Margaret Dreier Robins

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Margaret Dreier Robins (1868 -1945) was an American labor leader. Born in Brooklyn to German immigrants in 1868, Robins spent much of her early life suffering from depression. At age nineteen, she began doing charity work at Brooklyn hospital and soon became involved in other progressive causes. She met the reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell in 1902 and through Lowell joined in the Woman’s Municipal League, an organization that helped women avoid prostitution.

In 1904, increasingly interested in workers’ rights, Dreier joined the Women’s Trade Union League, then only a small, budding organization. She became the president of its New York chapter and treasurer of the national organization and rose quickly in its ranks. In 1907, she was elected president of the League and began a fifteen year tenure as its leader. Meanwhile, she married the lawyer and social worker Raymond Robins in 1905.

As president of the League, Robins helped organize women into unions, educate women workers, and advocate for progressive legislation. She created a Training School for Women to educate women workers about organizing and leadership skills. She supported and became active in a number of well publicized strikes, most notably the International Ladies Garment Workers’ strike in 1910. She pushed for protective legislation limiting the hours of women’s work, and she presided over the League during its most influential period.

In 1924, Dreier retired from her activist work and moved with her husband to Florida. She died in 1945.

[edit] Sources

Payne, Elizabeth Anne (1988). Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.