This article argues that in her long career of political and labor activism, Rose Schneiderman (1882-1972) embarked on a quest for urban equity that took her from the tenets of socialism, which emphasized trade unionism, to the principles of social justice feminism, which advocated state activism through the passage and promotion of labor legislation. While social justice feminists wanted to both ameliorate the harsh effects of industrialization and urbanization and to change the social conditions of women, they often neglected the issues of class and race. I describe how Schneiderman changed that situation from 1911 through 1933 by lobbying for legislative changes in the Progressive Era, by establishing a partnership between social justice feminism and New York’s Democratic Party, and by assisting African American laundry workers in New York City from 1924 through 1933.
"Extracts from Address Delivered by Miss Rose Schneiderman Before the Women’s Industrial Conference . . . Jan. 20, 1926: The Right to Citizenship," Mary van Kleeck Papers, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, Box 71, Folder 1171.
2.
The term "social justice feminism" comes from the introduction to Kathryn Kish Sklar, Anja Schuler, and Susan Strasser, eds., Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885-1933 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 4-5. See also John Thomas McGuire, "From the Courthouses to the State Legislatures: Social Justice Feminism, Labor Legislation, and the 1920s," Labor History 45, no. 2 (May 2004): 225-46, as well as John Thomas McGuire, "Two Feminist Visions: Social Justice Feminism and Equal Rights, 1899-1940," in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 71, no. 4 (Autumn 2004): 445-78. In discussing social justice as an issue in late nineteenth-century America, I found Jane Mansbridge’s definition of "justice" in Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg, eds., A Companion to American Thought (New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1995; reprint, New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 363 useful. Other influences have been Arthur S. Link, American Epoch: A History of the United States Since the 1890s, Vol. I, 1897-1920, 3rd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1967), 70, and Clarke A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform: American Social Justice and Social Action, 1918-1933 (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1963). The definitions of feminism come from those used by Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 4 and Elisabeth Lonna, "Waves in the History of Feminism," in Crossing Borders: Re-mapping Women’s Movements at the Turn of the 21st Century, ed. Hilda Romer Christensen, Beatrice Halsaa, and Aino Saarinen (Copenhagen: University of South Denmark Press, 2004), 45-46. I agree with Lonna that the third criteria of Cott’s definition, "that feminism implies the understanding that women constitute a social grouping," overlooks complexities inherent in defining women as a social group. I therefore use Lonna’s reformulation, which entails "an understanding that the social conditions one is living under are dependent on gender, and an identification of one or more groups of women." Lonna, "Waves in the History of Feminism," 45-46. The term "industrial feminism" comes from the Introduction to Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 6.
3.
Alice Kessler-Harris, "Rose Schneiderman and the Limits of Women’s Trade Unionism," in, Labor Leaders in America, ed. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). The quotation about social justice in New York City’s Jewish community is from Alice Kessler-Harris, "Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union," Labor History 17, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 5-23, reprinted in Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker, ed. Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 147. The statistics about New York State come from Joel Schwartz, "The Triumph of Liberalism, 1914-1945," in The Empire State: A History of New York, ed. Milton M. Klein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 57. The Perkins quotation is from Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking, 1946), 23.
4.
Two notable exceptions are Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, and Kessler-Harris, "Rose Schneiderman and the Limits of Women’s Trade Unionism." An excellent short biography can be found in Kathleen Banks Nutter, "Rose Schneiderman," in American National Biography, vol. 19, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 407-08. Rose Schneiderman wrote her memoir with Lucy Goldwaithe, All for One (New York: Paul S. Erickson, 1967).
5.
Rachel changed her name to Rose at the request of her father on emigrating to the United States. Schneiderman, All for One, 37-43. Schneiderman’s father also Americanized his sons’ names.
6.
Schneiderman, All for One, 10-14, 27-28, 34. Nutter, "Rose Schneiderman," 407. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 23. Rose Schneiderman, "A Cap Maker’s Story," The Independent 58 (April 27, 1905): 935.
7.
Schneiderman, "A Cap Maker’s Story,"935. Schneiderman, All for One, 50.
8.
Schneiderman, All for One, 47, 49.
9.
Elias Tcherioewer, ed., The Early Jewish Labor Movement in the United States. Trans. and revised by Aaron Antonovsky (New York: Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, 1961), 3-5. Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 10-11.
10.
Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997), 18. Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 9. Gerald Sorin, Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 34.
11.
Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, 29. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 35, 80.
12.
Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, 32.
