Margaret Dreier Robins

• Margaret Robins
• Born: September 6, 1868
• Died: February 21, 1945

Labor activist, was born in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of the five surviving children (four daughters and one son) of Theodor Dreier and Dorothea Adelheid (Dreier) Dreier, both immigrants from Germany. Theodor Dreier was a member of the German Evangelical church and a successful businessman, active in civic affairs. Margaret Dreier was educated in a private school in Brooklyn Heights and then studied history and philosophy as a student of the Rev. Richard Salter Storrs of the Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn. Like some other well-to-do women, she was drawn by altruistic concerns to reform activism rather than to the purely cultural and social life available to one of her means.

Margaret Dreier’s reform work began when she joined the women’s auxiliary at Brooklyn Hospital, of which her father was a trustee. This affiliation introduced her to the daily problems confronting poor people. Inspection tours of mental asylums, undertaken for the State Charities Aid Association, broadened her understanding; she also lobbied successfully for an act to regulate employment agencies in New York State and in 1903-04 chaired the legislative committee of the Women’s Municipal League. In 1904 the socialist reformer William English Walling and the trade-union activist Lemora O’-Reilly put her in touch with the Women’s Trade Union League of America (WTUL) which Walling had just helped to establish with the blessing of Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor.

In June 1905 Dreier married Raymond Robins, a Chicago settlement worker, moving with him to a cold-water flat in a Chicago tenement. They had no children. Raymond Robins, a former lawyer and miner who had become wealthy in the Klondike gold rush, lent consistent support to her reform activities. In Chicago she plunged into trade-union work alongside such emerging labor leaders as Margaret Haley of the teachers and Agnes Newton of the glovemakers.

In 1907 Robins was elected president not only of the WTUL branch in Chicago but of the national WTUL. (Her sister, Mary Dreier, became president of the New York branch.) Often credited with being the key figure in the early development of the WTUL, she helped crystallize its twin goals of organization among women workers and lobbying for protective industrial legislation, one of labor’s aims in the progressive era. She edited the WTUL organ, Life and Labor, stood on Chicago street corners early in the morning to tell hotel and restaurant workers about Illinois’ new ten-hour workday; encouraged new WTUL leadership through training programs for young working women (1914-26); negotiated financial support from middle-class friends; gave liberally of her own money to the cause; and led 20,000 workers through Chicago to protest the arrest of the radical labor leader William D. (Big Bill) Haywood for murder in 1906. She helped build the WTUL from three branches to eleven by 1911, and she worked with Rose Schneiderman of New York and other women trade unionists to support the critical strikes in the garment industry in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago between 1909 and 1911.

Robins tied her efforts to other reform movements by associating with social worker Jane Addams and a variety of academic, religious, and political leaders. Friendly with Gompers, she was a member of the industrial education committee of the AFL and also worked with trade-union leader John Fitzpatrick from 1908 to 1917, on the executive board of the Chicago Federation of Labor. The governor of Illinois made her a member of the state unemployment commission in 1915.

Robins was an active suffragist. Distrust of feminism in the labor movement and other friction, however, led the AFL to end its financial support to the WTUL in 1915. Robins continued to seek support from wealthy patrons. She resigned her presidency in 1922. (She returned as a member of the executive board in 1934 and as chair of its southern organization in 1937, by which time the WTUL was much weaker.)

For some time Robins’s political views had been moving in a more conservative direction than the militant course of the WTUL’s earlier days. Perhaps her continued piety (she eventually became a Congregationalist) made it easier for her to interpret reform in a more broadly ethical, rather than militantly political, fashion. Apart from support for the regulation of monopolies, she believed in free enterprise tempered by welfare legislation for those in need of protection. As a Progressive party supporter in 1912, she followed Theodore Roosevelt and others in their backing of Republican presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, becoming part of the women’s division of the Republican party in 1919-20 and a member of the national committee in 1928.

In 1919 Robins organized an international conference of working women in Washington; this was followed by another in Geneva in 1921. From 1921 to 1923 she was president of the International Federation of Working Women, which she had founded, but resigned from the group because of differences concerning its international affiliations.

In 1925 Robins and her husband moved to Chinsegut Hill, an estate in Hernando County, Florida. There she involved herself with the Red Cross, the League of Women Voters, and the Young Women’s Christian Association. She was appointed by President Herbert Hoover to the planning committee of the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection. She voted for Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and became a warm supporter of his administration in the mid-1930s.

Robins died of pernicious anemia and rheumatic heart disease at the age of seventy-six at Chinsegut Hill, where she was buried.

The Margaret Dreier Robins papers are at the University of Florida Library at Gainesville. The Wisconsin State Historical Society at Madison has the papers of her husband. The Library of Congress and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College have the records of the WTUL. The article in Notable American Women (1971) has a bibliography. Other sources include M. E. Dreier, Margaret Dreier Robins: Her Life, Letters, and Work (1950); G. Boone, The Women’s Trade Union Leagues in Great Britain and the U.S.A. (1942); A. F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform (1967); C. A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform (1963); Who Was Who in America, vol. 2 (1950); and B. M. Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (1977). See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, February 22, 1945.