An account of the successful Bronx bread strike during the Great Depression organized by the United Council of Working Class Women and led by Anna Cohen.

‘We Stick Together—And We Win’ by Anna Cohen from Working Woman. Vol. 5 No. 1. January, 1934.

Six months of Roosevelt’s New Deal did not improve the conditions of the Bronx workers. Unemployment, low wages and high prices on all necessities of life are still the order of the day. Especially hard is the lot of the housewives. With an inflated dollar and the high cost of living it is no easy matter to make ends meet. The workers of the Bronx felt that something must be done to fight back the attacks on the workers’ standard of living. It was necessary to start a struggle.

In November 1933 the Bronx section of the United Councils of Working Class Women have laid the foundation for a struggle. The membership called a Bronx Conference against the “High Cost of Living.”

This Conference proved a huge success. Hundreds of delegates representing various workers’ organizations and houses and visitors were present. This splendid turnout showed to the Women’s Councils that the Bronx workers were ready for a struggle against the high cost of living.

Encouraged by this Conference as well as by some victories gained by workers in other neighborhoods the Women’s Councils No. 39 and 34 decided on a fight to lower the prices of bread and rolls. They canvassed the neighborhood from house to house and distributed leaflets calling the workers and housewives to a mass protest meeting.

At this mass meeting a Neighborhood Committee was elected to go to the baker boss Shereshefsky at 765 East 182nd Street with demands for lower prices on bread and rolls. Mr. Shereshefsky has promised to meet the workers’ demands. However, the baker boss broke his promise and spread rumors of bribery against the Neighborhood Committee. He has also spread slanderous lies against the Women’s Councils.

United Action Brings Results

A strike was declared at Mr. Shereshefsky’s bakery. The fight proved to be a pretty tough one. This bakery belonged to the Bakery Owners’ Association. The workers had to fight not only Mr. Shereshefsky but the entire bosses’ association, who knew very well that if one of their members submits to the workers’ demands the rest will have to follow.

Gangsters and police were present false injunction was introduced and continually near the bakery. And twelve arrests made.

Yet this terror did not scare the workers. The Women’s Councils No. 12 and 28 from the territory were drawn in, and many more councils sent committees for picket duty. Solidly they picketed day after day, held open air meetings and demonstrations, distributed thousands of leaflets calling the workers to indoor mass meetings support the struggle and arousing the neighborhood to

The workers did support the strike. They did not buy bread from the bakery that was on strike. Mr. Shereshefsky tried many ways to break the strike. He issued leaflets appealing to the neighborhood, telling the workers that he gives a great deal of charity. The workers have answered that if he wants to be charitable he can do so, but out of his own pocket and not at the expense of the workers.

The strike went on for two weeks until it spread to two more than more bakeries, one at 738 and another at 762 East 180th Street. The Bakery Bosses’ Association saw that the workers were determined to win. It proved too expensive for them to continue the strike. They had to give in.

On January 21 the strike was settled, with a victory for the workers. Bread went down from 8 to 7 cents per lb. and rolls from 20 to 18 cents per dozen. All other bakeries in the vicinity which were not involved soon followed with lower prices on bread and rolls. We received reports that as a result of the Bronx strike workers put up demands and made workers put up demands and made settlements with bakeries in other neighborhoods and sections in New York.

Pennies Saved Will Help

There is no doubt that the few pennies gained are a help to workers’ families, but more than the few cents are the gains from the important lessons which the workers learned from this small strike. This strike was led and carried on almost entirely by housewives. It showed what organization and unity of the workers can do. It once more proved the necessity of organizing women. If a group of women in one neighborhood can gain a little, then surely thousands of organized women can gain a great deal more.

We of the Bronx neighborhood will continue our fight for lower prices on milk and other dairy products. This will be our next step.

Working class women! Let us organize and fight the High Cost of Living not only in New York but everywhere in the United States. Let us fight for better conditions, for a better world.

Editor’s Note:

As we go to press we are informed of another action against the N.R.A. initiated by the Women’s Council No. 16 of Brownsville, N.Y. The workers of 274 East 93rd Street, Brownsville, N.Y. through united action were able to defeat the attempts of the owners of the Dime Savings Bank to raise their rent from $3 to $6 a month. At an affair celebrating the victory seven dollars was donated by the workers to our magazine the WORKING WOMAN. We call on women’s organizations all over the U.S.A. to follow suit to organize a struggle against the high cost of living.

The Working Woman, ‘A Paper for Working Women, Farm Women, and Working-Class Housewives,’ was first published monthly by the Communist Party USA Central Committee Women’s Department from 1929 to 1935, continuing until 1937. It was the first official English-language paper of a Socialist or Communist Party specifically for women (there had been many independent such papers). At first a newspaper and very much an exponent of ‘Third Period’ politics, it played particular attention to Black women, long invisible in the left press. In addition, the magazine covered home-life, women’s health and women’s history, trade union and unemployment struggles, Party activities, as well poems and short stories. The newspaper became a magazine in 1933, and in late 1935 it was folded into The Woman Today which sought to compete with bourgeois women’s magazines in the Popular Front era. The Woman today published until 1937. During its run editors included Isobel Walker Soule, Elinor Curtis, and Margaret Cowl among others.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/wt/v5n01-jan-1934-Working-Women-R7524-R2.pdf