Auntie Léa and Rose Pesotta

When Rose Pesotta arrived in Montreal several years later, she wanted to replicate her Los Angeles educational programming and started to look for an Educational Director. As Pesotta herself did not speak French, and had never lived in Quebec, she needed to hire a reliable person who could relate to the French-Canadian workers. Auntie Léa, who grew up in Quebec and could speak Yiddish and English as well as French, was an excellent match for the position. As Leavitt tells us:

Rose Pesotta’s first task in Montreal was to organize bilingual (French and English) radio broadcasts to recruit members for the ILGWU. The broadcasts talked about the low wages Montreal dressmakers were getting in comparison to the dressmakers in Toronto and the United States. The broadcasts also reported that the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union had already won a living wage and improved working conditions for more than 200,000 needle workers across North America (Pesotta, 1944, p. 264). Immediately, Pesotta came into conflict with the Catholic Church which had helped factory owners organize their own company unions (Leeder, 1993, p. 73). Labelled as an “outside agitator,” Pesotta quickly discovered the power the church wielded in Quebec. In her autobiography Bread upon the Waters Pesotta wrote:

While Pesotta herself was an anarchist and atheist, and was opposed to organized religion, she understood the respect workers felt for the church. She did not argue against the church but used the teachings of the church to recruit union members by drawing on the work of Catholic priests in the United States who supported unionization and striking for better wages and working conditions (Leeder, 1993, p. 73).

Pesotta’s unionization efforts were unexpectedly supported by many Jewish factory owners who didn’t want a Catholic union operating in their shops. As Auntie Léa explains, many of the Jewish factory owners had been cutters, tailors, the “aristocrats” of the industry, who had married the daughter of a man who owned his factory.

In addition to the influence of the Catholic Church, traditional thinking and practices around gender roles within the ILGWU itself were also an obstacle to organizing the women dressmakers. As Leavitt explained earlier, before Pesotta arrived the local ILGWU leadership in Montreal was dominated by skilled male workers who were often English-speaking and Jewish. Pesotta herself was the only woman on the executive board of the ILGWU in the United States, whose membership was composed of 85% women. A few years later, she would be pushed out of her leadership role in the ILGWU.

Sophia Cutler writes that while the “unskilled” women union members were expected to participate in workers’ strikes, they were often excluded from decision-making. The leaders saw themselves as “father figures” for women workers in the dressmaking industry and didn’t treat them as peers or comrades. This made many women sceptical about joining the union (Cutler, 2017, p. 10). As historian Mercedes Steedman, cited by Cutler, points out:

As well, men typically worked as cutters and pressers in the industry. They held “skilled” jobs that made them, as Auntie Léa says above, aristocrats of the industry. Women were employed as “unskilled” sewing-machine operators. Men operated the heavy machines which required skill and dexterity to manoeuvre – skills the women were thought not to have or need to operate the sewing machines. In reality, however, the categories of “skilled” and “unskilled” workers were meaningless. They had no relation to the actual strength, dexterity, or skill capacity individual workers possessed. Cutler writes that at least one factory inspector at the time conceded that although women’s work was “generally regarded as light,” in reality it was “hard and most exacting. Women engaged in it are liable to have to work overtime more frequently than in other trades” (Cutler, 2017, p. 10). The distinction between skilled and unskilled labour was used to justify lower wages for women’s “unskilled” labour. Women were paid on average half of what the men were paid (Leavitt, personal communication, 25 March 2025).

Creating unity and solidarity

Auntie Léa’s work to establish language classes, courses, and social activities in the union hall created a more welcoming space for women workers. In her role as Educational Director of the ILGWU, with the support of a team of Francophone organizers, Auntie Léa educated the women dressmakers in union activism, and offered them French and English language classes. There were also courses on journalism, music, public speaking, and the history of the Canadian labour movement, which were held in the ILGWU union hall. In a 1986 interview with Quebec sociologist and activist Nicole Lacelle (republished in 2005), Auntie Léa said this about her work:

Another important issue connected to the issue of piecework was the issue of favouritism and unwanted sexual advances. As Auntie Léa explains

The women workers wanted to fight for the right to their bodies – the right not to be harassed by the designers, the boss, or the foreman (Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, 1991).

