Partner
Maud O'Farrell Swartz
Queer Places:
1940 Andrews Ave S, The Bronx, NY 10453
Maimonides-Elmont Cemetery
Elmont, Nassau County, New York, USA
Rose
Schneiderman (April 6, 1882 – August 11, 1972) was a Polish-born American
socialist
and
feminist, and one of the most prominent female labor
union leaders. As a member of the New York
Women's Trade Union League, she drew attention to unsafe workplace
conditions, following the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, and as a
suffragist she helped to pass the New York state referendum of 1917 that
gave women the right to vote. Schneiderman was also a founding member of the
American Civil Liberties Union and served on the
National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board under President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is credited with coining the phrase "Bread
and Roses," to indicate a worker's right to something higher than
subsistence living. Schneiderman never married, and treated her nieces and nephews as if they
were her own children.[13]
She had a long-term relationship with
Maud O'Farrell Swartz, another working class woman active in
the WTUL, until Swartz's death in 1937.
Rose Schneiderman was born Rachel Schneiderman on April 6, 1882,[a]
the first of four children of a religious
Jewish family, in the village of
Sawin, 14 kilometres (9 miles) north of
Chełm in
Russian Poland. Her parents, Samuel and Deborah (Rothman) Schneiderman,
worked in the sewing trades. Schneiderman first went to
Hebrew school, normally reserved for boys, in Sawin, and then to a Russian
public school in Chełm. In 1890 the family migrated to
New York City's
Lower East Side. Schneiderman's father died in the winter of 1892, leaving
the family in poverty. Her mother worked as a seamstress, trying to keep the
family together, but the financial strain forced her to put her children in a
Jewish orphanage for some time. Schneiderman left school in 1895 after the
sixth grade, although she would have liked to continue her education. She went
to work, starting as a cashier in a department store and then in 1898 as a
lining stitcher in a cap factory in the 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.[1]
She returned to New York in 1903 and, with a partner 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 (WTUL), an organization that lent moral and
financial support to the organizing efforts of women workers. She quickly
became one of the most prominent members and was 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. She also was a key
member of the first
International Congress of Working Women of 1919, which aimed to address
women's working conditions at the first annual
International Labour Organization Convention.[1]
The
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 146 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 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.
In
1920, Schneiderman ran for the
United States Senate as the candidate of the New York State Labor Party,
receiving 15,086 votes and finishing behind the
Prohibitionist
Ella A. Boole (159,623 votes) and the
Socialist
Jacob Panken (151,246).
Her platform had called for the construction of nonprofit housing for workers,
improved neighborhood schools, publicly owned power utilities and staple food
markets, and state-funded health and unemployment insurance for all Americans.
Schneiderman was a founding member of the
American Civil Liberties Union, and became friends with
Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband,
Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1926, she was elected president of the National
WTUL, a post she retained until her retirement. In 1933, she was the only
woman to be appointed on the
National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board by President
Roosevelt, and was a member of Roosevelt's "brain trust" during that decade.
From 1937 to 1944 she was secretary of labor for New York State, and
campaigned for the extension of social security to domestic workers and for
equal pay for female workers. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, she was
involved in efforts to rescue European Jews, but could only rescue a small
number.
Albert Einstein wrote her: "It must be a source of deep gratification to
you to be making so important a contribution to rescuing our persecuted fellow
Jews from their calamitous peril and leading them toward a better future."
Beginning in 1907, at the First Convention of Women Trade Unionists,
Schneiderman argued that the political enfranchisement of women was necessary
to address their poor working conditions. Accordingly, she helped expand the
women's suffrage movement – which was primarily associated with middle-class
women – to include working-class women, especially factory workers, and to
incorporate the issues they faced. She became a popular speaker with suffrage
organizations that focused on working women, including
Harriot Stanton Blatch's
Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, and the American Suffragettes, a
militant group based in New York City.[5]
In 1912, on behalf of the
National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), she traveled throughout Ohio's
industrial cities, giving lectures to working men to garner support for a
state suffrage referendum. To win men's support, she emphasized how beneficial
the enfranchisement of working women would be for labor issues. As she later
explained, "My argument to them was that if their wives and daughters were
enfranchised, labor would be able to influence legislation enormously."[6]
While Schneiderman was hailed as a powerful speaker, the 1912 referendum did
not pass, and it would not be until 1923 – after the passage of the
federal
Nineteenth Amendment that granted women the right to vote - that the
phrase "white male," in reference to voting, would be removed from the
Constitution of Ohio.[7]
In 1917, the same year that New York would vote on a women's suffrage
referendum, Schneiderman was appointed head of the industrial section of the
New York Women's Suffrage Association. In this capacity, she spoke at men's
union meetings (though many employers had attempted to ban men from speaking
to activists), distributed literature, and instituted a series of open letters
that explained how suffrage could help women improve their own working
conditions. On the day of the election, Schneiderman and several friends
manned three election districts – the first time, she later wrote, that they
had seen the inside of a polling station.[8]
The referendum passed, granting
New York's women full enfranchisement.
After the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, feminists regrouped and, under the
leadership of the
National Woman's Party, pursued passage of the
Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the
United States Constitution, which proposed equal rights for all citizens,
regardless of sex. Like other female labor activists, however, Schneiderman
opposed the ERA, fearing it would deprive working women of the special
statutory protections for which the WTUL had fought so hard, including the
regulation of wages and hours, and protection against termination and
dangerous working conditions during pregnancy.[9]
In 1949, Schneiderman retired from public life, making occasional radio
speeches and appearances for various labor unions, devoting her time to
writing her memoirs, which she published under the title All for One,
in 1967.
Rose Schneiderman died in New York City on August 11, 1972, at age ninety.
In an obituary appearing in The New York Times, she was credited with
teaching Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt "most of what they knew about
unions," and having an indirect influence on the passage of the
National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (also known as the Wagner Act), the
National Industrial Recovery Act, and other
New Deal
legislation. The obituary also declared that she had done "more to upgrade the
dignity and living standards of working women than any other American."[14]
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