Rose Schneiderman

• Rose Schneiderman
• Born: April 6, 1882
• Died: August 11, 1972

Trade-union leader, suffragist, and educator, was born Rachel Schneiderman in Saven, Russian Poland, the eldest of four children (two daughters and two sons) of Adolph Samuel Schneiderman, a tailor, and Deborah (Rothman) Schneiderman, a seamstress. The family, which was Orthodox Jewish, came to New York City when she was eight. Her father died of influenza in 1892, leaving a pregnant wife who tried to support the family by sewing and taking in boarders.

At the age of thirteen Schneiderman went to work in a department store, earning $2.16 for a sixty-four-hour workweek. She resolved to become a capmaker, a job that paid three times as much, though she had to buy a sewing machine, pay for power to run it, and supply her own thread, and had to replace the machine out of her own pocket when it was destroyed in a factory fire. Conditions such as these spurred her interest in unionization. As cofounder and secretary of Local 23 she was instrumental in getting women admitted to the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union. Elected to the union’s general executive board in 1904—it was the highest position yet held by a woman in the American labor movement—she helped organize a successful thirteen-week strike.

In 1905 Schneiderman met Mary Dreier, who persuaded her to join the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), a national organization dedicated to improving the conditions of working women through unionization, legislation, and education. In 1906 she was elected vice president of the New York branch. The following year a WTUL grant enabled her to leave her factory job to study at the Rand School of Social Science and to become an organizer and field worker.

Schneiderman and other WTUL leaders participated in 1909 in the call for a strike of waist-makers that resulted in the famous Uprising of the 20,000—the largest strike of women workers yet seen in the United States. Most of the workers were between sixteen and twenty-five years of age. The WTUL also played a central role in the general strike of garment workers that developed later in the year and led to unionization of the industry. It was mainly women who picketed, were arrested, and suffered ill-treatment from the police and courts.

The WTUL, which ran an information booth, registered the strikers, and generally helped to systematize the strike, was particularly concerned with presenting the strikers’ case to the general public and the influential classes. Schneiderman addressed a meeting at the Hippodrome sponsored by Alva Belmont and one at the Colony Club at which a group of women contributed a sizable sum to the strike fund. Throughout the strike Schneiderman was kept busy addressing groups of strikers to keep up their morale.

As organizer for the WTUL, Schneiderman met constantly for four years with the white-goods workers of New York City until they felt strong enough to call a successful strike in 1913, and she was able to hold the union together afterward—always a difficult problem.

After the Triangle Waist Company fire of 1911, which killed 146 shirtwaist makers who had been locked into their factory with no means of escape, Schneiderman made a historic speech at a mass protest meeting held at the Metropolitan Opera House. With quiet passion she condemned the public and the government for their acquiescence in the perpetuation of unbearable working conditions and called for workers to “save themselves” through “a strong working-class movement.” A colleague described the tiny, red-haired Schneiderman during this period as the “living representative of the gifts that the Slavic races, and especially the Russian Jew [sic], have contributed to American life. Penetrated with the profound sadness of her people, and passionately alive to the workers’ wrongs, Rose Schneiderman can stir immense audiences and move them to tears as readily as to indignation. For her all the hope of the world’s future is embodied in two movements, trade unionism on the one hand and Socialism on the other.”

Woman suffrage was also of paramount importance to Schneiderman, for she and other WTUL leaders believed it indispensable not only for the improvement of conditions among working women but also for the eventual attainment of industrial democracy. In her organizing work she went from union to union telling men that the ballot must be given to working women. The WTUL’s first convention placed her on its suffrage committee. In 1913 she was sent by the National American Woman Suffrage Association to help with the campaign in Ohio, where she bluntly described to a group of upper-class women their role in improving the conditions under which the poor labored: “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.” She was opposed to the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which she believed constituted a threat to the achievement of protective legislation for women workers. In 1917 she chaired the Industrial Section of the Woman Suffrage party, and in 1920 she became the first Jewish woman to run for the U.S. Senate (she ran on the Farmer-Labor ticket).

During World War I Schneiderman continued her organizing work in the eastern states as the business agent and general organizer of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. In 1918 she was elected president of the New York branch of the WTUL, which had just moved into a new clubhouse on Lexington Avenue. The headquarters were shared by the newly formed Tenants’ League, of which Schneiderman was temporary head and which had been organized to protest the sharp wartime rent increases in New York City. During the same year she helped organize the laundry workers and was a delegate to the convention of the New York State Federation of Labor, afterward reporting to the WTUL that through the league’s efforts the federation had made the eight-hour bill for women a preferred item on its legislative agenda. In 1919 she was elected vice president of the national WTUL, served on the organization’s delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, and helped organize the International Congress of Working Women.

In 1925 Governor Alfred E. Smith appointed Schneiderman to represent New York at the Washington conference of the Child Labor Committee. She was a delegate to the 1926 national convention of the American Federation of Labor, and she also served on the organizing and life-insurance committees of the New York Central Trades and Labor Council.

Schneiderman was elected president of the National Women’s Trade Union League in 1926; for the next quarter-century she headed both the national organization and the New York branch. During this period, a low point of union activity throughout the country, the organization’s emphasis shifted to the education of women workers through summer schools and evening and weekend classes. Schneiderman was elected to the boards of Bryn Mawr College (where she helped Carey Thomas found a summer school), the Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York, the Pioneer Youth of America, and the Manumit School for workers’ children. The WTUL also held evening meetings with such speakers as Eleanor Roosevelt and the German Social Democrat Toni Sender. Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Schneiderman had introduced to the WTUL in 1922, became a friend and ally; through her intervention Schneiderman was able to speak directly to Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor of New York State, about trade-union goals.

With the onset of the depression in the early 1930s, the WTUL made every effort to keep up with its regular programs. Schneiderman toured New York State to build up interest in the league and in the minimum-wage bill for minors it was sponsoring. A small-loan fund for union members was established and the league cooperated in various mass relief projects. From 1933 to 1935 she served, by appointment of President Roosevelt, as the only woman member of the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Act. She was listed among the members of Roosevelt’s brain trust.

Returning to New York in 1935, Schneiderman headed the successful drives to organize laundry and hotel workers and helped the enactment of the eight-hour workday and the minimum wage. From 1937 to 1943 she was secretary of the New York State Department of Labor. She remained president of the New York WTUL until 1949 and of the national WTUL until its demise in 1950. In 1967 she entered the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged on New York City’s Upper West Side, where she died at the age of ninety, remembered as America’s most prominent woman trade unionist.

Schneiderman’s memoirs, All for One, were published in 1967. Her papers are in the Tamiment Library, New York University. Schneiderman made frequent contributions to Life and Labor, the WTUL publication. Her career can be traced in its pages and in the annual reports of the New York WTUL. See P. S. Foner, Women and the American-Labor Movement: From World War I to the Present (1979); also L. Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers (1924); C. Baum et al., The Jewish Woman in America (1976); A. Henry, The Trade Union Woman (1915); G. Boone, The Women’s Trade Union Leagues in Great Britain and America (1942); and Current Biography, February 1946. The sketch in Notable American Women: The Modern Period (1980) contains an extensive biography. An obituary appeared in The New York Times, August 12, 1972.