rose Pesotta's and Jean Bouvier's papers. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Letter from Fannia Mary Cohn to Evelyn Preston, dated, 19 April 1922, Fannia M. Cohn Papers, Correspondence, 1914–1962; Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (FCP/NYPL).

2. This paper is part of my overall project of writing feminist genealogies (Tamboukou, 2003, 2010).

3. Letter from Cohn to Preston, dated, 21 September 1923 (FCP/NYPL).

4. The Bryn Mawr Summer School has been the object of several studies. See amongst others, Heller (1984, 1986), Hollis (2004), Kornbluh and Frederickson (1984), Smith (1929), Tamboukou (2013). For a history of Brookwood Labor College, see amongst others, Howlett (1993). The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library, houses the WEB records (1921–1951).

5. The ‘Workers' university’ at Washington Irving High School was founded by ILGWU in New York in 1918.

6. Letter from Cohn to Charles A. Gulick, dated, 25 March 1929 (FMC/NYPL).

7. Charles A. Beard to Cohn, letter dated Labor Day, 1945 (FMC/NYPL).

8. Letter from Dewey to Cohn, dated, January 1933 (FCP/NYPL).

9. The Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) was one of the largest recruiters for Bryn Mawr over the years (see Heller, 1984).

10. Letter from Ernestina Friedman to Cohn, dated, 26 July 1921 (FCP/NYPL).

11. ‘Garment Workers Speak’, n.d. (FCP/NYPL).

12. ‘Should literature find a place in the curriculum of workers' colleges?’ Unpublished paper by Fannia M. Cohn, 3 November 1923 (FCP/NYPL).

13. ‘Women’, unpublished essay, n.d. (FCP/NYPL).

14. Letter from Cohn to her friend Emma, dated, 8 May 1953 (FCP/NYPL).

15. ‘Le travail des femmes dans les temps passés’, Le Peuple, 9 October 1922, Bibliothèque Historique de la ville de Paris (BHVP), Archives Marie-Louise Bouglé, Fond Jeanne Bouvier.

16. For a discussion of the notion of the assemblage, see Tamboukou, 2008.

17. FMC/NYPL.

18. See Hollis (2004), particularly Chapter 4.

19. Letter from Cohn to Rose Pesotta, dated, March 1934, Rose Pesotta Papers, General Correspondence; Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (RPP/NYPL).

20. Letter from Cohn to Egnor, a union member, dated, 29 January 1934 (FMC/NYPL).

21. Letter from Cohn to Egnor, a union member, dated, 29 January 1934 (FMC/NYPL).

22. Mary Sekula, 1932 Shop and School, in Hollis, 2004, p. 141.

23. See Smith, Women Workers, Heller, The Women of Summer, documentary film, Hollis, Liberating Voices. There is further a rich collection of photographs at Bryn Mawr at the M. Carey Thomas Library at Bryn Mawr College.

24. I refer here of course to Bergson's (2002) philosophical configuration of time as duration.

Additional information

Funding

I want to thank the British Academy [SG112079] for funding my archival research at the NYPL Manuscripts and Archives Division and the University of East London for funding my archival research at the Bibliothèque Historique de la ville de Paris (BHVP).