In 1909 the shirtwaist industry of New York was a fifty-million-dollar-a-year business.

But its workers - mostly young women between the ages of 16 and 18 - earned scarcely enough to live on, and the working conditions they endured were harsh and unfair. But their greatest disadvantage was being mostly unskilled, and easy to replace. When the union finally declared a strike, it took great courage to picket, as the girls were often beaten and jailed. As the months went on, some of the most socially prominent and wealthy women in America came to the aid of the shirtwaist girls, and brought national attention to the plight of the workers. This demonstrated, possibly for the first time, the power of sisterhood, with women of all classes coming together to achieve a common goal.

With lively descriptions of immigrant life on New York's Lower East Side, writer Joan Dash paints a powerfully vivid and often painful portrait of the lives of working-class young women at the turn of the century.