Long Tower Youth Club and Féile record socialist and feminist anthem 'Bread and Roses' for International Women's Day 2021

Young people from the Long Tower Youth Club have recorded a new version of the socialist and feminist anthem 'Bread and Roses' to mark International Women's Day 2021
Amber Archibald, Katie Nash, Ava Whoriskey and Clara Hutton at Free Derry corner.Amber Archibald, Katie Nash, Ava Whoriskey and Clara Hutton at Free Derry corner.
Amber Archibald, Katie Nash, Ava Whoriskey and Clara Hutton at Free Derry corner.

A video of Amber Archibald, Katie Nash, Ava Whoriskey and Clara Hutton performing the song at some of Derry's best known landmarks was released by the Gasyard Féile this afternoon.

The song has its origins in the campaigns for women's suffrage and workers' rights in the United States in the 1910s.

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Releasing the video Féile noted how Rose Schneiderman, a Polish-born immigrant speaking in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire on March 25, 1911, had said: "The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too."

It's believed 146 people - 123 of them women aged 14 to 23 - had died in the inferno in New York City.

"What the woman who labours wants is the right to live, not simply exist - the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art," Schneiderman had said at a meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911.

"You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with."

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