Women's History Month, Day One: Learn the Names They Didn't Teach You

TL;DR: Women built the American labor movement. Then they were written out of it. On Day One of Women's History Month, let's learn four names the textbooks skipped: Clara Lemlich, Dolores Huerta, Luisa Moreno, and Fannie Lou Hamer. We owe them more than a hashtag.

Okay, let's unpack something my dad told me when I was about twelve years old.

We were at a union hall in South Philly—the kind with bad coffee and better arguments—and I asked him who started all of this. Who built the labor movement that made it so workers could go home at the end of the shift instead of sleeping under the machine?

He rattled off a list. Samuel Gompers. John L. Lewis. Eugene Debs. A few more men I'd eventually read about in a textbook.

He wasn't wrong. But he was wildly incomplete.

Because here's what the textbooks usually skip: women built the labor movement. Young immigrant women, Black women, Latina women, women who were legally barred from voting, women who were told their place was in the home—they organized wildcat strikes in the middle of winter, they faced beatings from Pinkerton detectives, they gave speeches in multiple languages on street corners, and then they watched men take the podium, sign the contracts, and get their names in the history books.

Women's History Month, Day One. Let's do it right. Let's learn the names.

Clara Lemlich, Who Started Everything

It is November 22, 1909. The Cooper Union in Lower Manhattan is packed—mostly with young Jewish immigrant women who work in the shirtwaist factories of the Garment District. They've been listening to union leaders (men) debate strategy for hours. The room is exhausted and restless.

Then a 23-year-old woman named Clara Lemlich pushes to the front and demands to speak. She's just recovered from a beating by company thugs who broke six of her ribs. She speaks in Yiddish. The translation is roughly: "I have listened to all the speakers. I have no more patience for talk. I move that we go on a general strike!"

The room erupts. The crowd takes a Jewish oath—If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise. Twenty thousand shirtwaist makers walk off their jobs the next day. It becomes known as the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand—the largest strike by women workers in American history up to that point.

Within five years, Clara Lemlich would be blacklisted from the garment industry entirely. Her name would not appear in most labor history books for another half century. Samuel Gompers, who was in that room and who later took credit for the organizing energy it created, would be remembered as the father of the American labor movement.

(The math isn't mathing, is it.)

Clara Lemlich kept organizing for the rest of her long life—tenants' rights, consumer boycotts, the Communist Party (which got her blacklisted a second time, this time by the government). She died in a nursing home in 1982 at 96 years old. The nurses there went on strike for better conditions. Clara, they reported, helped organize them.

Dolores Huerta, Who Co-Founded a Movement and Got Half the Credit

Ask anyone who started the United Farm Workers, and they'll say Cesar Chavez. They're not wrong. They're also not complete.

Dolores Huerta co-founded the UFW. She was Chavez's equal partner in building the organization from the ground up in the early 1960s. She coined the phrase "Sí, se puede"—yes, we can—the phrase that would later become the rallying cry of an entire presidential campaign (with, notably, zero acknowledgment of where it came from).

Huerta negotiated directly with California legislators for farmworkers' rights. She organized the 1965 Delano grape strike and the subsequent consumer boycott that actually worked—convincing millions of Americans to stop buying grapes in solidarity with the workers who picked them. She did this while raising eleven children.

She was also beaten by San Francisco police officers at a peaceful protest in 1988, suffering a ruptured spleen and multiple broken ribs, and the resulting public outcry led the San Francisco PD to actually change its crowd control policies. (She was 58 years old.)

When Cesar Chavez died in 1993, the national obituaries ran long. When people talk about the farmworkers' movement, Chavez is the name they use. Huerta, now in her 90s and still working, is often treated as a supporting character in her own story.

The lesson here isn't to diminish Chavez's real contributions. It's to understand that the systematic minimization of women's work isn't accidental—it's how power writes its own history. The guy who signs the contract gets the monument. The woman who organized the workers who made the contract possible gets a footnote, if she's lucky.

Luisa Moreno, Who You've Probably Never Heard Of

I will bet you actual money that you didn't learn about Luisa Moreno in school. I didn't learn about her from my dad, who was a union organizer. I found her on my own, in a footnote, in a book about California labor history that I read in my mid-twenties.

