Clara Lemlich was a leader of the Uprising of 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York’s garment industry in 1909.

Lemlich was born in Gorodok, Ukraine and moved to the US in 1903 where she began working at a Lower East Side garment shop. Lemlich found the conditions appalling and began organizing women into the fledgling International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).

Lemlich led worker strikes at both the Weissen & Goldstein Factory and the Leiserson Factory, and was a regular speaker on picket lines around Manhattan. In 1909 she took the stage at a union meeting at Cooper Union and demanded a strike. This led to the Uprising of 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York’s garment industry which lasted for 14 weeks. After the strike, Lemlich was blacklisted by the garment industry and turned her attention to women’s suffrage.