Rose Schneiderman brought working women into suffrage

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

The story

In the early 1900s the American campaign for votes for women was led mostly by middle-class women, and many factory workers saw it as far removed from their daily struggle over wages, hours and safety. Rose Schneiderman, an immigrant cap maker who had become one of New York's leading union organisers, set out to close that gap.

At the First Convention of Women Trade Unionists in 1907, she argued that women needed the vote to improve their poor working conditions. Her case was practical rather than idealistic. She did not claim that putting women in office would transform politics; she argued that women voters could change the laws that governed their working lives, and so win protection through the law. That plain argument won her a growing following.

She carried the message to working audiences across New York and beyond. She became a popular speaker for suffrage groups 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. In 1911 she helped found the Wage Earners' League for Woman Suffrage, and in 1912 she toured Ohio's industrial cities for the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In a speech in Cleveland that June she told women of privilege that the worker "must have bread, but she must have roses, too", and urged them to "give her the ballot to fight with".

In 1917 she was appointed head of the industrial section of the New York suffrage campaign. She spoke at men's union meetings, handed out literature and wrote open letters explaining how the vote could help women improve their own working conditions. On election day the referendum passed and New York's women won full voting rights, three years before the Nineteenth Amendment.

Schneiderman then showed what the ballot could do. In 1918 she organised newly enfranchised women to vote against anti-labour state legislators who had tried to weaken protections for women workers. By tying the vote to the pay packet and the factory floor, she helped turn women's suffrage into a cause for working families as well as reformers, and built a lasting alliance between the labour and women's movements.

Why it matters

By linking the vote to wages and safety, Schneiderman built a bridge between the labour and suffrage movements and widened support for women's voting rights.