We Fight for Roses, Too! ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 11, 2026
The story began 114 years ago, on January 1, 1912. That day, a new law took effect in Massachusetts that reduced the number of hours in the work week for women, from 56 hours per week to 54. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_Lawrence_textile_strike)
You heard that right. 54 hours per week. We might have assumed that this shorter work week would be welcomed. But in fact, textile workers were opposed to this new law, as they feared that their wages would be cut as a result, which they could ill afford. They had begun unionizing in Lawrence, Mass, to be prepared to fight. And sure enough, when paychecks were issued 10 days later, on January 11, 1912, 114 years ago today, word spread quickly that women were now earning less. Some 20,000 textile workers walked off the job in the mills.
The strike lasted for over two months, throughout a brutally cold winter. It became known as the “Bread and Roses” strike, because the year before, in 1911, a poem had been written by James Oppenheim, the poem that we sang a few minutes ago as our opening hymn. Oppenheim had picked up the expression ‘bread and roses’ from women activists and suffragists who had begun using the phrase in speeches beginning in 1910. It is first attributed to a woman named Helen Todd, who in 1910 was involved in Illinois campaigns for better working conditions and for the right to vote for women. Mrs. Todd said in a speech, “…woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Roses#:~:text=%22Bread%20and%20Roses%22%20is%20a,by%20at%20least%20three%20composers.)
“Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses.”
It was very early in the fight for better working conditions, and the fight to unionize to gain living wages. Working conditions were terrible for most, and the hours brutal. Young girls could be hired legally in the mills starting at age 14, but often they were younger. The year before the strike, in 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City had claimed 146 workers, mostly women and children. Many of these deaths were preventable, as the factory owners had kept the doors locked to keep people from leaving, or from stealing merchandise. The accounts of this horrific tragedy shocked the country. As a result, the State of New York led the country in confronting factory conditions and began passing laws improving worker safety. As so often happens in the United States, we seem to need to be shocked into doing the right thing.
This month, we are exploring the concept of Resistance; how to practice resistance. It’s a timely topic, and seems to grow timelier by the day. Over the past year, we have observed and participated many forms of resistance, from showing up with signs and chants, as some of you did yesterday – thank you very much! We might change our buying habits. We might choose to continue with our normal activities, even when it seems less safe to do so. Maybe we become more vigilant; watching for law enforcement activity. This way of resisting is growing more important. Last Wednesday, when Renee Good was gunned down during an ICE raid in Minneapolis, a colleague of mine, UU minister Ashley Horan, left her nearby home, walked down the block, and stood in the snow and recorded everything that happened for the next few hours. I sat in my kitchen in Rockport and watched, as she recorded the cordoning off of streets, the use of tear gas, the arrival of a stretcher heartbreakingly being slowly walked toward the crime scene. Resistance can look like recording the truth as it happens.
And since then, as I’ve thought about resistance in the midst of all the vitriol and victim blaming, I have thought more and more about the role of dignity as resistance.
We live in a world, and in a country, that can be terribly harsh and oppressive. We can treat other people terribly; treat them as expendable, as having no worth. And much of this harshness is nothing more than a deliberate attempt to strip other people of their dignity, in order to oppress them.
I think of the narratives told about people of color – especially of Black and native peoples. We were not content with physical mistreatment, overwork, starvation, removal from ancestral land, as bad as that has been. We also treated people with contempt. We made fun of them, (and in some settings still do) by exaggerating their appearance, caricaturing them in minstrel shows and cartoons. This culture has worked hard to diminish people, to humiliate them, to bring them as low as it possibly can, by trying to strip them of dignity. To grab them off the street in front of neighbors, for example.
Have you ever wondered why, when we begin to grapple with civil rights issues, so often we end up focusing on public accommodations: who can use which water fountains, and restrooms? I’ve wondered for years how it is that we always seem to engage in this race to the cellar, to find the lowest common denominator of issues to fight over. But what reduces people’s dignity more than telling them where they are allowed to take a drink or relieve themselves?
And so, finding ways to maintain human dignity is a powerful form of resistance. To give people not just bread, but roses.