Alongside classes and discussions about workers’ rights, Auntie Léa and Rose Pesotta organized social activities such as a choir, orchestra, theatre, sports, parties, and cultural festivals which provided opportunities for the English-speaking Jewish workers and French-speaking Catholic workers to meet each other. Besides these two groups of workers, there were also Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Black women working in the factories. Auntie Léa also published a newsletter called “The Organizer/L’Organistrice” in both French and English. A copy of the newsletter is available in the Léa Roback archives at the Jewish Public Library. Spending time learning and socializing together promoted the development of unity and solidarity among the women workers, two key values necessary for negotiations between the workers and the factory owners. As Auntie Léa says in the quote that opens this chapter, building unity and solidarity among the workers meant that no one had to negotiate with factory owners alone. Because Auntie Léa knew she was not alone in fighting for better wages and better working conditions, she had the courage she needed to speak on behalf of those who were afraid to speak.

The dressmaker strike of 1937

In January 1937, after a successful recruitment drive that included handing out leaflets at the doors of factories in the early morning as the workers were going in, the dressmakers received their first charter. The first goal for Local 262 of the ILGWU in Montreal was to create a contract with manufacturers that ensured union recognition, and better hours and pay. But the Montreal Dress Manufacturers’ Guild – an association of factory owners – refused to recognize the union. On 15 April 1937, just months after getting their charter, Local 262 triggered a surprise general strike against one hundred shops and factories. Rose Pesotta, Auntie Léa and the ILGWU shop stewards led five thousand women workers on the most momentous strike in Canadian dressmaking history.

The strike became known as the Dressmaker Strike of 1937 and the Midinettes Strike. The word “midinettes” is a combination of the French word midi (noon) and dinette (light lunch) and was used to describe the women who would pour out of the downtown dress factories during their brief lunch break. In her interviews with Sophie Bissonnette and Nicole Lacelle about the strike, Auntie Léa remembers:

In response to the workers going on strike, the Church, and the government of Quebec led by Premier Maurice Duplessis worked to end it. The highly-ranked clergy in Montreal called for the deportation of Rose Pesotta, who was an American citizen. But on the day she was to be arrested, Pesotta found a place to hide where the police would not find her – under a hair dryer at a beauty salon. She ordered a facial, manicure, and as many other beauty services as she could to avoid the police as long as she could. When the salon closed, she found a secluded restaurant to have dinner in and then went to a movie. She was successful in evading the police. The arrest warrant was never served (Leeder, 1993, p. 74).

In addition to putting out an arrest warrant for Rose Pesotta, the Duplessis government began an anti-communist campaign that targeted and criminalized any form of labour activism. Melanie Leavitt explains that Duplessis used laws such as the Padlock Law to target the labour movement under the guise of fighting the “threat” of Communism. During the Dressmakers’ Strike, Duplessis, Catholic Church leaders, and even the leaders of the Catholic unions regularly invoked the accusation that the leaders of the ILGWU were “notorious Communists.” The accusation of being Communist was used to undermine the credibility of the ILGWU (and other international unions) and to dissuade French Canadian, Catholic workers from joining their ranks (Leavitt, personal communication, 25 March 2025). Because the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union was mostly run and organized by Eastern European Jewish left-wingers, the anti-communist campaign was often antisemitic. As Cutler writes, French newspapers such as La Nation and Le Devoir named ILGWU organizers as “la juiverie internationale” or “the international Jewry” – a label that reflected the long history of antisemitic representations of Jews as a menace that was increasing its numbers and power globally through finance and (contradictorily) communism (Cutler, 2017, p. 11).

But despite the work of the Church and the government to destroy the union, the women workers maintained their solidarity. As one picketer’s sign declared, “Nos races sont multiples, notre but est un” – “We are many races, but our aim is one” (Cutler, 2017, p. 11). Rose Pesotta and Auntie Léa’s work to build alliances across language, culture and religion was successful.

Unified, the women marched on the picket line for 25 days forcing the Montreal Dress Manufacturers’ Guild to finally enter into negotiation with the leaders of Local 262. On 10 May, after 14 hours of negotiation, Local 262 won significant improvements to their workers’ wages and working conditions. To celebrate, Pesotta decided to attend the ILGWU’s annual national convention which was being held in Atlantic City. She brought a large delegation from Montreal with her. The delegation marched up to the platform with a brass band preceding them. They received a standing ovation from the assembly. It was a moment of triumph (Leeder, 1993, p. 74). The 1937 Dressmakers’ Strike became the largest strike of women workers in Québec history and would remain so until 1972. As Auntie Léa has said to several interviewers, “Never before had there been a women’s strike of such magnitude in Montreal.”

