International Women's Day
Monday, 8 March 2010 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_the_kThe song Bread & Roses was inspired by the IWW (Wobbly) organizing campaign in the Lawrence, Mass textile mills. The workers were almost all female (since the owners could pay them less) and mostly immigrants. My family history somehow intersects here: I heard fuzzy stories growing up about my Socialist Grandfather Knebel running away from the company police on the Lawrence train platform—I assumed he was in town making trouble.
March 8th used to be one pivot point of my year.
I was a member of a succession of "movement" bands, playing rhythm guitar, singing & snarking for rallies, events and picket lines. We performed Bread & Roses many times, at a zippier 6/8 pace than the Baez sister's embedded video below.
Let's hear it for the folk process, which moved Mimi Fariña to set Oppenheim's poem to a much more singable tune. We also rewrote some of James Oppenheim's original lyrics, which seemed to define women's power solely through motherhood. In the second verse, we sang:
As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men
If solely we should triumph, what profit to us then?
We've lived too long enfettered, all our choices merely poses
Fight for a working union: bread & roses, bread & roses.
The third verse declares the rising of the women means the rising of the race. This sounded a dischordant eugenic bell in our heads. We improved it to: The rising of the women raises up the human race.
March 8th used to be one pivot point of my year.
I was a member of a succession of "movement" bands, playing rhythm guitar, singing & snarking for rallies, events and picket lines. We performed Bread & Roses many times, at a zippier 6/8 pace than the Baez sister's embedded video below.
Let's hear it for the folk process, which moved Mimi Fariña to set Oppenheim's poem to a much more singable tune. We also rewrote some of James Oppenheim's original lyrics, which seemed to define women's power solely through motherhood. In the second verse, we sang:
As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men
If solely we should triumph, what profit to us then?
We've lived too long enfettered, all our choices merely poses
Fight for a working union: bread & roses, bread & roses.
The third verse declares the rising of the women means the rising of the race. This sounded a dischordant eugenic bell in our heads. We improved it to: The rising of the women raises up the human race.