13.
Sorin, Tradition Transformed, 107-15.
14.
Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, 120; Tradition Transformed, 113. A fascinating discussion of this Jewish principle can be found in Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia, vol. 6 (St. Petersburg, 1991), 793-94.
15.
Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, 139.
16.
Ibid., 81. Other sources possess different language for the oath, but the same sense as the words quoted in this article. See Richard A. Greenwald, "Bargaining for Industrial Democracy? Labor, the State, and the New Industrial Relations in Progressive Era New York" (PhD diss., New York University, 1998), 27.
17.
Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, 49.
18.
Ibid., 67. Daniel T. Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 48.
19.
Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, 54-55. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 18, 19, 21.
20.
Schneiderman, All for One, 12.
21.
Ibid., 47, 49.
22.
Rose Schneiderman, speech of March 26, 1936 (twenty-fifth anniversary of Triangle Fire), copy in Rose Schneiderman Papers, Taminent Library, New York University (Microfilm Edition of Papers of the Women’s Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders) (hereinafter "Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition"), Reel 2. Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, 54-55.
23.
Schneiderman, "A Cap Maker’s Story," 935. Nutter, "Rose Schneiderman," 407.
24.
See letter from Max Fruchter, Socialist Party Naturalization Bureau, to "Comrade Rose Schneiderman," March 5, 1911, letter from Louis Wechler, Socialist Party Branch 2, to Rose Schneiderman, August 11, 1911, and letter from Joseph Shalen to "My Dear Comrade Schneiderman," June 27, 1911, all in Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 1.
25.
Orleck, Introduction, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 6. For more on the national Women’s Trade Union League, see Robin Miller Jacoby, The British and American Women’s Trade Union Leagues, 1890-1925: A Case Study of Feminism and Class (New York: Carlson, 1994).
26.
As with Rose Schneiderman, very little has been written about Mary Dreier. Her papers are located in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her extensive correspondence with her sister, Margaret Dreier Robins, is on microfilm from the Margaret Dreier Robins papers at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Ann Schofield has partially remedied this oversight in her book, "To Do & To Be": Portraits of Four Women Activists, 1893-1986 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 50-81. Schofield concentrates more on Dreier’s personal life than on her social justice activities, but makes Dreier’s contributions to progressivism clear. See Annelise Orleck’s perceptive review of Schofield’s book in Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (June 2001): 242-43. Other sources include "Mary Elizabeth Dreier" in Notable American Women: The Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary, Vol. IV, A-Z, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 204 and John Thomas McGuire, "Mary Elizabeth Dreier," in Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, ed. John D. Buenker and Joseph D. Buenker (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2005). The best source on the New York Women’s Trade Union League remains its papers located in the Taminent Library, New York University, now on microfilm, and Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women’s Trade Union League of New York (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980). Schneiderman, All for One, 79-80.
27.
Carolyn Daniel McCreesh, "On the Picket Line: Militant Women Campaign to Organize Garment Worker, 1880-1917" (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1975), 143-44.
28.
McCreesh, "On the Picket Line," 98-99, 130-33, 147-48. See also Louis Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers (New York: B.W. Huesbch, 1924), 109.
29.
John Thomas McGuire , "A Catalyst for Reform: The Women’s Joint Legislative Conference (WJLC) and Its Fight for Labor Legislation in New York State, 1918-1933" (PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2001), 39-40.
30.
David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Grove Press, 2003) is an excellent description of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the fire’s significant aftereffects, although Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (New York: J.P. Lipincott, 1962) remains the standard account. The quotation from Schneiderman’s Metropolitan Opera speech is from "Mass Meeting Calls for New Fire Laws," New York Times, April 3, 1911. For the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Factory Investigating Commission, see Von Drehle, Triangle, 212-15; Stein, The Triangle Fire, 208; George Martin, Madame Secretary: Frances Perkins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 89; Thomas J. Kerr, IV, "The Factory Investigating Commission and the Minimum Wage Movement," 12 Labor History (1972): 375; and Rose Schneiderman, "Women’s Role in Labor Legislation," Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 2.
31.
See, for example, letter from Marion D. Savage of the Jacob Riis Neighborhood Settlement Association to Rose Schneiderman, December 10, 1913, in Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 1. For Schneiderman’s lobbying, see her letter to Frances Ecob, May 22, 1911, in Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 1.
32.
McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 46-53 and "New York State Factory Investigating Commission" in Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era, 1890-1920, ed. John D. Buenker and Edward R. Kantowicz (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 335.
