- Person
- Rose Schneiderman
- Lived
- 1882–1972
- Field
- Labour organising
- From
- Polish-American
The story
New York's men had rejected votes for women in a referendum in 1915, and in 1917 the question went before them again. Rose Schneiderman had been building toward that moment for a decade. Since the First Convention of Women Trade Unionists in 1907 she had argued that working women needed the vote to improve their conditions, and in 1911 she had helped found the Wage Earners' League for Woman Suffrage.
After a frustrating spell as general organiser for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, whose male leaders showed little interest in organising women, she became chair of the industrial section of the New York Woman Suffrage Party in 1917, responsible for winning over working people. In January that year she launched what the Jewish Women's Archive calls one final, successful drive to win the vote for New York women.
She spoke at men's union meetings, even though many employers tried to stop men from listening to activists, distributed literature, and launched a series of open letters explaining how the vote could help women improve their working conditions. Her argument was the one she had tested in Ohio in 1912: if wives and daughters could vote, labour would gain real influence over the laws. On election day she and several friends staffed three election districts, the first time, she later wrote, that they had seen the inside of a polling station.
The referendum passed, granting New York's women full voting rights, three years before the Nineteenth Amendment extended the vote nationally. New York was then the most populous state in the country, and the result proved decisive in persuading President Woodrow Wilson to back a federal suffrage amendment. The same year Schneiderman was elected president of the New York Women's Trade Union League. In 1918 she organised newly enfranchised women to vote against anti-labour state legislators, showing how the ballot could protect workers.
The win also shaped her own path. In 1920 she ran for the United States Senate on the New York State Labor Party ticket, and in later decades she served on the National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board and as New York's secretary of labor. Her 1917 campaign showed that working-class voters could carry the suffrage cause, and it left New York's women with a voice in the laws that govern their lives.
Why it matters
The 1917 New York victory gave the state's women the vote and showed that working-class support could carry the suffrage cause to success.
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 was a founding member of the ACLURose Schneiderman was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, bringing a labour organiser's experience to the defence of free speech and civil liberties.
- 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.
Sources
- Rose Schneiderman Wikipedia
- Rose Schneiderman Jewish Women's Archive
- Women's suffrage in the United States Wikipedia
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