Immolated Women

If you have read Sterne’s Tristram Shandy you may remember the quixotic way Sterne plays with John Locke’s discussion of the “association of ideas”—essentially how one thought can lead to another in a wandering, circuitous and sometimes comic direction.  Throughout the book there is running, slightly off-color, and entirely whimsical joke involving grandfather clocks and marital sex.  But “Lockean”  associations can also be tragic.  I have just been taken along a circuitous mental path of tragedy, and I do mean circuitous.  It began with memories of my grandmother’s house in Denver where I spent some of the War years of the 1940s. Among a relatively few decorations adorning its walls were a couple of cheaply reproduced images of the Virgin Mary.  One of these was Tiepolo’s famous “Immaculate Conception.”  The other, which I remember less clearly, showed Mary as a seamstress, a theme, as I learned many years later, common in the folkloristic iconography of medieval Europe.  The illustration I found for this essay is not identical to the print in my grandmother’s house.

 

In 1854 Pope Pius IX (the famously long-serving Pio Nono)  dogmatized the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Thus, Tiepolo’s painting is of an idea rather than an event.  Allow me briefly to explain this doctrine, since I have found that many knowledgeable people, and even a few learned ones, mistakenly think it refers directly to the Virgin Birth of Jesus.  It does not. It was a “pious belief,” a tenet of popular thought, that has been widely but informally believed by some Christians for centuries.  It became theologically “hot” in the thirteenth century, though only official dogma in the nineteenth.   It refers to the supposed supernatural intervention by which Mary’s own birth was shielded from the Original Sin inherited from Adam and Eve.  The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception seemed to be necessitated  by Scholastic logic in order to guarantee the human sinlessness of Jesus.  In the later Middle Ages the Franciscans were particularly zealous in championing the doctrine.   A good deal of my scholarly work has related to the medieval Franciscan Order, so that I have perhaps read more treatises on the Immaculate Conception than are good for me.

 

 The Feast of the Immaculate Conception was assigned the date of December 8.  On that day in 1863,  in the huge church of Santiago (Chile) that had been built by the Jesuits before their Order’s expulsion from South America, there was a packed festival Mass attended by most of the city’s elite, with many of the female worshippers wearing elaborate gowns and dresses.  A dropped candle or oil lamp kindled a flash fire that “almost instantly” engulfed the entire building.  Partly because of seating arrangements and partly because of the flammability of the women’s clothing, the loss of life was much higher for females than for males.  We lack exact numbers, but at least twenty-five hundred, and possibly as many as four thousand worshippers were immolated.  It was perhaps history’s largest known single building incendiary disaster.  European anticlericalism, especially in Italy and France, but also in republican circles in Latin America, was bourgeoning.  Garibaldi had originally had high hopes for Pio Nono, but as the pope aged into bleak political reaction he and his republican followers came to despise him.  Blasphemous radicals scandalized the pious throughout the Catholic world by suggesting that the catastrophe was a judgement on the pope and his dogma of the Immaculate Conception!

 

 

         The fire in the Church of the Company of Jesus in Santiago de Chile, for all its horror, led to no particular reforms so far as I know.  But  about fifty years later another disastrous immolation of women, this one in Greenwich Village in New York, would prove to be an important impetus in the advancement of the American labor movement.  I refer to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (25 March 1911), which ravaged a factory in the upper floors of a building on Washington Place now owned by New York University.  I am personally acquainted with the site of the old building, as it is very near the large apartment house, also owned by NYU, in which our daughter and son-in-law have lived for many years.  (The roster of earlier residents of note in that  building include Eleanor Roosevelt.  Every inch of lower Manhattan is “historic”.)  The product manufactured by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, the shirtwaist, is, or rather mainly was (as it is no longer common) an item of female apparel.  The shirtwaist is a long-sleeved blouse, sometimes with wide shoulders, narrowing tightly at the waist—often quite a sexy item in my view, by which I mean the view of book illustrators and Hollywood costumers.  In the late nineteenth century low-paid workers, mostly young immigrant women in  sweatshops in New York and Philadelphia, produced untold thousands of them.  Most of the workers at the Triangle Company were young women, southern Italians and Central European Jews, working for long hours seated at constantly humming sewing machines.

 

 

         The precise origin of the Triangle fire is uncertain.  The post-fire investigation found that safety precautions were casual.  There was a single and as it proved feeble exterior fire escape.  Scraps of material, some highly flammable, littered the floors beneath the sewing tables.  There were dust piles.  Strict prohibitions against smoking were at times violated.  But what guaranteed unspeakable disaster when fire broke out was the fact that the factory owners had locked the main exit doors during working hours.  The owners said the motive was to discourage theft.  Some historians have claimed it was to keep labor organizers out.  Once again, nearly total conflagration was said to be almost instant.  Between those actually incinerated and those forced to leap to their deaths nearly 150 perished, the large majority women and girls.

 

         It was at such a terrible price that significant improvements in working conditions of the American garment industry were achieved.  The Triangle fire encouraged the reformation of some of the more appalling practices  of the sweatshops and hastened the organization and powerful expansion of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, generally regarded as a major positive force in American labor history.

 

         The site of the Triangle fire now boasts an impressive and  moving memorial to its victims of more than a century ago.  And in the whimsical ways in which the Lockean association of ideas leads from one way to another I find that I myself have a thematic link to that moment in history.  For it just so happens that I am the emeritus Louis W. Fairchild professor at my institution.  Mr. Fairchild, who died in 1981 and whom I never met, was the publisher of Women’s Wear Daily, one of the most famous trade journals in the country  I never met his son either, though he was the one who established “my” chair in his father’s name.  He was apparently for decades a prominent and highly public figure in the New York fashion world.