Bread and Roses

Helen Todd and her colleagues campaign for women's suffrage. Todd, as a factory inspector, discussed how the right to vote would gain for working women and society "bread and roses"–referring to greater income, and life's roses.

The first mention of the phrase and its meaning appears in The American Magazine in September 1911. In an article by Helen Todd, she describes how a group of women from the Chicago Women's Club, after listening to advice from Senator Robert La Follette, decided to initiate an automobile campaign around the state of Illinois for the right of women to vote in June 1910.[5] The women who made up the first automobile campaign were Catherine McCulloch, a lawyer and justice of the peace; Anna Blount, a physician and surgeon; Kate Hughes, a minister; Helen Todd, a state factory inspector; and Jennie Johnson, a singer. Each of the speakers was assigned a subject in which they were an expert. McCulloch gave a record of the votes of the representatives and senators to their home constituents. Blount's subject was taxation without representation as concerns women. Hughes gave her speech on the history of the women's suffrage movement. Johnson opened up the speeches with a set of suffrage songs which was intended to focus and quiet the audience for the subsequent speeches. Helen Todd, as a factory inspector, represented the working women and discussed the need for laws concerning wages, work conditions, and hours.[6][7][8]

It is in Todd's speech on the condition of the working women that the phrase is first mentioned. A young hired girl expressed to Todd, who was staying with the hired girl's family overnight during the campaign, what she had liked the most about the speeches the night before: "It was that about the women votin' so's everybody would have bread and flowers too." Todd then goes on to explain how the phrase "Bread for all, and Roses too" expresses the soul of the women's movement and explains the meaning of the phrase in her speech.

Not at once; but woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life's Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.

— Helen Todd, 1910.[1]

The Women's Trade Union League was central in promoting the eight-hour day, a living wage and improved working conditions.

Helen Todd, subsequently, became involved in the fall of 1910 with the Chicago garment workers' strike, which was led by the Women's Trade Union League of Chicago.[9] The Women's Trade Union League worked closely with the Chicago Women's Club in organizing the strike, picket lines, speeches, and worker relief activities. Helen Todd and the president of the Women's Trade Union League Margaret Robins made a number of speeches during the strike and manned with the thousands of striking garment workers the picket lines.[10] During the strike, it was later reported that a sign was seen with the slogan "We want bread – and roses, too".[11][12][13]

In 1911 Helen Todd went out to California to help lead the suffrage movement in the state and campaign in the state's fall election for proposition 4, which sought women's suffrage.[14][15] The women's suffrage campaign proved successful, and the right for women to vote passed in the state in November 1911.[16][17] During the California campaign, the suffragettes carried banners with several slogans; one was "Bread for all, and Roses, too!"—the same phrase that Helen Todd used in her speech the previous summer.[18][19]

The phrase was subsequently picked up by James Oppenheim and incorporated into his poem 'Bread and Roses',[19] which was published in The American Magazine in December 1911, with the attribution line "'Bread for all, and Roses, too' – a slogan of the women in the West."[20] After the poem’s publication in 1911, the poem was published again in July 1912 in The Survey with the same attribution as in December 1911. It was published again on October 4, 1912, in The Public, a weekly led by Louis F. Post in Chicago, this time with the slogan being attributed to the "Chicago Women Trade Unionists".[21]

The children of Lawrence textile strikers, who were sent to New York City for temporary care, march with banners in solidarity with the textile strikers back in Massachusetts.

The first publication of Oppenheim's poem in book form was in the 1915 labor anthology, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest by Upton Sinclair. This time the poem had the new attribution and rephrased slogan: "In a parade of strikers of Lawrence, Mass., some young girls carried a banner inscribed, 'We want Bread, and Roses too!'".[22] The Lawrence textile strike, which lasted from January to March 1912, united dozens of immigrant communities under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World, and was led to a large extent by women. The Women's Trade Union League of Boston also became partially involved in the strike, and set up a relief station, which provided food.

The Women's Trade Union League of Boston had, however, only limited involvement in the strike, since it was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which did not endorse the strike. This restraint on involvement in the strike caused a number of Boston League members to resign. One critic of the AFL's failure to endorse the strike stated: "To me, many of the people in the AFL seem to be selfish, reactionary and remote from the struggle for bread and liberty of the unskilled workers..."[23] Although popular telling of the strike includes signs being carried by women reading "We want bread, but we want roses, too!", a number of historians are of the opinion that this account is ahistorical.[24][25][4][26]

Poster from 1912 of Rose Schneiderman as speaker with her famous bread and roses quote printed on it

In May 1912, Merle Bosworth gave a speech in Plymouth, Indiana, on women suffrage in which she repeated the discussion of taxation without representation and the meaning of the phrase "Bread and Roses" that Helen Todd and her companions gave in 1910 during their automobile campaign for the women's suffrage.[27] A month later in June 1912 Rose Schneiderman of the Women's Trade Union League of New York discussed the phrase in a speech she gave in Cleveland in support of the Ohio women's campaign for equal suffrage.[28] In her speech, which was partially published in the Women's Trade Union League journal Life and Labor, she stated:

What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.

