bread and roses
Sustenance and dignity
Bread and roses is a phrase representing the demand for both material necessities and dignity—fair wages alongside beauty, leisure, and fulfillment.
The slogan emerged from early 20th-century labor movements, particularly associated with women workers: We want bread, but we want roses too.
It insists that survival isn't enough; workers deserve lives worth living.
- laborStrenuous effort; also childbirth
- labor movementOrganized effort for worker rights
- strikeForceful impact or stoppage
- dignityInnate personal worth
- workersPeople doing jobs
working class · textile workers · suffrage · poem · protest · unions · living · eight hour day · wages · beauty · struggle · textile · Lawrence · mills · solidarity · movement · demands · fair wages
bread and rosesscraping by
Barely having enough
hand to mouth · survival mode · grinding poverty · subsistence wages · starvation wages
bread and rosesworker exploitation
Mistreating employees for profit
union busting · strikebreaking · right-to-work · company town · Pinkertons
bread and rosesausterity
Enforced economic stringency
trickle-down economics · wage suppression · profit maximization · race to the bottom
bread, rose, breads, breaded, breading, breadcrumb, roses, rosy, rosier