Clara Lemlich - Consumer Advocacy

Consumer Advocacy

Lemlich married Joe Shavelson in 1913. She was the mother of Irving Charles Velson, Martha Shavelson Schaffer and Rita Shavelson Margules. Moving to the solidly working-class neighborhood of East New York, then later to Brighton Beach, she did not return to work, other than on an occasional part-time basis, for the next thirty years. Instead she devoted herself to raising a family and organizing housewives.

Others had organized in this area before Lemlich: Jewish housewives in New York had boycotted kosher butchers to protest high prices in the first decade of the twentieth century and the Brooklyn Tenants Union led rent strikes and fought evictions. After joining the Communist Party, which largely disdained the notion of consumer organizing, Lemlich and Kate Gitlow, mother of Benjamin Gitlow, attempted to organize a union of housewives that would address not only consumers' issues, but housing and education as well. The United Council of Working Class Housewives also raised money and organized relief for strikers in Passaic, New Jersey during the bitter 1926 strike.

In 1929, after the Communist Party created a Women's Commission, Lemlich launched the United Council of Working Class Women, which eventually had nearly fifty branches in New York City, as well as affiliates in Philadelphia, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit. The organization recruited among CP members but did not identify the Council with the CP or press non-Party members of the Council to join the party as well.

The UCWCW led a widespread boycott of butcher shops to protest high meat prices in 1935, using the militant tactics of flying squadrons of picketers that shut down more than 4000 butcher shops in New York City. The strike became nationwide and the UCWCW won support outside the Jewish and African-American communities to which it had been limited in New York.

The UCWCW renamed itself the Progressive Women's Councils the following years as part of the Popular Front politics of the day. The Party withdrew support for the councils and discontinued publications aimed at women, however, in 1938. Lemlich continued to be active in the PWC, however, and was a local leader in it after it affiliated with the International Worker's Order in the 1940s. The Councils organized even broader boycotts to protest high prices in 1948 and 1951, before accusations of Communist Party dominance destroyed it in the early 1950s. The IWO was ordered dissolved by the State of New York in 1952.

Lemlich continued her activities as part of the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs, which raised funds for Red Mogen David, protesting nuclear weapons, campaigned for ratification of the United Nations' Convention on Genocide and against the War in Vietnam, and forging alliances with Sojourners for Truth, an African-American women's civil rights organization.

Lemlich was also active in Unemployed Councils activities and in founding the Emma Lazarus Council, which supported tenants' rights. The Emma Lazarus Council declared in 1931 that no one would be evicted in Brighton Beach for inability to pay rent, then backed that up by rallying supporters to prevent evictions and returning tenants' furniture to their apartments in those cases in which authorities attempted to effect eviction.

Lemlich remained an unwavering member of the Communist Party, denouncing the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs. Her passport was revoked after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1951. She retired from garment work in 1954, then fought a long battle with the ILG to obtain a pension. After the death of her second husband she moved to California to be near her children and in-laws in the 1960s, she entered the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles. As a resident she persuaded the management to join in the United Farm Workers' boycotts of grapes and lettuce, then prodded the workers there to organize.