Picketing the Syrian Shop: Confronting Mahjari Capitalism and Its Archival Afterlives

Between 1913 and 1934, the New York City garment industries endured a wave of strikes led by women and girls previously dismissed as unorganizable. Year after year, women coordinated walkouts numbering in the thousands, forcing their bosses to close shops and imposing new contracts, better wages, and safer working conditions. There is a sizable historiography on the garment industry and its connection to the women’s labor movement. One facet of this story gets routinely overlooked: the so-called “Syrian shops” of Brooklyn and Washington Street, kimono factories where 3,500 to 6,000 Arab American women and girls stitched for Syrian merchant-manufacturers. Before 1913, activists called the Syrian shops “unreachable,” deciding that the co-ethnic ties among Syrians made staging a confrontation between labor and capital impossible. That changed when 3,000 Syrian women walked out of their factories to join a citywide garment strike, surprising the ILGWU and ultimately wresting concessions from their bosses. In the years that followed, Syrian women joined more strikes, their numbers large enough to ensure victory from intransigent manufacturers’ associations. Despite their centrality to the garment strikes of the era, Syrian women are absent from the historiography on garment work... and labor activists are absent from much of the historiography of the Syrian mahjar (diaspora). This paper draws on union records, family papers, and oral histories to narrate the labor history of the Syrian shops during the 1913-1934 strikes. Tracking the contests between Syrian American garment workers and their Syrian American bosses, I ask: how does a labor movement look when waged within the ethnic community? How did Syrian women engage with New York City unions, and on what terms? I also examine the class politics of remembering (and forgetting) labor activism in the mahjar.