FESTA DELLA DONNA - Tutto cominciò l'8 marzo 1908... / Camilla Ravera racconta - 8 marzo: Perché non è una festa

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8 marzo 1908, Stati Uniti. L’assenza di sistemi di sicurezza e le pessime condizioni di lavoro causano un grave incendio nell’industria tessile Cotton, una fabbrica ad alta concentrazione di lavoratrici. Nelle fiamme perdono la vita 129 donne, rimaste imprigionate nella fabbrica: Mr. Johnson, il proprietario, usava chiudere le porte durante l’orario di lavoro, per impedire agli operai di uscire.

In ricordo della tragedia, sin dagli anni immediatamente successivi al suo accadimento, negli Stati Uniti si organizzano celebrazioni per commemorarla.

Presto l’importanza di questa data, 8 marzo, varca i confini americani: si diffonde in tutto il mondo grazie alle associazioni femministe e diventa il simbolo dei maltrattamenti che la donna ha dovuto subire, ma anche il punto di partenza del proprio riscatto.

Nel secondo dopoguerra l’UDI, Unione Donne Italiane, sceglie un fiore per questa ricorrenza: la mimosa, profumatissima e impalpabile, povera e selvatica, ma che subito si carica di una precisa connotazione politica. Sin dal momento della loro scelta, i grappoli gialli delle mimose diventano il simbolo delle donne e del loro combattere insieme.

fonte:  http://www.intrage.it/rubriche/festivita_ricorrenze/8_marzo_festa_donna/origini_festa_donna/index.shtml

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Sweatshops & Strikes Before 1911

Over ninety-five percent of New York shops were found defective with respect to safety.  Buildings were without fire escapes and adequate exits.  Cluttered and crowded working conditions posed a constant health and fire risk.  Many shops had locked doors funneling workers leaving at the end of the day past a check point where bags were searched for stolen ribbons, buttons or finished clothing.

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Clara Lemlich, an organizer for shirtwaist makers, had already been beaten by police and arrested 17 times before the Cooper Union meeting on November 22.  After 2 hours of speeches she took the podium to tell in Yiddish about the intolerable conditions in the shops and call for an end to the discussion and a vote on a general strike, now!  The response was immediate and overwhelmingly affirmative.  Within a day 20,000 shirtwaist makers had walked out, effectively bringing production to a halt.  The uprising of the 20,000

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Women raised their hands voting for the strike and pledging to walk the picket lines for its success.  This action brought them into clear conflict with police, judges, lawyers, employers, but also their families and other workers.

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The march to City Hall brought attention to the unethical treatment of workers and the strike.  Demands were made for better working conditions and pay, abolition of the subcontracting system and fines, payment for supplies, a 52-hour work week, weekly pay and limited overtime, and equal distribution of overtime during the slack season.  These culminated in a demand for recognition of the union.

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Unprincipled owners hired scabs, police, thugs and prostitutes to disrupt orderly picketing.  Arrested strikers were taken to Jefferson Market Prison for booking.  The Women’s Trade Union League was very successful raising funds to pay fines and bail but some women did have to spend time in the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island.

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Women turned to allies in the upper and middle class including the Women’s Trade Union League for assistance.  This affiliation was not without ambivalence. The “allies” were often rich white Christians who did not necessarily understand Yiddish or Italian, nor did they all hold in high regard the cultural and religious practices of the immigrants they attempted to aid.  Carola Woerishoffer, a young wealthy graduate of Bryn Mawr, used her resources to buy houses and then, waiting in the Jefferson Market Court, offered the deeds as security for strikers’ release.

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Chicago Sunday Tribune, March 26, 1911

New York Fire Kills 148: Girl Victims Leap to Death from Factory

One hundred and forty-eight persons nine-tenths of them girls and young women are known to have been killed in a fire which burned out the ten story factory building at the northwest corner of Washington place and Green street, just off Washington square, this afternoon.

One hundred and forty-one of them were instantly killed, either by leaps from the windows and down elevator shafts, or by being smothered. Seven died in the hospitals.

FALLING BODIES HURT RESCUERS.
Women and girl machine operators jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors in groups of twos and threes into life nets and their bodies spun downward from the high windows of the building so close together that the few nets soon were broken and the firemen and passersby who helped hold them were crushed to the pavement by the rain of falling bodies.

Within a few minutes after the first cry of fire had been yelled on the eighth floor of the building, fifty-three were lying half nude, on the pavement. Bare legs in some cases were burned a dark brown and waists and skirts in tatters showed that they had been torn in the panic within the building before the girls got to the windows to jump to death.

The mangled bodies lay there with the spill of the water which the firemen soon were pouring from water towers and hose into the building, soaking them. There was no time to clear away the dead in the street. Inside the building the firemen believed there still were dozens upon dozens of girls and men and they wasted no time upon those whom they knew to be dead.

