AOC and Letitia James spoke, and Bernie Sanders swore the new mayor in, just after Lucy Dacus performed "Bread and Roses" today at NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Inauguration Ceremony.
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses."
As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men—
For they are women's children and we mother them again.
Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes—
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient call for Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew—
Yes, it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too.
As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days—
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes—
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.
The song is based on a poem written in 1911 by James Oppenheim, inspired by a speech given by suffragist and labor activist Helen Todd. "No words can better express the soul of the woman’s movement, lying back of the practical cry of 'Votes for Women,' better than this sentence....‘Bread for all, and Roses, too,'" Todd said. "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.”
Todd went to California to help lead the suffrage movement in the state and campaign in the state's fall election for Proposition 4, which secured the right for women to vote on October 10, 1911. During the California campaign, the suffragettes carried "Bread for all, and Roses, too!" banners, and the phrase spread throughout the country. In July 1913, for instance, during a suffrage parade in Maryland, a float with the theme "Bread for all, and roses, too" participated. The float "bore ... a boy with a basket of bread and two girls with a basket of roses."
Folksinger Mimi Fariña set the poem to music in 1974; hear her singing "Bread and Roses" with her sister Joan Baez. Fariña founded the nonprofit organization Bread and Roses that brings free live music to sick and imprisoned people. Dacus and her supergroup boygenius performed at a benefit concert for the organization in 2021, and Mamdani made a surprise appearance at her All Things Go festival in Queens in September.
The phrase can be traced back to Roman physician and philosopher Galen of Pergamon, who said something like, "If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy flowers, for bread is food for the body, but flowers are food for the mind." Edward Lane, in the notes of his 1838 translation of One Thousand and One Nights, states that, according to 15th-century writer Shems-ed-Deen Moḥammad en-Nowwájee, Galen said, "He who has two cakes of bread, let him dispose of one of them for some flowers of narcissus; for bread is the food of the body, and the narcissus is the food of the soul." [There is a long history of the use of narcissus (aka daffodil) to induce trance-like states and hallucinations. Sophocles referred to the narcissus as the "Chaplet of the infernal Gods."]
Dacus's beautiful performance today lead into a tape of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a Changing." Let's hope so, and work for that change.
