Background
Rose Schneiderman was born Rachel Schneiderman on April 6, 1882, the first of four children of a religious Jewish family, in the village of Sawin, 14 kilometres (9 miles) north of Chełm in Russian Poland.
(Discusses the life and work of ten female union organizer...)
Discusses the life and work of ten female union organizers and strike leaders: Sarah Bagley, Augusta Lewis, Kate Mullaney, Leonora Barry, Clara lemlich, Hannah O'Day, Rose Schneiderman, Mother Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Agnes Nestor
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Rose Schneiderman was born Rachel Schneiderman on April 6, 1882, the first of four children of a religious Jewish family, in the village of Sawin, 14 kilometres (9 miles) north of Chełm in Russian Poland.
Her parents, Samuel and Deborah (Rothman) Schneiderman, worked in the sewing trades. Schneiderman first went to Hebrew school, normally reserved for boys, in Sawin, and then to a Russian public school in Chełm. In 1890 the family migrated to New York City's Lower East Side. Schneiderman's father died in the winter of 1892, leaving the family in poverty. Her mother worked as a seamstress, trying to keep the family together, but the financial strain forced her to put her children in a Jewish orphanage for some time. Schneiderman left school in 1895 after the sixth grade, although she would have liked to continue her education. She went to work, starting as a cashier in a department store and then in 1898 as a lining stitcher in a cap factory in the Lower East Side. In 1902 she and the rest of her family moved briefly to Montreal, where she developed an interest in both radical politics and trade unionism.
Schneiderman’s first two jobs were in stores, but within a few years she went to work in the garment industry, in a cap-making factory. Here she first encountered union workers — all male. She and a co-worker responded by recruiting the requisite number of women to have their own charter. Fired with a vision of social justice, she saw labor unions as her means of fighting her own way upward, and in her battles for minimum wages, maximum working hours, and legislation to prevent child labor, she sought to take other working women and girls with her. In this struggle she gained the support of women of means who even walked picket lines with her.
In 1906 Schneiderman helped found the National Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). From 1914 to 1917 she was a general organizer of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. From 1918 until 1926 she served as vice president of the National WTUL; she continued as president of the New York branch of the WTUL until her retirement in 1949.
Schneiderman also worked for the Women’s Suffrage Association. Following their success in winning the vote for women in 1920, the Women’s party’s initial efforts for an equal rights amendment began. If women had obtained the equal rights with men that these women sought, it would have meant the abrogation of the protective legislation for women that Rose Schneiderman had achieved. All the laws guaranteeing women minimum wages, maximum hours, and compensation for pregnancy would have been nullified since the laws did not apply to men. Therefore it marked a critical, paradoxical juncture for her in her quest for bettering the condition of women. She found herself defending protective legislation and thus opposing her former friends with whom she had worked in presuffrage days.
She ran for the Senate in 1920 on the Farm Labor party ticket. In 1937 Governor Herbert Lehman appointed her secretary of the New York State Department of Labor, where she worked until 1943, and she served as labor adviser to several national labor and other government agencies. Her friendship with Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt lasted until their deaths. She was one of their mentors in trade union matters.
A tiny, red-haired bundle of social dynamite, Rose Schneiderman did more to upgrade the dignity and living standards of working women than any other American.
Seventy years ago, first as a department store clerk, then as a cap maker and finally as a founder of the Women’s Trade Union League, she pioneered in the mission of emancipation that reached flower two decades later in the campaign for women’s suffrage and the current movement for women's liberation. Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, both learned most of what they knew about unions from her — lessons that eventuated in the Wagner Act, the National Industry Recovery Act and other New Deal landmarks.
Ironically, many of the pioneer laws she helped put on the statute books to abolish the sweatshop through regulation of wages, hours and safety standards for women in industry became the target a half century later of women campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment, who regarded all protective legislation as discriminatory. There was less paradox in that shift than appeared, however. The upward march that Rose Schneiderman did so much to start had now progressed to a point where women felt able to stand on their own feet, with walls of special protection as unwelcome as walls of prejudice. That progress is her monument.
In 1920, Schneiderman ran for the United States Senate as the candidate of the New York State Labor Party, receiving 15,086 votes and finishing behind Prohibitionist Ella A. Boole (159,623 votes) and Socialist Jacob Panken, (151,246). Her platform had called for the construction of nonprofit housing for workers, improved neighborhood schools, publicly owned power utilities and staple food markets, and state-funded health and unemployment insurance for all Americans.
Schneiderman was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1926, she was elected president of the National WTUL, a post she retained until her retirement. In 1933, she was the only woman to be appointed on the National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board by President Roosevelt, and was a member of Roosevelt's "brain trust" during that decade. From 1937 to 1944 she was secretary of labor for New York State, and campaigned for the extension of social security to domestic workers and for equal pay for female workers. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, she was involved in efforts to rescue European Jews, but could only rescue a small number. Albert Einstein wrote her: “It must be a source of deep gratification to you to be making so important a contribution to rescuing our persecuted fellow Jews from their calamitous peril and leading them toward a better future.”
In 1949, Schneiderman retired from public life, making occasional radio speeches and appearances for various labor unions, devoting her time to writing her memoirs, which she published under the title All for One, in 1967.
(Discusses the life and work of ten female union organizer...)
(short stories, fiction, all written by women about women.)
Schneiderman was an active feminist, campaigning for women's suffrage as a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She saw suffrage as part and parcel of her fight for economic rights. When a state legislator warned in 1912 that "Get women into the arena of politics with its alliances and distressing contests--the delicacy is gone, the charm is gone, and you emasculize women", Schneiderman replied:
"We have women working in the foundries, stripped to the waist, if you please, because of the heat. Yet the Senator says nothing about these women losing their charm. They have got to retain their charm and delicacy and work in foundries. Of course, you know the reason they are employed in foundries is that they are cheaper and work longer hours than men. Women in the laundries, for instance, stand for 13 or 14 hours in the terrible steam and heat with their hands in hot starch. Surely these women won't lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to lose standing in foundries or laundries all year round. There is no harder contest than the contest for bread, let me tell you that"
— Rose Schneiderman
Schneiderman helped pass the New York state referendum in 1917 that gave women the right to vote. On the other hand, she opposed passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution proposed by the National Woman's Party on the ground that it would deprive working women of the special statutory protections for which the WTUL had fought so hard.
Schneiderman never married, and treated her nieces and nephews as if they were her own children. She had a long-term relationship with Maud O'Farrell Swartz (1879-1937), another working class woman active in the WTUL, until Swartz' death in 1937. Rose Schneiderman died in New York City on August 11, 1972, at age ninety.