Brood & Rozen, more than a title
By Nina Moens, Public Relations Officer at Amsab-ISG
Anyone who knows Amsab-ISG undoubtedly knows the magazine. Bread & Roses. On the website it is described as follows:Bread & Roses is the most versatile journal on social history in Flanders. Renowned professors as well as young, emerging researchers, authors outside academia, and heritage workers bring the rich history of social movements to life there.' But where does the title come from? Bread & Roses come from?
'Bread for all, and roses too' American suffragettes are said to have used those words for the first time in 1911 during the 'automobile campaign', a campaign for women's suffrage that crisscrossed the entire country. One of them, Helen M. Todd, mentioned 'Bread and Flowers' in her speech and wrote about it in The American Magazine in September of that same year. In that article, she recounts a conversation with the women she stayed with during the campaign. She quotes Maggie, one of them, about what she remembered from the speech: 'If you want to know of what I liked the best in the whole meetin' [...] it was that about the women's votin' so's everybody would have bread and flowers too.' The woman even asked for a pillow for her 92-year-old mother to be decorated with the words 'Bread and Flowers'. Eventually it became 'Bread for all, and roses too'.1
Helen M. Todd. (Helen M. Todd - Wikipedia)
Not much later, James Oppenheim, an American poet, picked up the statement and incorporated it into his poem. Bread and RosesIn addition to being a poet, Oppenheim was also a writer and editor. His work reflects his passion for social justice.2 The poem also appeared in The American Magazine, in December 1911, two months after Helen M. Todd's story. It is about female workers who no longer want to live under the yoke of men.3 A few years later, in 1916, musician Caroline Kohlsaat set the text to music.
James Oppenheim, 1928. (James Oppenheim - Wikipedia)
The poem by James Oppenheim in The American Magazine, December 1911.
The poem was later also translated into Dutch. The translator is unknown.
Women walk through the streets, it seems as if the sun has risen.
in millions of dull kitchens, in a thousand wacky studios
All those women have finally chosen freedom now.
and they sing: "Give us bread, but from now on also give us some
roses".
Women walk through the streets, having stepped out of line.
They also expect their share of the opportunities in life.
A harness is good for oxen, but evil for humans.
Yes, we want bread, of course, but we would also like roses.
Women march through the streets; it is also about men's rights,
who, just like all those women, remains enslaved by the question of bread,
Life is not meant to toil in such a rut, that hopelessness,
Even a heart can sometimes starve, give us bread but also give
roses.
Women walk through the streets and their song is centuries old,
but it was constantly stifled and snapped away behind closed doors.
Now, awakened from her hypnosis, she chooses for herself, is not chosen.
And the woman earns her living, and look, she picks her own roses too!4
In January 1912, a month after Oppenheim's poem had appeared, a strike broke out in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the United States. A new law stipulated that the working hours for women and children would no longer be 56 hours, but 54 hours per week. This change in the law caused an uproar. Firstly, because 54 hours a week was still a great deal. All workers—women, children, and men—worked themselves to death during that period. Secondly, because not only did working hours decrease, but wages also went down by 0,32 cents per day. Today that does not seem like much, but back then, for many families, it meant the difference between putting food on the table or going hungry.5
The women of the Everett Mill factory were the first to decide that enough was enough. They downed tools and took to the streets. Along the way, they encouraged hundreds, and eventually even thousands, of workers to join them. In total, about 25.000 people participated in the strike.6 Things got rough at times, and eventually the strike escalated into a true power struggle between factory bosses, politicians, unions, and even anarchists.7 But it was the unorganized women who took to the streets en masse and took the lead who still capture the imagination today. Overnight, bound by solidarity, they organized all kinds of actions across gender and language boundaries – among the workers in Lawrence, there were no fewer than 51 nationalities.8 And the story goes that through the streetsWe want bread and roses, too' echoed. Later, the strike was therefore given the name Bread and Roses Strike.
