User:Andrew 5G NOLA/Women's Trade Union League

The roots of the WTUL can be traced back to the settlement house movement, which brought together middle and upper class reformers with working class women to live in settlement houses in an effort to provide them assistance. However, reformers began to notice the constraints of this system. One of these reformers, American Socialist William English Walling, was the first to take note of the British WTUL. Working in settlement houses in Chicago and New York, he had come to the conclusion that the unionization of working class women was the future of the reform movement. In 1903, he went to England to study the British WTUL directly, which was founded in 1874. Later that year, Walling returned to America, attending the Annual American Federation of Labor (AFL) convention. It was here that the organization was created, with its first president being Mary Morton Kehew, a labor and social reformer from Boston, and vice president Jane Addams of Chicago's Hull House.^[1][2]

Due to the nature of its very inception, the WTUL was inexorably intertwined with the AFL, and spent much of its early years trying to cultivate ties with the AFL leadership. Without the approval of organized labor, the WTUL would not succeed, and the AFL being the biggest player meant that, for the League's purposes, the two were one and the same. Despite many of their organizers having previously worked for or with the AFL at some point, the AFL leadership generally ignored the League. Still, the League did push the AFL towards a pro-suffrage position and did manage to organize more women into the Federation than at any previous time. The relationship between the two organizations was marred with inconsistency, "marked by both moments of embrace and dismissal."^[2]

In the early years, it was important to the WTUL to establish a primary mission and central concerns and issues to focus on. Chief among these was the League's dedication to organizing women into trade unions and ensuring successful collective bargaining for them. The WTUL also emphasized the passing of labor standardization legislation as well as promoting the education of women in the workforce.^[3]

The WTUL counted a diverse group of people amongst their ranks, from educated women reformers of a mostly white, Protestant, and native-born background, to young women workers which included a large number of immigrants, namely Jews, Italians, and Irish.^[4] Among the more affluent of their numbers were figures like Jane Addams, Florence Kelly, Margaret Dreier Robins, and Mary Morton Kehew, while the working class members of the WTUL included figures like Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, Fannia Cohn, and Clara Lemlich.^[2][5][6]

The heyday of the League came between 1907 and 1922 under the presidency of Margaret Dreier Robins.^[7] During that period, the WTUL led the drive to organize women workers into unions, secured protective legislation, and educated the public on the problems and needs of working women.

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Women's Trade Union League Draft

Origins

The roots of the WTUL can be traced back to the settlement house movement (create hyperlink), which brought together middle and upper class reformers with working class women to live in settlement houses in an effort to provide them assistance. However, reformers began to notice the constraints of this system. One of these reformers, American Socialist William English Walling, was the first to take note of the British WTUL. Working in settlement houses in Chicago and New York, he had come to the conclusion that the unionization of working class women was the future of the reform movement. In 1903, he went to England to study the British WTUL directly, which was founded in 1874. Later that year, Walling returned to America, attending the Annual American Federation of Labor (AFL) convention. It was here that the organization was created, with its first president being Mary Morton Kehew, a labor and social reformer from Boston, and vice president Jane Addams of Chicago's Hull House.

Due to the nature of its very inception, the WTUL was inexorably intertwined with the AFL, and spent much of its early years trying to cultivate ties with the AFL leadership. Without the approval of organized labor, the WTUL would not succeed, and the AFL being the biggest player meant that, for the League's purposes, the two were one in the same. Despite many of their organizers having previously worked for or with the AFL at some point, the AFL leadership generally ignored the League. Still, the League did push the AFL towards a pro-suffrage position and did manage to organize more women into the Federation than at any previous time. The relationship between the two organizations was marred with inconsistency, "marked by both moments of embrace and dismissal."

In the early years, it was important to the WTUL to establish a primary mission and central concerns and issues to focus on. Chief among these was the League's dedication to organizing women into trade unions and ensuring successful collective bargaining for them. The WTUL also emphasized the passing of labor standardization legislation as well as promoting the education of women in the workforce.

The WTUL counted a diverse group of people amongst their ranks, from educated women reformers of a mostly white, Protestant, and native-born background, to young women workers which included a large number of immigrants, namely Jews, Italians, and Irish. Among the more affluent of their numbers were figures like Jane Addams, Florence Kelly, Margaret Dreier Robins, and Mary Morton Kehew, while the working class members of the WTUL included figures like Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, Fannia Cohn, and Clara Lemlich.

The heyday of the League came between 1907 and 1922 under the presidency of Margaret Dreier Robins. During that period, the WTUL led the drive to organize women workers into unions, secured protective legislation, and educated the public on the problems and needs of working women.

Support for union organizing

[The League supported a number of strikes in the first few years of its existence, including the 1907 telegrapher's strike organized by the Commercial Telegraphers Union of America. The WTUL played a critical role in supporting the Uprising of the 20,000, the New York City and Philadelphia shirtwaist workers' strike, by providing a headquarters for the strike, raising money for relief funds, soup kitchens and bail for picketers, providing witnesses and legal defense for arrested picketers, joining the strikers on the picket line, and organizing mass meetings and marches to publicize the shirtwaist workers' demands and the sweatshop conditions they were fighting. Rose Schneiderman in particular led efforts during the great garment strike of 1909. Working with the League's New York City branch, the NYWTUL, she was able to successfully organize over one-hundred shirtwaist makers, coordinated events which helped fund the strike, and persuaded women to join their local branch of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). Some observers made light of the upper-class women members of the WTUL who picketed alongside garment workers, calling them the "mink brigade". Furthermore, Schneiderman’s Socialist views and actions during the strike also highlighted the tenuous relationship between the the wage earners and the middle-class women which made up the WTUL. These distinctions split strikers from their upper-class benefactors as well: a contingent of strikers challenged Alva Belmont concerning her reasons for supporting the strike.^{[citation needed]}]

[The strike was, however, less than wholly successful:

The WTUL was also active in cities like Boston, where the League's local branch was involved in a flurry of activism. In 1914, the BWTUL organized the downtown office cleaners into a union which was recognized and chartered by the AFL. In 1915, it worked directly with the AFL on behalf of candy workers in the city. During the campaign, the BWTUL was able to significantly increase wages for the workers, though not without some clash with the AFL. Five years later, in 1920, the BWTUL followed up on this success by organizing a union for predominately marginalized service workers, mostly young women who worked at newsstands.

The NYWTUL also continued its organizing into the 1930s, helping organize strikes against Sunshine Laundry in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Colonial Laundry in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The former employed mostly white women, while the latter predominantly African-American women. The WTUL strike came to both groups' aid, helping organize a population which had been historically on the outside of labor organization. The strikes were conducted to protest the employers' inaction in raising the minimum wage from 14-15 cents an hour to the NRA mandated 31 cents. Engaging in long periods of protesting and picketing, the activists of the WTUL were subjected to brutalization by both police and strikebreakers, in addition to the harsh New York winter. Indeed, conditions were so bad that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (herself a member of the NYWTUL since 1922) personally provided members of the Secret Service to help protect strikers and prevent unlawful conduct by police and strikebreakers.

[1st International Congress of Working Women called by the National Women's Trade Union League of America, Washington, D.C., October 28, 1919

The WTUL played a similar role in the strike of mostly male cloakmakers in New York City and men clothing workers in

The League had a closer relationship with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, the union formed by the most militant locals of mostly immigrant workers in the men's clothing industry in Chicago, New York and other eastern urban centers, which was outside the AFL. The WTUL trained women as labor leaders and organizers at its school founded in Chicago in 1914 and played a key role in bringing Italian garment workers into the union in New York.]

References