33.
The best source for Florence Kelley’s life up to 1899 is Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Landon R.Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) discusses the NCL’s initial fight for social justice. See also Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Two Political Cultures in the Progressive Era: The National Consumers’ League and the American Association for Labor Legislation," in United States History As Women’s History, ed. Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 51. For more on the NCL’s legal work, see McGuire, "From the Courts to the State Legislatures." An excellent discussion of progressive reformers such as Kelley and their arguments for gender-specific legislation can be found in Thomas C. Leonard, "Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women’s Work," American Journal of Economics and Sociology 64, no. 3 (July 2005): 757-91.
34.
For more on the night work legislation struggle in New York during the Progressive Era, see John Thomas McGuire, "Making A Case for Night Work Legislation in Progressive Era New York, 1911-1915," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5, no. 1 (January 2006), 47-70, as well as Richard A. Greenwald, The Triangle Fire, The Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). Felix Frankfurter, foreword to Josephine Goldmark, Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelley’s Life Story (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953), v.
35.
Sklar, Florence Kelley, 126-28.
36.
Ibid., 272-74, and Jane Addams, "The Settlements As A Factor in the Labor Movement," in Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago By Residents of Hull-House (Boston: Crowell and Company, 1895), 214. New York Times Oral History Program, Columbia University, Oral History Collection, "Reminiscences of Frances Perkins, Book I" (Owen Rock, NJ: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1976), 58. Schneiderman quoted in Kessler-Harris, "Rose Schneiderman and the Limits of Women’s Trade Unionism," 181. For more on Perkins and her approach to the issue of trade unionism versus labor legislation, see Winifred D. Wandersee, "’I’d Rather Pass a Law Than Organize a Union’: Frances Perkins and the Reformist Approach to Organized Labor," Labor History 34, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 5-32.
37.
Antler, The Journey Home, 95.
38.
Letter from Althea Somerville to Rose Schneiderman, May 6, 1910, in Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 1. Marot quotation from Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 67. Kessler-Harris, "Rose Schneiderman and the Limits of Women’s Trade Unionism," 167-68.
39.
McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 80-84.
40.
Ibid., 22-23.
41.
Ibid., 87-195. A good introduction to the period is David J. Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). The Woman Patriot (March 15, 1919), 1-2, copy in History of Women’s Periodicals, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Microfilm Edition, Reel 173. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 138. The Lusk Committee Report was printed as Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics, With an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required to Curb It, Being the Report of the Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, Filed April 24, 1920, in the Senate of the State of New York, Part I: Revolutionary and Subversive Movements Abroad And At Home, Vol. I (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1920). The comments on Schneiderman can be found in Revolutionary Radicalism, 828, 1031, 1101-02.
42.
Letter from Belle Moskowitz to George Van Namee, September 9, 1919, in Alfred E. Smith Executive Papers, Series 260, 1919-1921, Folder 172, Manuscripts and Archives, New York State Library, Albany, New York.
43.
The best sources for Belle Moskowitz’s life are Elisabeth Israels Perry, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1975).
44.
A good description of the Red Scare can be found in Esmond Wright, The American Dream: From Reconstruction to Reagan, A History of the United States of America, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 218-19. For further information about women’s organizations and the attacks on them by right-wing groups in the 1920s, see Jan Doolittle Wilson, The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee and the Politics of Maternalism, 1920-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001); and Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism. The information about the United States government’s arrests and deportations comes from Howard M. Sachar, A History of Jews in America (New York: Knopf, 1992), 296-99. In 1905, nearly 154,000 Jews entered the country; by 1932 only 1,747 Jews could be admitted each year. Marcus, ed., The Jew in the American World, 397.
45.
Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 149-50. "Is Farmer-Labor Nominee for U.S. Senate," New York Times, July 30, 1920. See also McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 128-29 and letter from Rose Schneiderman to Mrs. Frank J. Tone, September 11, 1920, in New York Women’s Trade Union League Papers, Microfilm Edition (hereinafter "NYWTUL Papers, Microfilm Edition"), Reel 7.
46.
See McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 130-31, and Zoe Beckley, "Finds Hard Job Organizing Girls Whose Aim Is to Wed," New York Telegram and Sun, June 18, 1924.
47.
McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 188-91.
48.
Ibid., 200.
49.
For Schneiderman’s attendance at the NCL dinner, see Report of Work, November 1924, in NYWTUL Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 2. McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 204, 206-07, 208-36.
