Rose Schneiderman fought for workers' bread and roses

Person: Rose Schneiderman
Lived: 1882–1972
Field: Labour organising
From: Polish-American

The story

Rose Schneiderman was born in 1882 in the village of Saven, in Russian Poland, to devout Jewish parents, and her family settled on New York's Lower East Side in 1890. After her father's early death the family was desperately poor, and at thirteen Rose left school to work, later becoming a lining stitcher in a cap factory.

In 1903 she organised the women in her shop for the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers' Union, and within a year she became the first woman elected to national office in an American labour union. She went on to work for the Women's Trade Union League, helped pave the way for the 1909 to 1910 Uprising of the 20,000 shirtwaist strike, and became president of the league's New York branch in 1917 and of the national league in 1926.

The image of bread and roses had first appeared in the suffrage campaigning of Helen Todd, who in 1911 wrote of "bread for all, and roses too", and James Oppenheim used it for a poem published that December. Schneiderman gave the idea its most memorable form. Speaking in Cleveland in June 1912 for the Ohio suffrage campaign, she said that the woman who labours wants the right to live, not simply to exist, and that "the worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too." Bread stood for fair wages, hours and safety; roses for music, art, learning and a fuller life. She then urged women of privilege to give working women the ballot to fight with.

Her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, which began in the early 1920s, carried those ideals into national policy. In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt named her the only woman on the National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board, where she wrote the codes for every industry with a mainly female workforce. As New York's secretary of labor from 1937 she campaigned to extend Social Security to domestic workers and for equal pay for women.

The slogan outlived her. It became linked with the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where an annual Bread and Roses Heritage Festival is still held on Labor Day, and Oppenheim's poem was set to music by Mimi Fariña and recorded by singers including Judy Collins. More than a century on, the phrase still sums up the idea that working people deserve dignity and beauty in their lives as well as a living wage.

Why it matters

Schneiderman made 'bread and roses' a lasting rallying cry for workers' dignity, and her New Deal work helped shape labour protections that millions of Americans still rely on.