Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire ed. by Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire ed. by Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti Melissa R. Klapper (bio) Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti (eds.) Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire New York: New Village Press, 2022. In just fifteen minutes on March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City's Greenwich Village killed nearly 150 people, most of them women, most of them young, most of them Jewish or Italian. This entirely preventable tragedy resulted in a public outcry and an uptick in union membership, but not in civil or criminal convictions and not even in better enforcement of the paltry safety regulations on the books, which might have saved at least some lives. In the century since the fire, there has been some attention to it in both the scholarly and the popular press, as well as several novelistic treatments. The fiery speech given by labor leader Rose Schneiderman at a memorial meeting shortly after the fire appears in numerous document collections focused on American, labor and women's history, as do the terrible photographs of broken bodies strewn on the pavement beneath the building or lying forlornly in the morgue. The centennial of the fire was marked in 2011 by two competing documentaries on PBS and HBO. Yet, as Talking to the Girls editors Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti point out, the tragedy has been compounded as much by forgetting as by remembering. Garment workers across the world, predominantly women and girls, still work in unsafe conditions that have changed less than anyone would have hoped in 1911. Talking to the Girls is explicitly shaped by this presentist perspective; the book even ends with an interview with Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity. The editors have drawn together a collection of essays that include scholarship, family reminisces, commentary by teachers and professors who integrate the Triangle fire into their curricula, and accounts of both artistic and activist tributes to the victims and survivors. This book is not a history of the Triangle fire but rather a dissection of its multiple meanings among various groups. And while Jewish women's experiences are certainly present, Giunta and Transciatti seem more intent on highlighting Italian women's experiences, which they claim have been understudied by comparison. This feature makes Talking [End Page 191] to the Girls a slightly odd choice for review in Nashim, but there are many other reasons to value the book. The division of the "intimate and political essays" of the title into sections entitled "Witnesses," "Families," "Teachers," "Movements" and "Memorials" yields a rich array of short pieces on widely diverse topics, from Suzanne Pred Bass's analysis of the lasting impact on her family of her great-aunt Rosie Weiner's death in the fire to Kimberly Schiller's description of bringing her eighth grade students to the annual Triangle commemoration. May Chen writes of the ways in which the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union continues to use the memory of the fire today as a basis for organizing contemporary groups of women from very different backgrounds, while Ester Rizzo Licata documents her efforts to mark the places in Italy from which the Italian victims of the fire emigrated. All of the essays are evocative and interesting in their own way, but three in particular stand out. One is Martin Abramowitz's reflection on his father Isidor, a garment cutter who survived the fire but might also have started it by carelessly tossing a still-lit match or cigarette butt into his scrap bin. Abramowitz takes on not only this difficult personal history but also the conflicting stories told by his parents about Isidor's movements that day, in an effort to deflect blame and protect their children. He currently serves his own kind of penance and attempts at memorialization through his service on the board of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition. Another notable essay is Janette Gayle's "They Were Not There," which notes that racism and segregation in the garment industry, as in...