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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