Portrait: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman

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Some Eastern European Jewish girls such as Bessie Abramowitz Hillman left their homes and families behind to avoid arranged marriages. Rather than marry the son of the butcher in a nearby town in Belarus, Abramowitz convinced her father to allow her to immigrate to the United States at the age of fifteen. A year after Bessie arrived in the United States, while working as a button-sewer making men’s suits, she led a strike in Chicago’s garment district that led to the founding of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). As a member of the union’s executive board, Bessie relocated to ACWA headquarters in New York in 1915 and married--by her own choice--Sidney Hillman, president of the union that she helped to establish. Bessie Abramowitz Hillman spent more than half a century fighting for rights for all workers regardless of color or gender.

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Bessie Hillman circa 1910, courtesy of Jewish Women's Archive

Born Bas Sheva Abramowitz in a Russian shtetl, Bessie Abramowitz Hillman immigrated to Chicago in 1905 and moved to New York City after 1916, where she was an important figure in the labor movement.

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Bessie Abramowitz, courtesy of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

Bessie Abramowitz Hillman in 1922 

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Sidney Hillman, President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America from 1916- 1946 and a member of President's Advisory Defense Commission during World War II, courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing, [LC-DIG-hec-28923].

Bessie Abramowitz’s husband, Sidney Hillman, was the head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, the largest men’s clothing workers union in the United States and was a key figure in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and in marshaling labor's support for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party.  He was born in Lithuania but left the Russian empire in 1906 because it was unsafe for him as he was both a Jew and a Menshevik revolutionary.  He and Bessie lived in New York City and summered on Long Island.
 

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