Rose Schneiderman
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Rose Schneiderman (April 6, 1882– August 11, 1972) was a prominent United States labor union leader and socialist of the first part of the twentieth century. Born in either Saven or Chelm, Poland under Russian rule, she and her family emigrated to the United States in 1890. Her father died two years later, forcing her mother to place her in an orphanage for more than a year.
Schneiderman went to work in 1895, first as a cashier in a department store and then in 1898 as a lining stitcher in a cap factory in New York City's Lower East Side. In 1902 she and the rest of her family moved briefly to Montreal, where she developed an interest in both radical politics and trade unionism.
She returned to New York in 1903 and, with a fellow worker, started organizing the women in her factory. When they applied for a charter to the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union, the union told them to come back after they had succeeded in organizing twenty five women. They did that within days and the union then chartered its first women's local.
Schneiderman obtained wider recognition during a citywide capmakers' strike in 1905. Elected secretary of her local and a delegate to the New York City Central Labor Union, she came into contact with the New York Women's Trade Union League, an organization that lent moral and financial support to the organizing efforts of women workers. She quickly became one of the most prominent members, elected the New York branch's vice president in 1908. She left the factory to work for the league, attending school with a stipend provided by one of the League's wealthy supporters. She was an active participant in the Uprising of the 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York City led by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in 1909.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which more than 100 garment workers were burned alive or died jumping from the ninth floor of a factory building, dramatized the conditions that Schneiderman, the WTUL and the union movement were fighting. The WTUL had documented similar unsafe conditions — factories without fire escapes or that had locked the exit doors to keep workers from stealing materials — at dozens of sweatshops in New York City and surrounding communities; twenty-five workers had died in a similar sweatshop fire in Newark, New Jersey shortly before the Triangle disaster. Schneiderman expressed her anger at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911 to an audience largely made up of the well-heeled members of the WTUL:
- I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.
- This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.
- We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.
- Public officials have only words of warning to us – warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.
- I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.
Despite her harsh words, Schneiderman continued working in the WTUL as an organizer, returning to it after a frustrating year on the staff of the male-dominated ILGWU. She subsequently became president of its New York branch, then its national president for more than twenty years until it disbanded in 1950.
She also served on the National Recovery Administration’s Labor Advisory Board in the 1930s, was a member of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "brain trust" during that decade, and worked as secretary of the New York State Department of Labor from 1937 to 1944. She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, active in the American Labor Party in the 1930s and a close associate of Eleanor Roosevelt, who joined the WTUL in 1922.
Schneiderman was an active feminist, campaigning for women's suffrage as a member of the National American Women Suffrage Association and running for the United States Senate as the candidate of the Farmer Labor Party in 1920, receiving just 15,086 votes and finishing behind Prohibitionist Ella A. Boole (159,623 votes) and Socialist Jacob Panken, (151,246). [1]
Schneiderman saw suffrage as part and parcel of her fight for economic rights. When a state legislator warned in 1912 that "Get women into the arena of politics with its alliances and distressing contests--the delicacy is gone, the charm is gone, and you emasculize women", Schneiderman replied:
- We have women working in the foundries, stripped to the waist, if you please, because of the heat. Yet the Senator says nothing about these women losing their charm. They have got to retain their charm and delicacy and work in foundries. Of course, you know the reason they are employed in foundries is that they are cheaper and work longer hours than men. Women in the laundries, for instance, stand for 13 or 14 hours in the terrible steam and heat with their hands in hot starch. Surely these women won't lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to lose standing in foundries or laundries all year round. There is no harder contest than the contest for bread, let me tell you that.
She helped pass the New York state referendum in 1917 that gave women the right to vote. On the other hand, Schneiderman opposed passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution proposed by the National Woman's Party on the ground that it would deprive working women of the special statutory protections for which the WTUL had fought so hard.
Schneiderman is also credited with coining one of the most memorable phrases of the women's movement and the labor movement of her era:
- What the woman who labors 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. 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.
Her phrase "Bread and Roses", became associated with a 1912 textile strike of largely immigrant, largely women workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Schneiderman was a close personal and working associate of Maud O'Farrell Swartz, another working class woman active in the WTUL, until Swartz' death in 1937. As Schneiderman noted in a letter to a fellow WTUL member,
- Maud and I are still at it in the world of labor where struggle goes on unendingly and often we have to fight to regain what we lost. Progress is slow, especially where women are concerned.
Schneiderman published her memoirs, All for One, in 1967.
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ Johnson, Willis Fletcher, Roscoe C. E. (Roscoe Conkling Ensign) Brown, Walter Whipple Spooner, Willis Holly (1922). History of the State of New York, Political and Governmental. The Syracuse Press, 347 - 348, 350.
[edit] Further reading
- Endelman, Gary E., Solidarity Forever: Rose Schneiderman & the Women's Trade Union League,Beaufort Books 1981
- Orleck, Annalise Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1995
- Schneiderman, Rose, All for one, New York, P. S. Eriksson 1967
