“Whether or not these women’s fight succeeds, the Jewish People can be proud of it forever”
Jewish women can be proud of themselves for their energetic protests against the meat vampires of the [Jewish] Quarter, and Jewish men can be proud of their women for this protest.… No man’s voice would resound with such an echo as do the women’s voices that weep, cry out about their own lives, those of their young children on behalf of the poor slave, harnessed in support of his half-starved family.… Whether or not these women’s fight succeeds, the Jewish People can be proud of it forever.
—Abraham Cahan, editor in chief of Der Forverts, May 16, 1902
America’s Gilded Age of the late 19th century saw the rise of trusts and monopolies controlling entire industries, manipulating prices at the expense of the average consumer. Labor unions began to organize, and economic conditions began to improve among unskilled labor during the Progressive Era, especially under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Early feminists launched the Women’s Suffrage movement, which would eventually culminate with the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920, granting women the vote. This period of social ferment was the backdrop for the 1902 kosher meat boycott led by Jewish women on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The great immigration peaked in the early 1900s, when millions of Eastern European Jews entered the United States, with the largest contingent settling in New York City. The Lower East Side emerged as one of the most densely populated places on the earth, and nearly 400,000 Jews lived in the neighborhood in its heyday.
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