We don’t talk enough about dignity. Back in 1948, the United Nations enshrined the importance of human dignity in its Declaration of Human Rights, which begins with these words: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…”
Dignity as the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace. And yet all too often dignity is withheld, rejected, ignored.
We Unitarian Universalists, of course, are no strangers to stating the importance of dignity, as we say in our first Principle: “We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all people.”
But what exactly do we mean when we talk about dignity? Is it the same as respect, or self-respect?
Conflict negotiator and author Donna Hicks does not equate dignity and respect. She wrote, “Dignity is something all human beings come into the world with: inherent value and worth, as well as inherent vulnerability to having our dignity injured and violated. Respect, on the other hand, must be earned. We don’t have to do anything to have dignity. It is an essential and universal aspect of our shared humanity.” (“The Path to Peace is Paved with Dignity,” Donna Hicks, in ReVista, March, 2025, www. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/the-path-to-peace-is-paved-with-dignity/)
In other words, human dignity is part of our personhood. Like our human rights, it has its basis in natural law. And when there are those who see dignity as a threat to their own power, their withholding of it can undermine our stability and our ability to live together in peace.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in his Truth and Reconciliation work both in his native South Africa and in Northern Ireland, came to understand the role of dignity in enabling the restoration of peace. He wrote,
“Dignity not only sustains but also energizes and enables. It accomplishes great things. It lifts the fallen and restores the broken. When the recognition of the good in the other is shared, it is the sense of personal dignity given that can give peace to situations of potential conflict. People’s awareness of their own dignity, their sense of worth, is the only answer to the inertia of an everyday life ruled by feelings of uselessness. How wonderful it would be if we all, every one of us, became agents of dignity, purveyors of the truth that this God-given dignity is the birthright of all.” (in Hicks, Donna, Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict, Yale University Press, 2013, p.x)
Donna Hicks wrote of her work among the Khmer people in Cambodia, who had suffered genocide during the regime of Pol Pot. The stories told were heartrending. Over time, the work centered on giving people opportunities to tell their stories, to be heard. It was in this storytelling and listening, said Donna Hicks, that people’s self-worth was restored. But over time, Hicks also came to see that there are many other forms of indignity that people experience, and that these cause injury as well. She asked, “What about the psychological ways in which people experience wounds to their dignity? What about being excluded, misunderstood, treated unfairly, dismissed, or judged as inferior on the basis of an aspect of their identity that they could do nothing about?” (Ibid., p.xii)
I am willing to guess that everyone in this room knows this feeling; of being dismissed, of not being taken seriously. Some of us have experienced the contempt of society because of who we are. Our culture allows, even encourages, this diminishing of our humanity, our dignity. It is a way of asserting power over others, of maintaining control. Can we ever truly thrive, can we ever say that we are truly living in peace, if we allow people who crave power to exert it by stripping dignity away from people who are less powerful?
And so, friends, maintaining our own dignity, and working to preserve the dignity of other people, is a powerful form of resisting injustice, resisting oppression, and ultimately resisting tyranny.
In our song this morning, we hear that to live with dignity, humans need more than subsistence, more than basic food, more than bread. They need beauty, music, all things that lift up our souls and our spirits as well as our bodies. But there are other types of roses – life’s glories, as the song puts it – as well, that we can commit to offering every day. What we need more than almost anything in this life, except for bread, is acknowledgement of our inherent humanity. We need to be seen as worthy. And we need to see others as worthy, to seek out the humanity of others and reflect that back to them, so that they may see it for themselves, see it reflected in our eyes. In short, we need love – love given and love received.
In living this way, offering dignity to those around us, or acknowledging their inherent dignity, we are resisting all the forces that attempt to diminish the lives of others by taking their dignity away. It’s a powerful way of moving through the world, offering roses to others, as well as bread, acting as “agents of dignity,” as Desmond Tutu put it. This way of approaching others has never been needed more than it is in this moment, when far too many powerful people are turning more and more easily to contempt and humiliation. May we seek to counter all those willing to take away our humanity, and may we be steadfast in offering a loving vision where all are invited to thrive. In the days and months ahead may we remember to help create, in the words of the Declaration of Human Rights, the ‘foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…’
I’ll close with the words of Maya Angelou:
“You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.”
May it be so,
Amen.
