Just months into her first job, Clara and her coworkers walked out over the company’s pay system, which involved the workers keeping track of piles of tiny tickets representing their production. They were not allowed to keep the tickets on the sewing tables. They were not allowed to place them in their pockets. The company was betting that they would lose track of the tickets, and they did. Some of the girls who walked out were as young as eight. They worked in corners of the factory called “kindergartens,” where they trimmed threads on finished garments for fourteen hours a day and where they had to hide in boxes on the rare occasion that an inspector showed up to enforce new laws prohibiting children from working at night.

Clara was not resigned to living her life as a piece of machinery, as she claimed the work was designed to make her feel. When her shift ended at night, she would walk to the public library, where she read through its vast collection of Russian classics. Then she would stumble home to sleep a few hours before going back to the factory in the morning. In her second year in New York, she joined a free night school, where she learned to read in English, and during lunch at the garment factories, she would read aloud to the younger girls from Dickens and Shelley and George Eliot and Thomas Hood. She started reading Marx in classes at the Rand School, too, and then formed a small fist of a study group that wandered the streets during lunch, to talk without their bosses being able to listen in.

After the decision was made to strike at Cooper Union in 1909, after the workers gathered there raised their hands and recited the oath, a delegation of fifteen women (along with a man, appointed to lead them) ran to nearby halls to report the decision to the thousands of workers who had overflowed from the main meeting. In these halls, too, the strike was unanimously approved. In the morning, they went in to work at shirtwaist factories across the city. They sat at their machines and waited for the walkout to begin. At one factory, a sixteen-year-old worker named Rose Perr later reported that the women sat silently for what seemed a long time, that the room was alive with some kind of energy, but that no one moved until somehow they were all on their feet at once, without any one of them having taken the lead.