BODIES LIE IN PILES.
It was more than an hour and a half before the firemen could enter the floor where the fire started, the eighth, and they came back then with word that a glance showed fifty dead bodies on the floor alone.

In the elevator shaft was a pile of bodies estimated conservatively at twenty-five bodies of girls who had jumped down the elevator shaft after the elevator had made its last trip.

Some of the girls, in jumping, smashed through the sidewalk vault lights on the Washington place side of the building. The bodies that continued to crash upon the vault light finally made a hole in it about five feet in diameter. Just at dusk firemen and policemen were pulling many half nude and burned corpses from this hole.

CROKER STAGGERED BY SIGHTS
Inside the building on the three top floors the sights were even more awful. When Fire Chief Croker could make his way into these three floors he saw a tragedy that utterly staggered him that sent him, a man used to viewing horrors, back and down into the street with quivering lips.

The floors were black with smoke. And then he saw as the smoke drifted away bodies burned to bare bone. There were skeletons bending over sewing machines, the victims having been killed as they worked. Other piles of skeletons lay before every door and elevator shaft where the sufferers fell in their effort to escape.

“The worst fire in a New York building,” said Chief Croker as he came out among the ambulances and fire apparatus again, “since the burning of the Brooklyn theater in the 70′s.”

FOUND LIVING AMONG DEAD.
More than an hour after the last of the girls had jumped policemen who had approached the building to gather up the bodies and stretch them out on the opposite side of Greene street found one girl, Bertha Weintrout, the last girl to leap from the ninth floor, still breathing. Two or three dead bodies were piled alongside her, and as the policemen were moving those away they heard the girl sigh. The police yelled for a doctor, and the girl, still bleeding and dripping wet was hurried to St. Vincent’s hospital.

A man who has an office on the third floor of the building in Washington place, across from the burned building, said he looked up upon hearing shrieks and saw a girl climb out of a window on the ninth floor of the Asch building, where the fire occurred. At this time the man, who refused to give his name, says there was no sign of smoke or flame. The girl stood for a moment. Then she jumped. She whirled over and over, a streak of black gown and white underclothing, for nine floors and crashed into the sidewalk.

LEAP TO THEIR DEATH.
About the same time Dr. Ralph Fralick, 119 Waverley place, was walking across Washington Square park toward the building and started on a run as he saw the heads of screaming girls at the window sills of the ninth floor.

They stood for a time, the doctor says, on the little ledge. Then a girl jumped and another and another. Some of them fell straight as a plummet and smashed through the vault lights of the street into the basement under the sidewalk. Most of them turned many times, shrieking as they fell.

One girl, the doctor says, deliberately took off her hat and laid on the ledge before she jumped.

MAN PUSHES MANY OUT.
But the greater number were jumping from the east side of the corner building and landing burned and crushed in Green street. Here one man ran from window to window, picked up girls bodily, and dropped them to the pavement. Either he thought the nets were there to catch them or he believed this was the easiest way.

When he had dropped the last girl within reach he climbed on to the sill and jumped straight out, with a hand raised as a bridge jumper holds his arm upward to balance himself.

All the girls had jumped from the Greene street side of the building and it seemed that the ninth floor ledge on this side was clear when two girls clambered out upon it. One of them seemed self-poised; at least her movements were slow and deliberate. With her was a younger girl shrieking and twisting with fright.

TRIES TO SAVE COMPANION.
The crowd yelled to the two not to jump. The older girl placed both arms around the younger and pulled her back on the ledge toward the brick wall and tried to press her close to the wall.
But the younger girl twisted her head and shoulders loose from the protecting embrace, took a step or two to the right and jumped.

After her younger companion had died the girl who was left stood back against the wall motionless, and for a moment she held her hands rigid against her thighs, her head tilted upward and looking toward the sky. Smoke began to trickle out of the broken window a few inches to her left. She began to raise her arms then and make slow gestures as if she were addressing a crowd above her. A tongue of flame licked up along the window sill and singed her hair and then out of the smoke which was beginning to hide her from view she jumped, feet foremost, falling, without turning, to the street. It was the Bertha Weintrout, whom the police found still breathing an hour later under the cataracts spilling from ledge to ledge upon the dead who lay around her.

About 200 other employes, mostly women, in the meantime had got out on the roof of the building, crazy with fright. Across the small court at the back of the building are the rear windows of the New York University Law school.

LAW STUDENTS SAVE MANY.
At the first cry from the burning building, two of the law students, Charles T. Kremer and Elias Kanter, led a party of students to the roof of the law school building, is a story higher than the building where the fire occurred. Kanter and the other students dragged two short ladders to the roof of the law school and by making a sort of extension ladder of the two short ones Kremer got down on to the roof of the burning building and tried to get the girls into orderly line and send them up the ladder to where his school fellows were waiting to grab them to safety.

