Bread and Roses

The story

"Bread and Roses" began as a slogan of the American women's suffrage movement. Its first known appearance is in an article by the suffrage activist Helen Todd in The American Magazine of September 1911. In June 1910 Todd, a state factory inspector, had joined an automobile campaign across Illinois for women's right to vote, speaking for working women on wages, conditions and hours. A young hired girl in whose family's house she stayed told her she had liked best the idea that women's votes would bring everyone bread and flowers too. Todd made of it the phrase "Bread for all, and Roses too": bread meaning home, shelter and security, and roses meaning music, education, nature and books. The slogan was carried on a banner in the Chicago garment workers' strike of 1910 and in California's successful suffrage campaign of 1911.

The poet James Oppenheim took up the phrase in his poem "Bread and Roses", published in The American Magazine in December 1911 with the note that the slogan was one of "the women in the West". It was reprinted in The Survey in July 1912 and in The Public in October 1912. When Upton Sinclair printed it in his anthology The Cry for Justice in 1915, its first appearance in a book, the slogan was credited to young girls carrying a banner in a parade of strikers at Lawrence, Massachusetts. That textile strike, from January to March 1912, united dozens of immigrant communities under the Industrial Workers of the World and was led largely by women; it is now often called the "Bread and Roses strike", although a number of historians think the story of the banner is not historical. In 1912 the trade unionist Rose Schneiderman spread the phrase further in speeches for women's suffrage, saying that the woman worker must have bread, but roses too.

Caroline Kohlsaat first set the poem to music in 1917, for the River Forest Women's Club, where she directed the chorus. Her song moved to the picket lines: by the 1930s women sang it while they fed and supported strikers outside the factories. It also became a college song. Graduating seniors at Mount Holyoke College have sung it in the Laurel Parade since 1932, and it is central to the Step-Sings of Bryn Mawr College, whose Summer School for Women Workers, begun in 1921, brought a hundred factory, mill and sweatshop workers each year to study.

After the Second World War the song reached a wider audience through the magazine Sing Out! in January 1952. Mimi Fariña set the poem again in 1974, and her version was recorded by Judy Collins, Pete Seeger, Ani DiFranco and others; John Denver set it to another melody in 1988. It was translated into German and Russian. The 2014 film Pride shows a Welsh mining community singing it during the miners' strike of 1984–1985, and the slogan has named the Bread and Roses Heritage Festival in Lawrence, the emblem of the Democratic Socialists of America and the organisation Pan y Rosas.

What it says

The poem gives voice to working women marching for more than wages: they ask for fair pay and also for dignity and the beauty of life. Its mood is hopeful and resolute.

The words