50.
For Schneiderman’s connections with the Equality League, see McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 33-35, as well as letter from Harriot Stanton Blatch to Rose Schneiderman, May 2, 1910, in Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 1. Her suffragist work after leaving the League can be traced in letters from Anna Howard Shaw, NAWSA president, to Rose Schneiderman, July 24, 1912, and from Grace Julian Clarke to Rose Schneiderman, September 5, 1912, both in Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 1.
51.
Letter from Max Fruchter to Rose Schneiderman, March 5, 1911.
52.
Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, 85-87.
53.
Letter from Rose Schneiderman to Nancy Cook, May 19, 1922, in NYWTUL Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 8. John Thomas McGuire, "Making the Democratic Party a Partner: Eleanor Roosevelt, the WJLC, and the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Party, 1921-1927," The Hudson Valley Regional Review 18 (September 2001): 29-47. For Al Smith’s experiences, see his memoir, Up to Now (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 7-8, 129.
54.
See letter from Rose Schneiderman to Eleanor Roosevelt, September 6, 1924, in NYWTUL Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 12. Schneiderman, All for One, 50, and Joseph Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (New York: Norton, 1971; reprint, New York: Smithmark Press, 1995), 281.
55.
Schneiderman, All for One, 176. For Schneiderman’s invitation to Franklin D. Roosevelt, see her letter to Edith Hirsch, July 29, 1924, in NYWTUL Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 12.
56.
Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 32-33.
57.
Letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Rose Schneiderman, January 12, 1929, in Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 1. See also letters from Guernsey T. Cross, Governor’s Secretary, to Rose Schneiderman, September 17, 1929; Franklin D. Roosevelt to Rose Schneiderman, May 12, 1930; and Franklin D. Roosevelt to Rose Schneiderman, August 2, 1930, all in Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 1.
58.
Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 148-49. Letter from Rose Schneiderman to Franklin D. Roosevelt, June 12, 1929, Franklin D. Roosevelt Gubernatorial Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York, Cont. 72.
59.
Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin, Women, Politics and Change ( New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 199.
60.
W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Damnation of Women," in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920), excerpted in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 309. Charles Lionel Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist of New York: Problems and Conditions Among Negroes in Labor Unions in Manhattan With Special Reference to the NRA and Post-NRA Situations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 180 and 209. See also Yvette Richards, "My Passionate Feeling about Africa: Maud Springer-Kemp and the American Labor Movement" (PhD diss., Yale University, 1994), chap. 2. For the interracial tensions in New York City’s laundry industry after World War I, see Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist, 209 and 302. Mary Anderson, "Economic Status of Negro Women," speech delivered before the National Negro Labor Conference, 1927, in U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau Records, Microfilm Edition, Reel 14. Carole Turbin, "And We Are Nothing But Women: Irish Working Women in Troy," in Women and Power in American History, A Reader, Vol. II, From 1870, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991), 30. "Women and Laundries," submitted to Women’s Journal, October 4, 1930, in U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau Records, Microfilm Edition, Reel 21.
61.
Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2, 1933-1938 (New York, Viking, 1999), 153-76, and J. William T. Young, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2000), 199-203. Roosevelt’s concerns for civil rights did start in 1927, when she met Mary McLeod Bethune at a National Council of Women dinner. Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 159.
62.
See David Burner, Preface, The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party In Transition, 1918-1932 (New York: Knopf, 1968), xi and xii, as well as 149, and David Plotke, Building A Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 262-97. For Schneiderman and her efforts for African American domestic workers in the late 1930s, see Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 165-66.
63.
"Address at Testimonial Luncheon in [Frances Perkins’s] Honor," typed copy in Frances Perkins Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, Box 44, "Speeches, 1929-1930."
64.
Quotation from letter from Mrs. Gerda Glan (Hialeah) to Eleanor Roosevelt, September 5, 1936, in Looking for the New Deal; Florida Women’s Letters during the Great Depression, ed. Edna L. Green (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 136-37. See also letter from "Tillie" to Rose Schneiderman, December 10, 1909, in Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 1.
65.
See Jane Bernard-Powers, "Leonora O’Reilly," in American National Biography, vol. 16, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 760-61, and Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 44. The Papers of Leonora O’Reilly (Microfilm Edition of Papers of the Women’s Trade Union League and its Principal Leaders), Reel 1, Diaries and Notebooks, vols. 1-16 (entry for May 31, 1909, under p. 160), Reel 4, General Correspondence, 1886-1909 (letters from Madeline Doty, secretary, Constitution League of the United States to Leonora O’Reilly, June 12, 1909, and William English Walling to Leonora O’Reilly, December 4, 1909), and Reel 11, Organizational and Topical Material-Labor Organizations Through Strikes (National Negro Committee and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People files.)
