Angela Bambace (1898-1975)
Italian American History and Heroes
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Labor organizer Angela Bambace began working in New York City's garment factory at the age of 17. She helped organize New York City's 1919 Dressmakers and Waistmakers Strike, the 1932 Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union strike in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and the 1933 walkout of 75,000 dressmakers in New York City. In 1936, she established the first women's local of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union and twenty years later she was on the Union's executive board. Bambace was committed to organizing women textile workers in the South and to the Civil Rights movement. See Jennifer Guglielmo's "History of Italian-American Women’s Radicalism." |