The Woman Behind The New Deal

This message comes from Progressive Insurance and the name your price tool. It helps you find car insurance options in your budget. Try it today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Prologue. The fire. 03/25/1911. Washington Square in Manhattan. Pauline Pepp arrives at work on the 8th Floor of a high rise building. She sits at her station, an industrial sewing machine. Well, it was a very big place. Oh my god. I couldn't just a big place with machines and windows. Lot of windows with shades. That's what they had. Mhmm. They like that. This is her voice recorded years later in an interview. Not a young girl. Not a Jewish young girls who are married, engaged. They were lovely girls. Pauline was one of hundreds of workers, mostly young women, employed by the Triangle Waist Company. That made the very popular Gibson Girl blouses, fluffy high neck, big sleeves. They used to have tables full of material, like very fine lingerie. You know, it was a big miracle blouses. The work was constant. Maximizing the use of space was very important to boosting the profitability of the business, So the workers were actually working at their sewing machines shoulder to shoulder. Their forearms were practically brushing each other as they did their work. Today, we call this kind of place a sweatshop. There were slots in the back of the machines, just holes, and the, excess cloth and the strings and threads would be pushed down into sort of a a trash slot at the back of the desk so that the debris could be brushed away quickly without having to be removed. It was hot. It was loud. It was not safe. They would be frequently oiling the machines to make sure that the machines worked as quickly as as possible. An overcrowded room filled with people and machines all on top of piles of oily cloth. Meanwhile, they were supervised with generally by men who smoked cigars while they worked. Cigar ash fell onto the fabric, went onto the oily cloths. So what you had is a circumstance where it wasn't if a fire would start. It was when a fire would start. At 04:40PM, right before Pauline was about to wrap up her shift, a fire started on the 8th Floor and quickly spread. Pauline watched in horror. That lingerie was so so bad. It went in a blaze in a minute. The windows got caught. The shades, everything. Oh my god. And the workers began fleeing. The fire escape collapsed. There was only one exit door. The owners of the company had closed some of the other doors to prevent people from stealing. The factory became a trap. Inside of the building was a basically, a towering inferno. Bysanders started to gather in the streets. And witnessed the first of the women jumping out of the windows to escape …