The students got 150 women, girls, and men away from the burning building in this way.

MANY FIGHT FOR SAFETY.
At the other end of the roof from the students’ ladders, fifty men and women were fighting with one another to climb the five feet to the roof of an adjoining building at the corner of Waverly place and Greene street. The law students say that the men bit and kicked the women and girls for a chance to climb to the other roof and safety.

Kremer, when the last of the group nearest the law school had been saved, climbed down the ladder to the roof of the burning building and went down the roof scuttle to the top floor.

He could see only one girl, who ran shrieking toward him with her hair burning. She had come up from the floor beneath and as she came to Kremer she fainted in his arms. He smothered the sparks in her hair with his hands and then tried to carry her up the narrow ladder to the roof. But because she was unconscious he had to wrap long strands of her hair around his hand and drag her to fresh air in the way. His friend Kanter helped him to get the girl up the ladder to the law school roof and safety.

fonte: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/texts/newspaper/cst_032611.html?location=Fire!

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Camilla Ravera racconta – 8 marzo – Giornata Internazionale della Donna – Perché non è una festa

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8 marzo 1908 : Mr. Johnson , proprietario dell’industria “Cotton” chiude a chiave all’interno della sua azienda le lavoratrici impegnate in una rivendicazione sindacale. Un incendio farà perire, arse vive, 129 lavoratrici.

Fu Rosa Luxemburg che propose questo giorno, l’ otto marzo, come:

La Giornata Internazionale della Donna.

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(Tratto da “Camilla Ravera racconta la sua vita” di Rita Palombo – Rusconi editore)

…Nel 1898 andammo a Valenza. Papà veniva continuamente trasferito, specie dove era necessario istituire nuovi uffici del Ministero delle Finanze. In quegli anni lo Stato neonato si estendeva per dare vita alle strutture periferiche (….……..) Così come ad Acqui, a Valenza assistetti ad un fatto che mi rimase scolpito nella memoria. Per molto tempo appartenne ai ricordi della mia infanzia. Ma dopo, quando la mia scelta politica fu compiuta, ciò che successe quel giorno divenne un riferimento storico della mia battaglia per 1′emancipazione e la liberazione della donna.

Non ricordo più quanti anni avessi, forse frequentavo la seconda elementare, quindi sette o otto.

Mi piaceva andare a scuola, perché ero contenta di stare con gli altri bambini.

La mamma mi accompagnava ogni mattina e spesso si spazientiva perché mi fermavo ad osservare qualsiasi cosa colpisse l’attenzione. Eravamo arrivati da poche settimane in quella cittadina e avevo ancora molte cose da scoprire.

Mentre chiacchieravo con la mamma, sentii all’improvviso delle voci alterate, arrabbiate e subito dopo, da un angolo, vidi comparire tantIssime donne che avanzavano verso di noi. Ebbi paura. Strinsi la mano di mia madre e lei mi obbligò a fermarmi.

Era un corteo di lavoratrici. Prima ancora che chiedessi chi fossero e perché urlassero in quel modo la mamma, accortasi dello spavento che provavo, mi disse che erano le pulitrici dell’oro che protestavano, guidate da un uomo, un socialista che si chiamava Filippo Turati, perché con la loro paga, guadagnata lavorando dodici ore al giorno, non riuscivano a comprarsi nemmeno il pane. Mi invitò poi ad osservare le loro mani. Io le guardai: erano completamente rose dall’ acido che serviva a pulire l’oro. Erano scalze, malvestite e smunte.Chiesi dove andassero e perché quell’uomo le guidasse.

Lei rispose che forse erano dirette alla Lega delle lavoratrici e che Turati, anche se non era povero, era alla testa del corteo perché era un socialista. E per questo era ammirevole.

Poco dopo scomparvero in una via e mia madre mi spiegò che non bisognava aver paura dei lavoratori che probabilmente avrei visto altre volte camminare urlando per strada.

In quel modo la mamma mi insegnò ad amare i deboli e innanzi tutto a rispettarli. Allora mi chiesi: “Chi ha soldi non potrebbe darli a chi non li ha?”. Questa domanda mi frullò nella testa per giorni e giorni. Anch’io, pensavo, potevo far qualcosa per coloro che soffrivano.

Inutile sottolineare l’importanza che quelle lavoratrici ebbero nella formazione politica di Camilla, che si tranquillizzò sulla sorte di quelle donne solo quando la mamma le disse:

«Le ripulitrici dell’ oro hanno ottenuto 1′aumento del salario.

Ora lavorano e sono contente».

Dopo un anno, nel 1899, i Ravera si trasferirono a Casale Monferrato. Lì Camilla assistette ad un altro episodio che influì molto sulle sue scelte politiche.

