From Sawin to the Lower East Side
Rachel Rose Schneiderman was born in April 1882 in Sawin (Saven), a village near Chełm in Russian Poland, the eldest child of a devout Jewish family. Her father, Samuel, was a tailor; her mother, Deborah, did a little of everything, taking in sewing, baking ritual breads, treating the sick with herbs and even tending the bar of a local inn. Unusually, her parents believed in educating girls. They sent Rose to heder, the traditional Jewish elementary school normally reserved for boys, and later moved to Chełm so that she could attend a Russian public school.
In 1890 the family emigrated to New York’s Lower East Side. Two years later Samuel died of meningitis, leaving three children and a pregnant wife. Deborah took in boarders and did sewing and washing, but for a time she had to place her children in a Jewish orphanage. When Rose came home, her mother worked nights so that her daughter could attend school by day, until 1895, when Deborah lost her night job and thirteen-year-old Rose had to leave school after the sixth grade and go to work.
Salesgirl and cap-maker
Her mother wanted a “respectable” job for her, and through the United Hebrew Charities found her a place as a salesgirl in a department store; retail work was considered safer for a girl’s reputation than the factory floor. But respectability did not pay the rent. After three years, Rose asked a friend to teach her the cap-making trade and in 1898 became a lining stitcher in a cap factory, where the pay was better.
In the factory she ran into the gender hierarchy of the garment trades, which reserved the best-paid work for men and left women the worst. When she complained, older women workers began to teach her about trade unionism, socialism and feminism, the three ideas that would shape the rest of her life. A brief stay with her family in Montreal in 1902 deepened her interest in radical politics.
The first woman in union office
Back in New York in 1903, the twenty-one-year-old Schneiderman and a co-worker set out to organise the women in her shop. When they asked the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers’ Union, founded and run largely by Eastern European Jewish socialists, for a charter, its leaders told them 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. Impressed by her organising and her speaking, the union elected her to its general executive board in 1904, making her the first woman elected to national office in an American labour union.
During a citywide cap-makers’ strike in 1905 she came into contact with the New York Women’s Trade Union League, an alliance of working women and wealthy reformers that supported women’s efforts to unionise. She rose fast: vice-president of the New York league by 1906, and from 1908 its chief organiser, paid by the philanthropist Irene Lewisohn after Schneiderman refused a scholarship on the grounds that she could not accept a privilege so few working women had. She helped lay the groundwork for the Uprising of the 20,000, the great strike of New York’s shirtwaist makers in 1909–10, the largest strike by American women workers up to that time, led largely by young Eastern European Jewish women.
After the Triangle fire
On 25 March 1911 fire swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory near Washington Square, killing 146 garment workers, most of them young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, many trapped behind locked doors or forced to jump from the upper floors. The Women’s Trade Union League had documented exactly such dangers in dozens of sweatshops.
At a memorial meeting in the Metropolitan Opera House on 2 April 1911, before an audience largely made up of the league’s well-heeled supporters, Schneiderman, four feet nine inches tall and famous for her flaming red hair, gave the most celebrated speech of her life. She told them she would be a traitor to the burned bodies if she came to talk good fellowship; the public had been tried and found wanting; the life of working men and women was cheap and property sacred; and the only way workers could save themselves was through a strong working-class movement. The speech helped galvanise the campaign that produced New York’s pioneering factory-safety and labour laws in the years that followed, for which she lobbied on behalf of the league from 1911.
Bread and roses
Schneiderman’s best-remembered words came from the suffrage campaign. She had argued since 1907 that working women needed the vote to win protective laws, and she carried that message to working-class audiences who had felt that suffrage was a middle-class cause. In 1912 she toured Ohio’s industrial cities for a state suffrage referendum. In a speech of that period she declared that what the woman who labours wants is the right to live, not simply exist, the right to life as the rich woman has it, and the sun and music and art: “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”
The phrase “bread and roses” did not originate with her: it had appeared in 1911 in an article by the suffragist Helen Todd and in a poem by James Oppenheim, and it became forever linked with the 1912 textile strike of immigrant women in Lawrence, Massachusetts. But Schneiderman did more than anyone to make it a rallying cry for a labour movement that demanded not only wages and hours but dignity, education, leisure and beauty. In 1917 she led the industrial section of the New York suffrage campaign that finally won New York women the vote.
“The Red Rose of Anarchy”
Schneiderman’s path inside the movement was not smooth. Believing some of the league’s founders to be both antisemitic and antisocialist, she resigned as its organiser in 1914 and spent two frustrating years as an organiser for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, whose male leaders showed little interest in organising women. She returned to the league and in 1917 became president of its New York branch, a post she held until 1949.
Conservatives in the New York legislature, angered by her socialist activism and her wartime fight to stop the suspension of laws protecting women workers, investigated her and dubbed her “the Red Rose of Anarchy”. She responded by organising newly enfranchised women to vote against anti-labour legislators. In 1920 she ran for the United States Senate on the ticket of the New York State Labor Party, on a platform of non-profit workers’ housing, better schools, public utilities and state-funded health and unemployment insurance. She lost, but the platform anticipated much of what was to come.
Teaching the Roosevelts
In 1926 Schneiderman became president of the National Women’s Trade Union League, which she led until her retirement in 1950. In the early 1920s she became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, who joined the league; Schneiderman became a regular guest at Roosevelt’s scrambled-egg suppers and at Hyde Park, where her conversations with Franklin Roosevelt helped shape his thinking about working people. The New York Times later wrote that she taught the Roosevelts most of what they knew about unions.
When Roosevelt became president, he appointed her in 1933 as 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. She played a part in shaping the landmark labour legislation of the New Deal, the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. From 1937 she served as secretary of the New York State Department of Labor, campaigning to extend social security to domestic workers and for equal pay for women. She was also a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union.
A strong Jewish identity
Schneiderman found the role of women in traditional Judaism too restrictive, but she had a strong Jewish identity and worked for Jewish causes throughout her life. She raised funds for a Labour Zionist settlement in Palestine named after the French socialist leader Léon Blum. In the late 1930s and during the Second World War she used her speeches, her letter-writing and the resources of the labour movement to help Jewish refugees escape Nazi Europe and resettle in the United States and Palestine. Albert Einstein wrote to her that it must be a source of deep gratification to be making so important a contribution to rescuing our persecuted fellow Jews. She herself could rescue only a small number, and she described herself as sick with worry throughout the war years.
Last years and legacy
Schneiderman retired from public life in 1949–50, making occasional radio talks and appearances for unions and writing her memoir, All for One, published in 1967. She never married; her closest companion for many years was Maud O’Farrell Swartz, a fellow league activist, until Swartz’s death in 1937. She treated her nieces and nephews as her own children. Rose Schneiderman died in New York on 11 August 1972, aged ninety. The New York Times obituary said she had done more to upgrade the dignity and living standards of working women than any other American.
Many of the causes she championed, equal pay, an end to job segregation by sex, protection for domestic workers, publicly funded child care and maternity insurance, were taken up by the new women’s movement that was gaining strength as she died. The minimum wages, maximum hours, workplace safety rules and social insurance that most American workers now take for granted owe something to the tiny, red-haired cap-maker from Poland who insisted that working people deserved not only bread, but roses too.
Sources & further reading
Rose Schneiderman, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive · Rose Schneiderman, Wikipedia · Bread and Roses, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.