Today there is a Parks Canada plaque located at 460 St. Catherine Street West in Montreal that designates the 1937 Dressmakers’ Strike as a National Historic Event. It says:

Honoured by Parks Canada for its importance in the evolution of the working relationships between management and labour in the clothing industry” (Parks Canada Directory of Federal Heritage Designations, 2024), Leavitt calls the success of the 1937 Dressmakers’ Strike a “monumental moment” that not only paved the way forward for the dressmaking industry but paved the way for important gains in the labour movement across a variety of different sectors. It also paved the way for many important gains for women’s rights (Jewish Public Library, 2024c, recollections, Episode 3). Auntie Léa’s life and work in the women’s rights movement is discussed in the next chapter.

Fighting racism in the dressmaking industry

Shortly after the strike ended, Auntie Léa encountered an incident of Black racism in one of the factories that had been unionized. She was working in the union office when a Jewish factory owner telephoned and asked her to send him a draper. Working from the local’s seniority list, Auntie Léa picked the draper at the top of the list. She was a Black woman named Hélène, who was a talented draper. Auntie Léa told the owner that she’d arrive in fifteen minutes. Hélène arrived back at the union office half an hour later and told Auntie Léa that the owner had told her that the job had been taken, and that there had been a mistake. In her interview with Nicole Lacelle, Auntie Léa shared the story of what happened next. Auntie Léa was furious Hélène had not been given the job, and she used her anger to lambaste the boss.

Auntie Léa’s commitment to the principles of seniority and her courage to name and confront racism ensured Hélène was given the position she deserved. In an interview with Sophie Bissonnette, a year or two later, Auntie Léa told the same story of her confrontation with the boss who didn’t want to hire Hélène, but this time she provided an unexpected ending to the story.

As discussed in Chapter 5, Auntie Léa would pursue her commitment against racism several decades later in the 1980s by joining the political struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid, which was in place between 1948 and 1994, was the name given to the racial segregation established under the all-White government of South Africa.

Leaving the ILGWU

In 1939, Auntie Léa left the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. In her interview with Nicole Lacelle, she explains why.

At first, I was surprised to read that the union as well as the bosses were happy to “get rid of the activists.” After all, it was activists like Auntie Léa who provided extraordinary leadership during the 1937 Dressmakers’ Strike. However, in an interview with Sophie Bissonnette, Auntie Léa talked about how the ILGWU leaders in Montreal were selling out to the factory bosses. The local radical activists in the union were a thorn in their side. Auntie Léa also talked about how the American leaders of the ILGWU were eager to remove the militant activists from the union. Like Auntie Léa, Rose Pesotta ended up leaving as well, even though she had held the position of vice-president.

Melanie Leavitt explains that the ILGWU’s eagerness to remove militant activists from the union speaks to the chilling effect the Duplessis anti-Communist legislation had on the labour movement and the Left as a whole. In the face of laws such as the Padlock Law, some international unions, such as the ILGWU, were anxious to purge the more radical members/organizers from their ranks (Melanie Leavitt, personal communication, 25 March 2025). As Auntie Léa told Nicole Lacelle about Duplessis’ attitude towards the unions, “They were all Communists. To him, everyone who wasn’t on his side was a Communist” (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, p.166).

Unionizing the workers at RCA

In 1941, two years after she left the ILGWU, Auntie Léa began working for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) war/munitions plant located in the neighbourhood of Saint-Henri, in Montreal. The RCA plant in Saint-Henri made radios during the Second World War and Auntie Léa was assigned to different jobs there. Auntie Léa had gone to work at RCA with the specific goal of unionizing the plant for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the United Electrical Workers. In 1941, an unprecedented number of women workers were working in factories like RCA replacing men who were serving overseas in the Second World War. At the time many Montreal families living in the French Canadian working-class neighbourhood of Saint-Henri were living in poverty. In an interview with Sophie Bissonnette, both Auntie Léa and her friend activist Madeleine Parent, told several stories about what that meant.

