Rose Schneiderman founded a union's first women's local

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

The story

Born in 1882 in Russian Poland, Rose Schneiderman came to New York's Lower East Side with her family in 1890. Her father died two years later, and the family was so poor that her mother placed the children in an orphanage for a time. In 1895, at thirteen, Rose left school to help support the household.

Her mother hoped for a "respectable" job for her, and the United Hebrew Charities found her work as a department store salesgirl. After three years she asked a friend to train her as a cap maker, because factory work paid better, and from 1898 she worked as a lining stitcher in a cap factory. She soon grew frustrated that the best-paying jobs in her shop were reserved for men while women were given the worst work. Older women workers introduced her to trade unionism, socialism and feminism, and a short stay in Montreal in 1902 deepened her interest in radical politics.

Back in New York in 1903, at twenty-one, she and a fellow worker began organising the women in their factory. When they applied for a charter to the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers' Union, a union founded and run largely by socialist Jewish immigrants, they were told to come back once they had signed up twenty-five women. They did it within days, and the union chartered its first women's local. Male leaders who had doubted that young women could organise were deeply impressed by her skill and her charismatic speaking.

Her rise was rapid. A well-received speech during a strike at a Bayonne, New Jersey, factory helped win her a seat on the union's general executive board, and she became the first woman elected to national office in an American labour union. During the citywide capmakers' strike of 1905 she was elected secretary of her local and a delegate to New York City's Central Labor Union, which brought her into contact with the Women's Trade Union League.

That first local was the start of a career of nearly half a century. Schneiderman went on to lead the league in New York and nationally, help win the vote for New York women and advise the Roosevelts on labour policy. Her first organising drive showed that young immigrant women could build their own unions, an example followed by the tens of thousands who joined the garment strikes of the next decade.