Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca

Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca (born Aug. 10, 1894, Zemel, Latvia—died Aug. 16, 1946, New York, N.Y., U.S.) was a Latvian-born American labour leader, remembered for her zealous union activism in the garment industry.

Dorothy Jacobs immigrated with her family to the United States from Latvia in 1900. They settled in Baltimore, Maryland. At age 13 Jacobs left school and went to work in a clothing factory. Working conditions quickly led her to the cause of organized labour, and about 1908 or 1909 she joined in the formation of Local 170 of the United Garment Workers of America. In 1912 she was prominent in a walkout that rapidly developed into an industrywide strike, and by 1914 she was head of her local.

In that year the United Garment Workers split, the older, mainly native, craft-union-oriented leadership remaining, whereas the younger members, predominantly Jewish and Italian immigrants and more radically committed to industrial unionism, left to form the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). Jacobs led her local into the ACWA, serving as a delegate to the organizing convention, becoming a member of the Baltimore joint board, and in 1915 becoming the board’s secretary. She was active in organizing campaigns in Chicago in 1915 and in Philadelphia and New York City in 1917, was elected to the general executive board of the ACWA in 1916, and was appointed its first full-time woman organizer in 1917. In August 1918 she resigned from her second term on the general board upon her marriage to organizer and ACWA board member August Bellanca.

Dorothy Bellanca nonetheless remained an active organizer and during the 1920s and ’30s worked in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Ohio directing picket lines, organizing relief for strikers, and bringing thousands of new members into the ACWA. She was especially effective among the mainly rural shirtmakers during the 1932–34 organizing campaign, and she later worked with neckwear workers, laundry workers, and cleaners and dyers, among others. She headed the ACWA’s short-lived Women’s Bureau in 1924–26 and throughout her career struggled to win equal recognition of women workers in union matters. In 1934 she was elected once again to the general board of the ACWA, and she served as its only female vice president until her death.

Reform politics was a natural activity for Bellanca. In 1933 she campaigned effectively in support of Fiorello H. La Guardia for mayor of New York City; in 1936 she helped organize the American Labor Party; and in 1938 she ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat. She served on many governmental and international commissions and boards, and early in World War II she was an adviser on women workers to the War Manpower Commission and the Department of Labor.