From the very beginning of her work at RCA in 1941, Auntie Léa began organizing to unionize the plant. She told interviewer Nicole Lacelle:

When Lacelle heard this, she asked, “You must have developed an extraordinary knowledge of the place?” Auntie Léa responded:

It took Auntie Léa and her team a year of organizing before the first union contract was signed at RCA.

Although RCA had fired Auntie Léa, they eventually took her back. However, when she returned to work, she no longer worked on the production line. She was given a job in the shipping department.

Auntie Léa worked at RCA from 1941 to 1952, but she didn’t only work as a factory worker. There was an arrangement in the collective agreement that RCA signed with the union that stipulated Auntie Léa could take unpaid leave to work on union grievances and discuss them with the bosses (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, p. 149). Auntie Léa worked at RCA as a grievance officer until 1952 when Maurice Duplessis, the Premier of Quebec at the time, working in collusion with RCA revoked the union’s accreditation, allowing the company to fire all of the union militants.

Given Auntie Léa’s experience as a union organizer and grievance officer, Lacelle was interested in knowing if Auntie Léa had ever had any interest in moving up higher in the union hierarchy (like Rose Pesotta). Auntie Léa told her:

After being fired from RCA in 1952, it wasn’t easy to find new work. But Auntie Léa persevered and was hired as a sales assistant at Eaton’s department store, where she tried to unionize the other sales assistants who had complaints about their working conditions. When Auntie Léa’s attempts to start a union were reported to a manager, she was fired. Next, Auntie Léa worked as a library technician at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. She also was hired to teach English in a girls’ school but had to quit when she refused to follow the school curriculum. Instead, Auntie Léa chose to teach the girls English through conversation, an approach that she thought would be more useful to them. Decades later, Auntie Léa’s conversational approach would gain acceptance in the field of English language education as the goal of communicative competence became increasingly important in English as a Second Language curriculum. Finally, Auntie Léa found a job as a programme administrator at the Quebec Society for the Visually Impaired, a job which she kept for ten years. When I first got to know Auntie Léa as a child in the 1960s, that’s where she worked, at the Quebec Society for the Visually Impaired. I remember Auntie Léa liked working there because it allowed her to connect people with resources that could improve their everyday lives.

There were other jobs that Auntie Léa would have liked to do, but she wasn’t successful in getting hired for them. For example, Auntie Léa told Sophie Bissonnette she would have liked to work in social services in the Jewish community. She wanted to work in a place that would allow her to care for women. But Jewish social services wouldn’t hire her because they thought she was too radical (An activist looking for employment (1950 and 1960), 2023). So, Auntie Léa found other ways to support women. She continued to participate in many social movements in Montreal, including access to legalized abortion and contraception, access to housing, anti-racism in Canada, and anti-apartheid in South Africa. She also supported equity in education and pay equity, protested against the Vietnam War, and defended the rights of immigrant and Indigenous women. Much of this political work took place with an organization called La Voix des Femmes/Voice of Women. A discussion of Auntie Léa’s work with Voice of Women also appears in the next chapter.

Sophie Bissonnette remembers Auntie Léa as a constant presence in protests and marches, passing out leaflets and lending her respected voice to a variety of causes. In the last scene of her 1991 film about Auntie Léa’s social justice work, Bissonnette shows Auntie Léa, in her late 80s standing in front of Steinberg’s, a supermarket in her neighbourhood of Côte des Neiges, in the middle of winter, handing out flyers about the violence of war toys. “There’s nothing that I like better,” Auntie Léa says in the scene, “than to be standing on a street corner, passing out leaflets because this is how you come to understand what people are about” (Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, 1991).

Age and cold winter conditions didn’t deter Auntie Léa from her activism. At the age of 85, she demonstrated with thousands of young women in Quebec City to defend a woman’s right to abortion in L’Affaire Chantal Daigle (discussed in the next chapter). At the age of 91, she was still working on the front lines as she led the Marche du pain et roses (the Bread and Roses March), an important initiative against poverty organized by the Federation des femmes du Québec in 1996.

Auntie Léa’s work for workers’ rights in Quebec in the 1930s and 1940s and her work for women’s rights and peace in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s earned her much recognition. A discussion of the honours she received in her life takes place in Chapter 6. In the next chapter, however, I share stories about Auntie Léa’s suffrage work with Thérèse Casgrain to win the right for women to vote in Quebec. The chapter continues with stories about her post-suffrage peace movement work with Voice of Women and her activism to legalize abortion.