Female strikers, 1912. ( )The Strike | DPLA)
But why exactly bread and roses? Bread symbolized the right to basic necessities. That choice was easily made, since people ate mainly bread back then. But people do not live on bread alone. They also demanded roses: a better quality of life, education, leisure and culture, and a voice in society.
Much less well known is that those same demands were also heard in Europe during this period, where women staged similar large-scale protests. International Women's Day took place in Russia on February 23, 1917.9 Gatherings were held in various places, but the atmosphere was tense on the eve of the revolution. Women had been called upon to take a stand in the days leading up to it, but unexpectedly and spontaneously, a major strike broke out that day. They clamored for bread and peace and played a significant, long-underestimated, but major role in the outbreak of the February Revolution, directly seeking confrontation. In the following days, female workers organized even more protest actions.10 Goldberg Ruthchild describes a confrontation between protesters and Cossacks who were deployed as order troops:
'On Nevskii Prospekt demonstrators faced another group of Cossacks. A young woman moved out of the crowd and walked toward the troops, carrying a package. Suddenly, she pulls off the wrapping paper to reveal a bouquet of red roses, which she presented to the officer in charge. It took the flowers, to cries of 'Hurrah' from the crowd. '11
And so, bread is never far from roses. Closer to home, too, militant women took to the streets en masse. During the First World War, in 1916, protests broke out several times in Ghent by female workers suffering from hunger.12
The exact origin of 'Bread and Roses', however, remains shrouded in mystery. The slogan must presumably have been circulating earlier, including in Europe. We encounter it primarily in literature, and more specifically in poetry. For instance, Ludo Abicht refers to a verse from the poem *Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen* from 1844 by Heinrich Heine, in which he expresses criticism of his native country:13
Wir wollen auf Erden glücklich signal
Und wollen nicht mehr darben;
Verschlemmen soll nicht der faule Bauch,
Was fleißige Hände erwarben
I'm waiting for you to enjoy your meal
For all children of men,
Auch Rosen und Myrten,
Beauty and Pleasure,
And Zuckererbsen not less.
Yes, Zuckerebsen für jedermann,
Sobald die Schoten platzen!
We leave the sky
The Angels and the Spaghetti
In the specific verses we cite here, clear similarities can be seen. For instance, Heine emphasizes the importance of being happy and refers to starvation and excessive labor in doing so. Here, Heine links roses to 'beauty'. A brief search reveals that the rose indeed often stands as a symbol for this.
Roses as a symbol are also found in religious literary works. At the end of the 19th century, Hélène Swarth wrote the work Deep Waters containing a sonnet with the title Bread and RosesThat sonnet is based on the hagiography of Elisabeth of Thuringia and the similar legend of Elisabeth of Portugal.14 Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire also wrote the poem during the same period. Love roses about Saint Elizabeth. In that legend, bread and roses refer to charity and divine intervention, but in a religious context, the rose also often symbolizes 'human passions that are of a passing nature (lust gratification, joy of wine, enchantment ...)'.15 Along the same lines, there is another frequently recurring saying that stands out: 'If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a flower, for flowers are food for the soul'. Its origin and authorship are unclear. References are made to a Persian philosopher, a Greek philosopher, and even to Mohammed. The wording also varies: the flowers are sometimes daffodils and elsewhere roses.