66.
Elizabeth Balanoff, "Interview with Maida Springer Kemp," International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, The Black Women Oral History Project for the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, ed. Ruth Edmons Hill (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1991), 42-43, 46, 71.
67.
The descriptions of Schneiderman’s activities are from the following sources: January 31, 1924 Report of Work, March and April 1924 Reports of Work, April and May 1924 Reports of Work, October 1924 Report of Work, January and February 1925 Reports of Work, Report of Rose Schneiderman attached to NYWTUL Regular Meeting Minutes, March 2, 1925, with attached Report from Rose Schneiderman, and Organization Report, June 1927, all in NYWTUL Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 2. See letter from Rose Schneiderman to Abe Baroff, December 1, 1916, in Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 1, for her resignation from the ILGWU. For the AFL’s discrimination against African American workers, see Rosalyn Terberg-Penn, "Survival Strategies Among African-American Workers: A Continuing Process," in Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History, ed. Ruth Milkman (London, New York: Routledge, 1985), 145.
68.
McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 195-236. Nutter, "Rose Schneiderman," 408. Letter from Ethel M. Smith to Amy G. Maher, September 8, 1924, in NYWTUL Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 12.
69.
John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 163. Quoted in Terberg-Penn, "Survival Strategies Among African-American Workers," 145.
70.
Schneiderman’s blacklisting by the Daughters of the American Revolution can be found in Appendix B of Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood, 148.
71.
McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 162-80, 276-86. See also McGuire, "From the Courts to the State Legislatures."
72.
See October 1929, December 1929, February 1930, and March 1930 Reports of Work in NYWTUL Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 3. McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 292-95.
73.
McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 295-300. Schneiderman quotation from "‘Parasites’ Draw Upon 100,000 Idle Women to Fill Sweatshop Gaps at Coolie Wages," New York World Telegram, March 1933, copy in Schneiderman Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 2. Figures cited in "[Paper] Presented by Mrs. Elinore M. Herrick at Round Table on Social Legislation Before State Federation of Women’s Clubs, Hotel Astor, November 15, 1932," 7, and Minutes of "Breakdown of Industrial Standards" Conference, NCL, December 1932, 11, in Consumers’ League of New York Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, Box 9, Folder 17, and Box 50, Folder 1, respectively.
74.
McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 308-10, and "Wage Rate Is Fixed in Laundry Industry," New York Times, October 2, 1933, 12.
75.
McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 327-28. "Wages and Hours in Industries, 1937-1945, New York State," by State of New York Department of Labor, Division of Industrial Relations, Women in Industry and Minimum Wage, November 1946, pp. 16-17, copy in Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Papers, Kheel Center, Industrial and Labor Relations Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, Collection 5619(b), Box 524, Folder 2.
76.
McGuire, "A Catalyst for Reform," 322-23. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 258-67. Nutter, "Rose Schneiderman," 408. For an indication of Schneiderman’s close friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, see her correspondence in the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, 1933-1945, Microfilm Edition, Reel 16. For Schneiderman’s successful lobbying of Sidney Hillman, see Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 165 and Schneiderman, All for One, 216-17. For further details on the Amalgamated’s efforts for African American laundry workers in New York City during the 1930s, see Jennifer Carson, "It takes Revolution and Evolution: New York City’s Women Laundry Workers in the first Half of the Twentieth Century" (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2007) and Karen Pastorello, "A Power Among Them: Bessie Abramowitz and the Amalgamated Workers of America" (PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2001), 166, 169-79.
77.
"Rose Schneiderman Dies at 88 [sic]; Pioneer Women’s Union Leader," New York Times, August 12, 1972, 26. Some sources still state that Schneiderman was born in 1884, but the agreed-on date is now 1882. See Nutter, "Rose Schneiderman," 407. The editorial is "Rose Schneiderman," New York Times, August 14, 1972. The dates of death for Eleanor Roosevelt, Molly Dewson, Mary Dreier, and Frances Perkins can be found in Who Was Who in America, Vol. IV, 1961-1968 (Chicago: Marquis-Who’s Who, 1968.)