Luisa Moreno was a Guatemalan-born labor organizer who became one of the most powerful union voices in 1930s and 1940s America. She organized cannery workers and agricultural workers across California and Florida—mostly Latina and Mexican workers who had been specifically excluded from New Deal labor protections (yes, deliberately excluded; Southern Democrats made FDR write them out of the legislation as the price of their support). She founded the El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española—the Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples—in 1938, making it one of the first national Latino civil rights organizations in the country.

Moreno understood, decades before the word "intersectional" existed, that labor rights and racial justice and women's rights were not separate fights. She organized across all three simultaneously, which made her a threat to multiple power structures at once.

In 1950, she was deported under the McCarthy-era Alien Registration Act. The U.S. government called her a communist. She accepted "voluntary departure" rather than face a longer legal battle, and she left the country she had spent two decades fighting to make more just for the people who built it.

Her name is not in most labor history books. Say it anyway. Luisa Moreno.

Fannie Lou Hamer, Who Was Sick and Tired

Fannie Lou Hamer is sometimes claimed by the civil rights movement (correctly), sometimes by the voting rights movement (correctly), and almost never by the labor movement—which is incomplete, because she understood that all three were the same fight.

Hamer was a sharecropper's daughter who became a sharecropper herself in Mississippi, which meant she lived under a system of labor bondage that kept Black workers trapped through debt, violence, and legal exclusion from basic protections. When she tried to register to vote in 1962, she was evicted from the plantation where she worked and shot at. When she came back and registered anyway, she was beaten in a Mississippi jail in 1963—beaten so severely she suffered permanent kidney damage and a blood clot behind one eye.

She showed up at the 1964 Democratic National Convention to testify about what was happening to Black voters in Mississippi. President Johnson held an emergency press conference to pull TV cameras away from her testimony. It didn't work—the footage ran on the evening news anyway.

Her most famous line: "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." She meant it literally and politically simultaneously. She was chronically ill from the beating. She was exhausted by the weight of surviving a system designed to crush her. She organized anyway.

Hamer spent the rest of her life fighting for economic justice for poor Black Mississippians—not just voting rights, but actual material conditions. Housing. Food. Healthcare. She understood that political rights without economic power are just theater. This is something that certain strands of feminism have still not caught up with.

Why the Erasure Matters (And What It Costs Us)

This is not a "women are underappreciated" lament post. I'm not here to give you feelings. I'm here to give you analysis.

Here's what the erasure actually costs us:

It lets people claim that women "weren't involved" in labor and political history—and use that absence as evidence that women don't belong in leadership now. The absence was manufactured. It's being used against us.

It severs us from our own strategies. Clara Lemlich's consumer boycott playbook is the same one that Dolores Huerta used 50 years later and that we use today. When we don't know the lineage, we reinvent wheels and lose decades of tactical knowledge.

It tells us this work belongs to someone else. That organizing is a man's game. That our role is to follow, support, maybe inspire—but not to lead, not to strike, not to take the floor and say I have listened long enough and I move that we act.

That is exactly the lesson we are supposed to absorb. It is exactly the lesson we are going to refuse.

Quick Action: What to Do With This Today

We don't do "awareness" posts here. So here's what I'm asking of you specifically:

Name one of these women in a conversation today. Not on Instagram. In real life or in a meeting or to your coworker. Clara Lemlich. Dolores Huerta. Luisa Moreno. Fannie Lou Hamer. Pick one. Use her name. Tell people one thing she did.
Look up what labor organizing is happening in your zip code right now. Go to aflcio.org or search "[your city] labor union organizing 2026." There is almost certainly something. That's where this history lives in the present tense.
If you're in a workplace with a union contract, read it. If you're in a workplace without one, ask why not. These women didn't die (or get deported, or get beaten, or get blacklisted) so we could not know our own rights.
Share one of their names with a young person in your life who is learning history right now and probably not hearing these names. The school-to-textbook pipeline is not going to save us. We do this ourselves.

Women's History Month is 31 days. We are going to use all of them.

Now, what are we doing about it?

In solidarity and with a lot of coffee,
Maya