— Rose Schneiderman, 1912.[29]

Schneiderman, subsequently, gave a number of speeches in which she repeated her quote about the worker desiring bread and roses. Due to these speeches, Schneiderman's name became intertwined with the phrase bread and roses. A year after the publication of Oppenheim's poem, the Lawrence textile strike, and Schneiderman's speech, the phrase had spread throughout the country. In July 1913, for instance, during a suffrage parade in Maryland, a float with the theme "Bread for all, and roses, too" participated. The float "bore ... a boat with three children, a boy with a basket of bread and two girls with a basket of roses."[30]

The source of Helen Todd's inspiration for the phrase "bread and roses" is unknown.[31] However, there is a quote by the Roman physician and philosopher Galen of Pergamon which closely parallels the sentiment and wording of the phrase. Edward Lane, in the notes of his 1838 translation of One Thousand and One Nights,[32] states that, according to 15th-century writer Shems-ed-Deen Moḥammad en-Nowwájee, Galen said, "He who has two cakes of bread, let him dispose of one of them for some flowers of narcissus; for bread is the food of the body, and the narcissus is the food of the soul."[33][34] The sentiment that the poor were not only lacking in food for the body, but also flowers for the soul was a theme among reformers of the period.[35][36] In April 1907, Mary MacArthur of the British Women's Trade Union League visited the Women's Trade Union League of Chicago and gave a speech addressing this theme.[37] Alice Henry of the Chicago League reported that McArthur's message could be summed up by Galen's quote, which she had mentioned more than once, and that although the quote warns against the materialist nature of the industrial situation, it also points in the direction in which the reformers hopes may go. McArthur's version of Galen's quote is:

If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy flowers, for bread is food for the body, but flowers are food for the mind.

— Galen of Pergamon, c. 200 AD.[37][33]

The poem "Bread and Roses" has been set to music several times. The earliest version was set to music by Caroline Kohlsaat in 1917.[38][39][40] The first performance of Kohlsaat's song was at the River Forest Women's Club where she was the chorus director.[41][38] Kohlsaat's song eventually drifted to the picket line. By the 1930s, the song was being extensively used by women, while they fed and supported the strikers on the picket line at the manufacturing plants.[42] The song also migrated to the college campus. At some women's colleges, the song became part of their traditional song set.[43][44]

Since 1932, the song has been sung by graduating seniors at Mount Holyoke College during the Laurel Parade ceremony, part of the college's graduation tradition.[44] It is also one of the central songs at Bryn Mawr College, traditionally sung at the College's "Step-Sings".[45] The use of the song at Bryn Mawr College evolved out of the school's first-of-its-kind summer labor education program. In 1921, the school started the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers; each year, one hundred largely unschooled workers from factories, mills and sweatshops were brought to the school for an eight-week study in humanities and labor solidarity. The program served as a model for others in the labor education movement in the 1920s and 1930s.[43]

The song gained a larger audience after World War II with its publication in January 1952 in Sing Out!.[46] In 1974 the poem was set a second time to music by Mimi Fariña. This version has been recorded by various artists, including Judy Collins, Ani DiFranco, Utah Phillips, and Josh Lucker, and was performed by a slowly-growing crowd of workers in a moving/critical turning point scene in the 2014 movie "Pride."Pride_(2014_film) John Denver also set it to music in 1988, using a melody different from the more common Mimi Fariña version. It was again set to music in Germany by Renate Fresow, using a translation by the Hannoveraner Weiberquartett, but which is sung mostly with the German translation by Peter Maiwald.[47] Composer Christian Wolff wrote a piano piece entitled "Bread and Roses" (1976) based on the strike song.[48] In 1989/91, Si Kahn wrote a song the refrain of which starts with the song's title: "They all sang 'Bread and Roses'".[49]

The poem has been translated into Russian by Russian poet Kirill Felixovich Medvedev, set to the original Kohlsaat music, and performed by the Moscow-based political activist punk collective Arkadiy Kots (Аркадий Коц), appearing on their 2016 album Music for the working class.[50]