2025/09/01 by Eileen Boris · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Crafts, Textile, and Design #Labor Movements and Unions #Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11819122
openalex publication_date 2025/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/07
Migration chains and supply chains, merchants, manufacturers, and peddlers: These movements and men have dominated the history of the mahjari. Now Stacy D. Fahrenthold brings a transnational gender, racial/ethnic, and class analysis to, as she puts it, “the making of the global Syrian working class”—without neglecting the elite that emerged as simultaneously exploiters and community builders (3). In the process, she reconceptualizes iconic upheavals in the history of the rag trade and US labor history writ large: the “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Syrian men, women, and children poured out of the tenements to protest the wages and working conditions of the American Woolen Company; and the continuous walkouts of garment workers in New York City, following the 1909 “Uprising of the 20,000,” that lasted into the 1920s. Despite such episodic militancy and a preference for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) over the AFL, Syrian workers remained caught in a vise of paternalism and nationalism. Such constraints particularly hit small garment shops, where Syrian women faced “direct merchant-manufacturer control, in conditions that isolated them from the broader currents of garment work trade unionism” (103). “Syrian shops for the Syrians” became the cry when transatlantic access returned following World War I. This tale of “Arab American cloth economies” does more than enhance existing studies of textiles and garments; it also shifts the geographies and periodization of the Arab diaspora (86).Here is a travelogue that moves from greater Syria, including Ottoman Mount Lebanon, to industrial New England, New York City, Portugal’s Madeira Islands, the Texas-Mexico borderlands, and Mexico itself, and back to Tripoli and Damascus. We enter the workshops and homes to the sound of machines clunking and needles flying, and walk into stores displaying samples of the decorated kimonos and women’s white goods that Fahrenthold captures with the term unmentionables. Big concepts like “class formation, racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation” come alive in the stories of young John Ramey, who died as he led marching textile workers, cornet in hand; immigrant Hannah Sabbagh, who parlayed sewing skills into her own apron firm before leading the Syrian Ladies’ Aid Society of Boston; émigré importers like the Arida brothers, who moved goods from Damascus to New York City; Syrian feminists like Victoria Tannous, who rejected the shaming of women in public and their exclusion from political life; factory foreman William Karsa, who guided a photographer through the Madeira-based Alexander J. Hamrah and Co. to document their modern methods of production; and multiple passport holders like Assad Sallom, who sought to cross the border with his wares but faced immigration officials who feared that Syrian peddlers were smuggling people as well as goods (6).Like Marx’s hidden threads linking the factory to the home, women and girls embroidered and stitched in kitchens and bedrooms. These are the “unmentionables” whose productive labor was central to the cloth and clothes packed into the suitcases of the men who peddled the wares of ethnic entrepreneurs. Fahrenthold provides more than the distaff side of the garment and textile industries. In her attention to the living conditions of households and the mutual aid societies developed to help strikers, the unemployed, widows, and the poor, she illustrates how “making” is about reproductive labor as well as the legal restrictions, occupational segregation, and anti-immigrant craft unions that defined Syrians as the Other. Women combined household management, including serving boarders, with childcare, industrial homework, and factory labor.Unmentionables further underscores “the gender politics of welfare work” (80). The women’s societies cooperated with social settlement houses and provided training and then offered piecework so mothers could earn some income while caring for family in crowded flats. Rather than philanthropy, “Americanization, assimilation, or racial uplift,” they practiced “social reproduction and maintenance of Syrian communities” (87). Nonetheless, the women succumbed to male expectations, serving as ladies’ auxiliaries to men’s clubs that pushed what we might name the political purposes of the displaced: The men prioritized raising funds for “homeland rescue” over “mutual aid” (80). Moreover, the men’s societies had to tread carefully to sustain their reputation as burial and philanthropic organizations by avoiding close collaboration with trade unions, even when they offered relief to the families of strikers. Men had their own concerns about reputation, so clubs kept private the names of those unable to support their families, to whom they had distributed aid. More than burial and direct relief societies, these Syrian clubs sought to strengthen both “ethnic solidarities” and “interethnic coalition building” to alleviate precarity before the New Deal (61).Fahrenthold presents not only a labor history but also a business history. She carefully reconstructs the building of firms, their supply chain strategies, and their global connections. Moving production countered “labor unrest,” but still subjected the merchant-manufacturers to geopolitical forces, from tariffs, wars, embargos, and anticolonial uprisings. “Ottoman subjects, as naturalized Americans, and as Syrians with deep diasporic ties to port cities on Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Pacific shores,” she notes, “these elites positioned themselves as agents of an expanding U.S. capitalism, promoting ‘free trade,’ opening supply zones, and creating new markets for American machines and finished goods” (155). This case illuminates varieties of colonialism: “a foreign merchant class whose own homeland was colonized by foreign capitalist interests” (154). They relied on both a cottage industry of women and a fleet of men peddling such products. The peddlers represented a visible thread connecting all the other links in the textile chain. By deconstructing the nostalgic symbolism surrounding the men who moved the goods, Unmentionables adds the missing layer to a story of “labor reproduction, textile logistics, and retail” that reveals the power of immigration and the surveillance of immigrants (185).It perhaps is too much to ask of such a sweeping canvas for more comparative analysis. Did the dream of return or connections to the homeland inhibit striking out against co-ethnic employers? Was there something about the contours of paternalism in the Syrian community that differed from Jewish, Italian, Puerto Rican, or US southern white responses to exploitation? The desire for more aside, after this stunning history, Syrians will be unmentionables no more.