Hello Bread Fans,
How’s your bread?
What if we asked that instead of how are you? Would we in turn be able to say something more truthful and less reflexive? Or would we say “Fine,” with that same impulse to seem okay. Could we admit that our bread, or the spirit we give to making it, feels brokenhearted, but still leavening? I’d like to push the limits of metaphors and squish our real feelings into them, but I bet the social inkling to be fine rather than vulnerable would still come forward.
My ideas of bread are most often buoyant. Bread is such a promise of growth and care. The actual and symbolic functions of bread are woven into our sense of ourselves. You can see the significance in examples that are not at all light: in books like The Rye Bread Marriage, a memoir that dives deep into Latvian rye history; in stories from Ukraine about Holodomor and other starvation campaigns; in the deep meaning bread carries for Holocaust survivors and their descendants; and in bakeries attacked by warring bodies, as in Palestine in the fall, and now, as ghastly food deprivations continue.
Within these horrors, the idea of bread’s comfort persists. I think that’s why bread and roses is a catchy shorthand for the simple sustenance we need, and the beauty we deserve. This definitely occurred to Rose Wilde as she titled her new book.
“I was harkening to the really beautiful protest speech by Rose Schneiderman (after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911) where she says that, you know, we deserve more life than just to live. We deserve to survive and thrive,” Rose in an interview for Wordloaf.
The term stretched to cover social justice and suffrage, and new wave of bakery unions has latched onto this term too, most recently She Wolfe Bakery in NYC. I grew up listening to Judy Collins singing lines from James Oppenheim’s poem, “Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses.”
I’ve just read another book with the title, Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants and the Struggle for the American Dream by Bruce Watson.
Reading this day-by-day account of the 1912 Lawrence textile workers’ strike was haunting for many reasons. One was that 1912 parallels 2024 on the calendar, and I started it in late January, so I felt like I was reading it in real time. Wednesday February 7, 2024, I read that on Wednesday February 7, 1912 labor leaders gave a speech about the strike, which started in January in NYC. Organizers sought families to house the children of strikers, so that parents wouldn’t cave in on their behalf and go back to work; New Yorkers said yes, and on Saturday February 10, a hundred kids, tagged with their names and accompanied by chaperones, left their families by train.
In New York City, the children were observed to be quite malnourished (one of the attending medical folk was Margaret Sanger, champion of women’s reproductive health), suggesting that they’d been hungry far longer than the period of the strike. Wages were so low that families primarily ate bread and molasses. The kids plumped up in New York City.
As I read about the strike and how it sent tremors across the nation, I thought of how it influenced my part of upstate New York, where textile mills and detachable shirt collar factories were the biggest employers. Cohoes was home to Harmony Mills, one of the largest fabric mills in the country, and Troy made 90% of America’s detachable shirt collars between 1890-1910. At peak, Troy had ten to fifteen thousand collar workers, and most of them were women. This fact made Freihofer’s Bakery land here because the original Philadelphia Freihofer’s, when traveling to Montreal to see a new oven, saw a city of women, ready to buy factory bread. While many American women were working at home, engaged in care for children and elders, 1 in 3 women in Troy sewed or starched collars.
As you may know, I think about my city’s history, from a lot of angles. Last year, I was distressed by A response to proposed plans for a new YWCA-GCR building, and decided it would be good to see what intersections between the community, the residents, and the organization once were, so I got a grant to study the early history. Reading Bread and Roses was part of my research, and dovetailed with what I discovered in the national archives of the YWCA. These are housed at Smith College, and digitized. Reading the 824 page document covering 1915-1950 in Troy, I found a wild window on what outsiders thought of my home, and how labor relations intersected with the Troy YWCA. Troy was, in the words of one observer from the national org, “archaic and feudal,” and had no middle class, just a ruling class and an underclass.
Here’s what I learned from that record, and from local archives. The wives of collar gentry in Troy were among the women who established the Young Women’s Association in 1883, part of an international movement to educate and often house young women as they migrated to cities for factory work. In Troy, manufacturing families donated big bucks to the Y, especially for construction of its first new home in 1891. The location was stately, right across from the acoustically renowned Troy Music Hall, and had 54 rooms, a cafeteria, and elegant meeting rooms. As plans began in 1914 for another bigger home, Troy labor leaders were suspicious of the textile gentry’s involvement with the YWCA.
Did the collar manufacturers, who were decidedly anti-union, make this grand place, complete with a dreamed for swimming pool, to keep collar workers satisfied and prevent strikes? Quite possibly. Although the textile strike in Lawrence ended on March 12, 1912, fears of worker uprisings, as well as strikes, continued to ripple across the nation. In Troy, the new building opened in 1918, and during a 1919 strike, some board members wanted to remove residents when they ran out of money for rent. One member, Julia Howard Bush passionately and successfully argued for the protestors to remain. However, a cloud of anti-union sentiment hovered over the Y; I could see this as I read how union men in Troy would not eat at the YWCA cafeteria.
This Friday, I’m presenting a zine I put together about the topic. We – the YWCA-GCR and I – are having a Bread & Roses luncheon to celebrate International Women’s Day. We’ll be echoing the Y’s cafeteria by serving bread and soups. We’ll talk about the history and future of the organization, and bring a rose to each of the residents.
The day will be glad, like making bread – leavening our hearts and bodies. I look forward to practicing what bread means, and sharing what it can be: nourishing and inspiring, like the sight of a flower on a crazy gray day while the world simmers near and beyond us.
I hope you find leavening and loving, bread and roses, too.
Amy
Notes:
A rosy bread friend has died, Sarah Black. She was a phenomenal teacher and baker, and in her honor, I’d like you to share your love of baking – as you probably already do – with her in mind. Through a loaf, through a lesson to a friend. If you knew Sarah, I’d love to hear your memories of her. If you did not, you can meet her in a tribute I wrote on Wordloaf.
At the very end of the book about Lawrence, the author notes the phrase bread and roses was never used in Lawrence at the time of the strikes. Rather, it became linked much later in commemorations.
Camp Bread is this week in Providence! If you are going, please tell me so we can say hello!
Postcard image of James Oppenheim’s poem came from Encyclopedia Virginia.
Bread 🥖 and Roses 🌹 at the #YWCA in #TroyNY.
https://facebook.com/events/s/bread-roses-international-wome/1610874919683383/
See you Friday! “ This Friday #AmyHalloran will be presenting a zine she put together about start of the #YWCA #womenshistory in #TroyNY topic. We – the YWCA-GCR and #Women are having a #BreadAndRoses luncheon to celebrate #InternationalWomensDay. We’ll be echoing the Y’s cafeteria by serving bread and soups. We’ll talk about the history and future of the organization, and bring a rose to each of the residents.”