There’s this song I used to play for the kid in the car, off a CD I’d burned of female vocalists: Tough Mary, sung by the amazing Etta James. We mostly know her now for At Last, the sexy, slow tune the Obamas danced to at the Inauguration. It that, the power of her voice is used to convey passion and joy. In Tough Mary, it’s used to clarify things:
Don't bring me posies
When it's shoes I need
Don't bring me flowers
Don't bring me the sea
Tough, but fair. A twist on the old labor anthem: give us roses, sure, but don’t forget the bread. The bread comes first.
I didn’t get a chance to write about the Bread & Roses Strike in my book. There wasn’t enough room. I had a lot of history to cover. It happened about a two hour drive from where I’m sitting now. It was the first majorly successful strike in US history, in large part because of the organizational work of women.
The Bread & Roses slogan comes from a phrase used by the women’s movement, noted in a pro-suffrage piece, “Getting Out the Vote,” by Helen M. Todd in the January 1911 issue of American Illustrated Magazine:
No words can better express the soul of the woman’s movement, lying back of the practical cry of ‘Votes for Women,’ better than this sentence which had captured the attention of both Mother Jones and the hired girl, ‘Bread for all, and Roses too.’ Not at once; but woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.
Alas, Ms. Todd couldn’t have known that 50% of white woman wouldn’t share that “every child” sentiment and would continuously vote for guys who gutted any program that might incidentally help even one non-white child.
Nonetheless, women’s votes have helped build a lot of the programs that have expanded access to bread stuff and roses stuff. Their increased involvement and representation in government have helped even more. Let us all pause now to remember the great and glorious Frances Perkins, our nation’s first Labor Secretary, architect of the bulk of the New Deal.
Tough Mary isn’t saying to never, ever bring her flowers. She just needs shoes first, so when you bring her the sea, she can walk along and enjoy it.
LOVE this.