The song, based on the poem by James Oppenheim, is still being set to music to this day. Cobi Schreijer even did so in Dutch, and recently it was included in the film Pride. Sonja Prins, a poet who was also active in communist circles in the Netherlands, published a poetry collection in 1953 with the title Bread and Roses.16 She wrote a number of the poems in the concentration camp where she was a prisoner during the Second World War. Several books with keywords such as class, identity, gender, and racism bear the title. Bread and Roses.16 There is even a historical novel from 1958, written by Marja Roc (pseudonym for Margaretha Jacoba van Dam), with the title Bread and Roses, in which the female protagonist stands up for herself in the man's world.17
However, grand statements regarding the meaning of bread and roses and exactly where its origins lie require more in-depth research. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to reflect on the continuity of the concept, as this makes clear how profoundly human the need for bread and roses was, and still is. In various circles of feminist and human rights activists, it grew into a powerful symbol for the struggle for equality. That struggle is still being waged today, and thus the slogan remains highly relevant. For instance, there is a feminist organization in Argentina named Bread and Roses.18 In France there is du Pain et des Roses, affiliated with the Trotskyist party Révolution Permanente.19 In 1996, the sixth World Women's Conference of The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions had a campaign image featuring bread, roses, and a rice bowl.20 In 1995, there was a large ten-day women's protest against poverty and inequality in Quebec, Canada, named La Marche du Pains et des RosesThe thirtieth anniversary was recently commemorated, in October 2025, with a new large-scale protest march.21
Although the slogan Bread & Roses still resonates strongly today, we must not reduce it to a cliché. While the protests may have originally been spearheaded by women, they were never about women's rights alone. Bread and Roses inspires not only feminist but also anti-racist, decolonial, class, climate, and LGBTQIA+ activism. It is about the fight against injustice and inequality. The fight for a dignified existence. And the magazine sets that fight Bread & Roses in the spotlight for thirty years.
1. Helen M. TODD, Getting out the vote. An account of a week's automobile campaign by women suffragists. In: The American Magazine, (1911)5, pp. 611-619
2. His ideology will cost him his appointment as a teacher at a girls' school. For the school, his beliefs were too 'radical'. See: archives.nypl.org -- James Oppenheim papers. Last accessed on 16/12/2025.
3. James OPPENHEIM, Bread and roses. In: The American Magazine, 1911, p. 214
4. Guy VANSCHOENBEEK, Bread & Roses. After the story and the slogan, the song. In: Bread & Roses, (1996)3, pp. 58-59.
5. Guy VANSCHOENBEEK, We want bread and roses too: the strike in Lawrence (USA), 1912. In: Bread & Roses, (1996)2, pp. 78-80.
6. Guy VANSCHOENBEEK, We want bread and roses too […], p. 78.
7. Several strikers also lost their lives in the violence, such as Anna LoPizzo, an Italian, who was killed by police. See: Bruce Watson, Bread&Roses. Mills, migrants, and the struggle for the American dream, London: Penguin Books, 2005, pp. 106-107.
8. Workers came from far and wide to work in the American factories, including from Italy, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium (primarily Wallonia), France, but also Syria and Canada. See: Bruce WATSON, Bread&Roses […], p. 8.
9. According to the Julian calendar (which was used in Russia at the time) and therefore March 8 according to the Gregorian calendar.
10. Rochelle GOLDBERG RUTHCHILD, Equality & Revolution. Women's rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010, pp. 218-221.
11. Rochelle GOLDBERG RUTHCHILD, Equality & Revolution […], pp. 221-222.
12. Giselle NATH, We want bread! Hunger, social policy and protest during the First World War in Belgium, Antwerp: Manteau Publishers, 2013, pp. 238-243.
13. Ludo Abicht retrieves in his essay Bread, roses and utopia that resemblance. Is it a coincidence? Or did German immigrants indeed have an influence on the American labor movement? See: Ludo ABICHT, Bread, roses and utopia, Ghent: Kritiek, 1987, p. 173.
14. In the story, the noblewoman wants to bring loaves of bread to the poor, hidden under her cloak, but her husband suspects her of theft, and when he removes her cloak, he finds no loaves, but roses. See: Elisabeth of Thuringia | KRO-NCRV. Last accessed on 30/04/2026.
15. See: Symbol: rose. Last accessed on 06/05/2026.
16. See, for example, the books by Anja Meulenbelt and Andrea d'Atri.
17. Little can be found about this novel, but we found a review in the Dutch newspaper De Gooi- en Eemlander of January 31, 1959.
18. See: Bread and Roses. Last accessed on: 04/08/2026.
19. See: Du Pain et des Roses. Last accessed on: 04/08/2026.
20. Guy VANSCHOENBEEK, Bread & Roses. After the story and the slogan, the song. In: Bread & Roses (1996)3, pp. 58.
21. See: Pain et roses, droits et luttes - STTCSN. Last accessed on: 04/08/2026.
