Bread and Roses

How we keep fighting

I was getting coffee with a friend recently, and we were fantasizing about how we would spend our money if we had discretionary incomes beyond rent and food (a classic thought exercise for us underemployed intellectuals). High quality musical instruments were mentioned (I’m currently in a one-sided romance/limerence situation with a rare banjo from the 1920s that costs half my monthly rent). Beautiful vintage clothes definitely made the list. Live theater. I would go to so many shows! No more partial view seats! No more lotteries!

Bread and roses! said my friend, as we went on dreaming of beautiful things.

For those of you who haven’t heard of “Bread and Roses,” the slogan—bread for all, and roses too—was coined by suffragist Helen Todd during a garment workers strike in Chicago in 1910. It was then transmuted into a stunningly beautiful poem by James Oppenheim in 1911, used to great effect by striking women in Lawrence, MA in 1912, and adapted into a song by composer Caroline Kohlsaat in 1917. Throughout the 1910s and after, “Bread and Roses” became a rallying cry for working women in various strikes and labor actions across the country (and a beloved graduation song at my alma mater, Mount Holyoke College).

I couldn’t help but think of this poem today as I watched updates on the nurses’ strike in NYC, which is now entering its third day. The vitriol being lobbed at these striking care workers—who are mostly women—is sadly unsurprising.

Predictably, hospital executives are trying to spin the story to portray the striking nurses as greedy ungrateful wenches. The hypocrisy of these executives is fairly obvious. Take, for example, the president of New York Presbyterian hospitals, who made twenty-six million dollars last year. TWENTY-SIX MILLION DOLLARS. That is roughly twelve times my projected LIFETIME income (if I live a long time). That is 21,666 vintage banjos! And this man has the gall to deny nurses safe working environments and adequate benefits?!

Meanwhile: those hospital nurses you see striking today have gone through intense schooling and accumulated immense student debt in the process; many began their careers working night shifts, holidays, and weekends in the ER (just try to imagine, for a moment, what that actually feels like); they spend every single one of their working hours keeping sick people alive in a system that wants them dead; and they often work twelve-hour shifts without taking breaks because of understaffing. In spite of all this, in the words of my striking nurse friend, “people think I’m their hospital waitress.”

No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil while one reposes—
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

Did you know that many of the world’s most famous political revolutions have been catalyzed by striking women?

I’ve been thinking of this not only with the nurses’ strike, but also with the news of widespread anti-government protests in Iran. The current uprising against the regime owes much to the mass uprisings of 2022, when women took to the streets to protest the murder of Mahsa Amini at the hands of police. Hundreds were killed and nearly 20,000 arrested in the months that followed. The protestors used the slogan زن، زندگی، آزادی (Woman, Life, Freedom) as their rallying cry.

The Russian revolution of 1917, to take another example, was catalyzed by working women marching for bread in the streets of St. Petersburg. Fed up with war, bread lines, and the threat of further rationing, women walked out of their factory jobs on March 8 (International Women’s Day) and soon thousands of workers joined them in the streets, the spark that lit the fire of revolution that winter.

Empress Alexandra, wife of Czar Nicholas II, wrote to her husband that March to dismiss the protestors in words that may sound all too familiar to us now:

“The rows in town and strikes are more than provoking…It’s a hooligan movement, young boys and girls running about and screaming that they have no bread, only to excite – then the workmen preventing others from work – if it were very cold they would probably stay indoors. But this will all pass and quieten down.”

Workers, women, caretakers, immigrants: we have so often been deemed a hooligan movement by those in power who think we are all just running about and screaming, “only to excite.”

We see this every day as we witness the brutality and impunity of ICE, whose agents have been emboldened by the federal government to murder, arrest, detain, and deport people at will. This includes targeted violence and harassment against protestors and legal observers in the vicinity of arrests and raids, the murder of Renee Good being only the most recent example of the fatal consequences of this protracted campaign of terror.

Misogyny, as Kate Manne recently argued on her brilliant Substack, is at the core of these ICE agents’ fascist worldview:

“…misogyny is not an incidental feature or an optional add-on or comorbidity. Misogyny is the beating heart of a fascism that violently safeguards and shores up white male authority—by punishing any social subordinate who questions the designated authority figures.”

These are not separate battles. The nurses’ strike, the anti-ICE resistance, the uprisings in Iran.

As activists used to say at the height of the AIDS epidemic, we mourn the dead, and we fight like hell for the living.

We find our fuel in each other’s struggles. We find hope in the proof that people still gather, that people still bear witness, that people still share the truth of what is happening.

We do what we can to protect each other. We offer care where the state would have us abandon each other. We offer material support where the state would have us hoard our resources. We offer compassion where the state would have us scapegoat strangers. We find beauty where the state would have us beg only for bread.

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew—
Yes, it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too.

The violence of the state and its collaborators is not new. But neither is our resistance. So we dig deep into the roots of that resistance, we drink from the fountains of our elders’ survival, we uplift the burned and buried and mistranslated histories of our dreaming.

And the people hear us singing, Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

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