Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca was an American labor activist who particularly represented women workers.
Background
Dorothy Bellanca was born on August 10, 1894, in Zemel, Latvia (then a part of the Russian Empire), the youngest of four daughters of Harry and Bernice Edith (Levinson) Jacobs. Her father, a Russian Jew, immigrated with his family to the United States in 1900 and worked as a tailor in Baltimore.
Education
Dorothy attended Baltimore public schools but left at the age of thirteen to work as a hand buttonhole maker in the Baltimore men's clothing industry. Thereafter her formal education was limited to occasional attendance in evening schools.
Career
From the start of her working life, Dorothy Jacobs sought to organize fellow workers into a trade union, and in 1912 she led a walkout by Baltimore hand buttonhole makers that soon developed into an industry-wide strike. Two years later she assumed a more prominent role in the trade union movement as a result of a split in what was then the leading union in the men's clothing industry - the United Garment Workers of America - between the younger, more militant Jewish and Italian immigrant members and the union leadership, which consisted of an older generation of more conservative and acculturated workers. An idealistic reformer and typical of her generation of immigrant Jewish workers, she cast her lot with the union insurgents, who late in 1914 founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (A. C. W. A. ) as an independent trade union dedicated to socialist principles and goals. A delegate to the A. C. W. A. 's founding convention, Dorothy Jacobs served its Baltimore affiliates first as an elected member of the city's joint board and then as secretary of the board in October 1915.
Dorothy’s union activity extended beyond the Baltimore area. Assigned to the organization of female workers, she participated in major organizing campaigns in Chicago in 1915 and in Philadelphia and New York City in 1917. She was also elected as the A. C. W. A. 's first female general executive board member in 1916, a position in which she urged a more equal role for women in the union. Reelected in 1918, she soon resigned after her marriage in August of that year to August Bellanca, a leader among the Italian immigrant workers in the men's clothing industry and himself a member of the general executive board. Shortly after her marriage, which was childless, Dorothy Bellanca resumed an active union career, joining with her husband a special committee established in 1920 to organize shops which had fled the union geographically by moving their production facilities out of the major cities and into depressed areas with surplus labor, especially in the Pennsylvania anthracite country.
During the early 1920's she also served as an organizer in New York City, Utica, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. And when in 1924 the A. C. W. A. established a Women's Bureau, Bellanca headed it until its dissolution in 1926. The bureau's failure to survive more than two years caused her to oppose its reestablishment in 1928. Indeed, as the only woman in the union hierarchy, she found it difficult to explain women's demands to her male colleagues. Not an uncritical advocate of women's rights, Bellanca believed that the cause of the union must supersede that of particular members, that the larger issues (class and economic) must transcend the smaller ones (sexual and social).
During the union resurgence triggered by the New Deal in 1933-1934, Bellanca acted as an exceptional organizer of women and children shirt workers in the more rural regions of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. She also participated in the massive 1934 general strike in the textile industry and later (1937 - 1938) as a special organizer for the C. I. O. 's Textile Workers' Organizing Committee among Southern workers. She was again elected to the general executive board of the A. C. W. A. in 1934 and continued thereafter to serve as the union's sole female vice-president until her death.
Like most needle-trades unionists of her generation, Bellanca did not restrict her reform efforts to the labor movement. She participated in local, state, and national politics, joining in the creation of the American Labor party in 1936 and serving on its state executive committee. In 1938 she ran unsuccessfully for Congress from a Brooklyn district with the endorsement of the American Labor and Republican parties. Her political contributions and her trade-union standing brought her numerous appointments to public committees and agencies. In a single year, 1941, she was a member of the Labor Advisory Committee of the federal Department of Labor, labor advisor to the International Labor Organization conference, and a member of the New York State Council on Discrimination in Employment. She was appointed to the New York State War Council Committee on Discrimination in Employment in 1943, but resigned the following year - together with seven other members - in protest against Gov. Thomas E. Dewey's refusal to support antidiscrimination legislation.
At the peak of her union career Dorothy Bellanca was struck by multiple myeloma, a disease of the bone marrow. Once a slender, strikingly attractive woman with sparkling black eyes, she had become at the time of her final illness a shell of a person racked by constant pain. After a confinement of several months, she died at Memorial Hospital in New York City in 1946, at the age of fifty-two. Her body was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, New York.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
Dorothy wrote to another woman unionist in 1925: "…women came into the trade and into the organization on grounds that were already established and fought out. One cannot expect equal consideration from men members where such conditions exist without being patient and waiting for proper opportunities. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
The Nation remarked, Mrs. Bellanca "was possessed by an unflagging and passionate concern for the sufferings of others. Without question she was the ablest woman organizer in the American labor movement. "
Connections
In August 1918 Dorothy married August Bellanca, a leader among the Italian immigrant workers in the men's clothing industry and himself a member of the general executive board. They didn't have children.
Dorothy Bellanca was a member of the Labor Advisory Committee of the federal Department of Labor and the New York State Council on Discrimination in Employment.