- Person
- Rose Schneiderman
- Lived
- 1882–1972
- Field
- Labour organising
- From
- Polish-American
The story
By the end of the First World War, Rose Schneiderman was a leading figure in both labour and feminist politics in New York. She had organised women garment workers since 1903, helped win the vote for New York women in 1917, and that same year became president of the New York Women's Trade Union League.
Her work drew fierce opposition. During the war she campaigned to stop the state assembly from suspending labour laws that protected women workers, and her socialist activism angered conservatives. Members of the legislature investigated her officially and publicly called her "the Red Rose of Anarchy". She answered at the ballot box, organising newly enfranchised women to defeat anti-labour legislators in the 1918 election.
The war years were hard on dissent across the country. The National Civil Liberties Bureau, set up in 1917 by the lawyer Crystal Eastman and Roger Nash Baldwin, had defended anti-war speech and conscientious objectors. On 19 January 1920 its leaders reorganised it as the American Civil Liberties Union, the first such body in the United States that did not represent one particular group or a single cause. Schneiderman was among its founding members, alongside figures such as Jane Addams, Helen Keller and Felix Frankfurter.
The link with her labour work was direct. Through the 1920s the ACLU concentrated on freedom of speech, especially within the labour movement. Schneiderman knew why that mattered. In her speech after the Triangle fire in 1911 she had said that whenever workers protested against unbearable conditions, "the strong hand of the law" was allowed to press down heavily upon them.
The organisation she helped launch grew far beyond its beginnings. In 1925, in Gitlow v. New York, the Supreme Court adopted the ACLU's view that the First Amendment's protection of free speech applies to state laws as well as federal ones. In 1971 Ruth Bader Ginsburg co-founded its Women's Rights Project. Today the ACLU has affiliates in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and about 1.7 million members.
Why it matters
As a founder of the ACLU, Schneiderman helped create an organisation that has long defended free speech and civil rights for Americans of every background.
About Rose Schneiderman
Polish-Jewish immigrant cap-maker who became a towering labour leader, popularised the cry “bread and roses” and helped shape New Deal labour law.
More about Rose Schneiderman
- Rose Schneiderman fought for workers' bread and roses“The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too,” Rose Schneiderman declared in 1912; she spent half a century winning better wages, hours and safety for working women.
- Rose Schneiderman founded a union's first women's localIn 1903 Rose Schneiderman organised the women in her cap factory so quickly that the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers' Union chartered its first women's local within days.
- Rose Schneiderman took women's labour rights worldwideRose Schneiderman was a key member of the first International Congress of Working Women in 1919, which aimed to address women's working conditions at the new International Labour Organization.
- Rose Schneiderman's speech after the Triangle fireAt a memorial meeting on 2 April 1911, after the Triangle fire killed 146 garment workers, Rose Schneiderman declared that working people must save themselves through a strong movement.
- Rose Schneiderman refused a privilege few workers hadIn 1908 Rose Schneiderman turned down a scholarship to finish her schooling, saying she could not accept a privilege so few working women had, and organised workers instead.
- Rose Schneiderman brought working women into suffrageFrom 1907 Rose Schneiderman argued that working women needed the vote to win better conditions, helping widen the suffrage movement beyond the middle class.
- Rose Schneiderman toured Ohio to win men's votes for womenIn 1912 Rose Schneiderman travelled through Ohio's industrial cities for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, urging working men to vote for women's suffrage.
- Rose Schneiderman helped win the vote for New York womenIn 1917 Rose Schneiderman led the industrial section of New York's suffrage campaign, and the state referendum that year gave New York's women full voting rights.
Sources
- Rose Schneiderman Wikipedia
- Rose Schneiderman Jewish Women's Archive
- American Civil Liberties Union Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.