Andavamo spesso ai giardini pubblici, di fronte ai quali si stava costruendo un palazzo.

Io osservavo con interesse quel lavoro. Un giorno, oltre ai muratori, notai delle donne che trasportavano calce ed attrezzi pesanti sulle spalle e si arrampicavano su precarie scale di legno.

Mi fu spiegato che erano le mogli di quei muratori, che aiutavano i mariti a guadagnare quel tanto in più che rendeva sufficiente il salario per portare avanti la famiglia.

Fu allora che nacque in me coscientemente l’interesse per la condizione della donna lavoratrice, per i suoi problemi e per la lotta per l’emancipazione femminile.

Camilla intanto aveva terminato le scuole elementari e poi quelle complementari. Per continuare gli studi fu costretta a frequentare !’Istituto Magistrale, perché a Casale Monferrato c’era solo un ginnasio maschile in un collegio privato.

Quella scuola era nata grazie alle battaglie di alcune insegnanti, quasi tutte giovanissime, che prima avevano dato vita all’istituto privato, poi, con il tempo, grazie anche, se non soprattutto, all’ ottimo insegnamento che impartivano, apprezzato da studentesse e genitori, ottennero la convenzione a trasformarlo in una scuola parificata e successivamente da parificata a statale.

Erano quelli gli anni in cui si cominciava anche in Italia a parlare di emancipazione femminile. E furono belli.

Camilla Ravera

Nata ad Acqui Terme (Alessandria) il 18 giugno 1889, deceduta a Roma il 14 aprile 1988, insegnante.

È stata la prima delle due donne italiane sinora nominate senatore a vita (la seconda è Rita Levi Montalcini). Quando, il 26 gennaio 1982, fece il suo primo ingresso a Palazzo Madama, i senatori, riuniti in assemblea plenaria, l’accolsero tutti in piedi. Aveva 96 anni quando fu ancora chiamata a presiedere l’Assemblea. Un altro suo record: è stato il primo caso, nella storia dei movimenti politici del mondo, di una donna nominata (era il 1927), segretaria del suo partito. Era il Partito Comunista d’Italia (del quale era stata uno dei fondatori nel 1921 e nel quale aveva subito assunto la guida dell’organizzazione femminile, fondando anche il periodico La compagna). Camilla Ravera resse la segreteria del PCdI sino al 1930 quando, rientrata clandestinamente in Italia dalla Francia, fu arrestata e condannata a quindici anni e mezzo, trascorsi tra carcere e confino sino alla caduta del fascismo. Con Umberto Terracini, fu l’ultima dei confinati a lasciare Ventotene (“una ciabatta in mare”, come ebbe a descrivere l’isola). Lì ebbe a conoscere Alessandro Pertini (che l’avrebbe poi scelta, quarantaquattro anni dopo, per il laticlavio) e lì, con Terracini, fu espulsa dal suo partito per aver condannato il patto Ribbentrop-Molotov.

Riacquistata la libertà, Camilla Ravera riuscì a raggiungere dopo molte peripezie i suoi famigliari, che erano sfollati a San Secondo di Pinerolo. Dopo l’8 settembre 1943, sapendo di essere di nuovo ricercata, la Ravera riparò in un casolare sulle colline, che diventò presto luogo di incontri politici clandestini. Dovette abbandonarlo quando i fascisti cominciarono a dare alle fiamme tutti i casolari della zona. Rientrata a Torino dopo la Liberazione, Camilla Ravera, riammessa nel PCI, divenne consigliere comunale. Nel 1947, con Ada Gobetti, del Partito d’Azione, fu tra le fondatrici dell’Unione Donne Italiane. Nel 1948 fu eletta deputato per il PCI. Aveva intanto ripreso le battaglie di sempre, cominciate idealmente quando lei, di famiglia borghese, aveva assistito, ancora bambina, ad uno sciopero di operaie a Valenza. Soprattutto si è impegnata nelle battaglie per la pace. Camilla Ravera ha lasciato molte pubblicazioni. Al suo libro Diario di trent’anniè andato, nel 1973, il “Premio Prato”. Nel 1978 la sua Breve storia del movimento femminile in Italia ha avuto il “Premio Viareggio”. Nel 1979 gli Editori Riuniti hanno raccolto in volume le Lettere al Partito e alla famiglia.Nel 1992 la Fondazione Istituto Gramsci ha acquisito l’Archivio Storico delle donne “Camilla Ravera”, costituito nel 1987 dalla Commissione femminile del PCI. Alla Ravera sono intitolate, tra l’altro, strade a Roma e in Toscana, la Federazione di Torino dei DS, Società cooperative, alcuni circoli del PRC.

Fonte Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia

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fonte:  http://a-sinistra.blogspot.com/2011/03/camilla-ravera-racconta-8-marzo.html

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