This Day in Labor History: November 14, 1903

On November 14, 1903, leading unionists and female reformers met in Boston to create the Women’s Trade Union League. This was an effort to support unions for women workers and to fight the plague of sweatshops that defined the lives of so many women in the years. More of a movement of wealthy Progressive women than rank and file women at first, the WTUL demonstrates the value of these cross-class alliances when the interests of wealthy women lined up with that of poorer women.

This all started out of the settlement houses, where women such as Jane Addams had pioneered the field of social work in America, working not only with immigrant women, but especially with them. It did not take long for this movement to expand, notably with Florence Kelley taking it to the labor movement. Kelley had started at Hull House but soon moved to New York and not only started Henry Street Settlement, but also became the head of the Consumers’ League to fight child labor. Most of these settlement house workers were women, but not all of them.

In 1903, William English Walling, a wealthy reformer from Louisville who later would play a key role in exposing the horrors of the 1908 Springfield Race Riot that led to the creation of the NAACP, went to England to observe something over there called the Women’s Trade Union League. That itself was inspired by women in unions in the United States, witnessed by the British reformer Emma Patterson, who had spent time in the U.S. The Progressive movement had all sorts of international connections like this. Walling was impressed by what he saw and returned to the U.S. to attend the American Federation of Labor’s national convention, Samuel Gompers and other American labor leaders were interested. So the WTUL formed with Mary Morton Kehew as president and Jane Addams as vice-president.

So you can form an organization like this, but given that it was not a workers’ organization, what exactly was it going to do? For years, not much. The AFL totally controlled it, which meant having to suck up to Gompers all the time. It engaged in no independent work, though it did push the federation toward eventual support of women’s suffrage. But in 1907, Margaret Dreier Robins took over the presidency and she reinvigorated the idea of active support for women’s labor struggles. That year, telegraphers organized with the Commercial Telegraphers Union of America went on strike and the WTUL provided active material support for the first time.

Then, in 1909, garment workers under the International Ladies Garment Workers Union struck in New York. These were mostly young socialist women, led by dynamic activists such as Clara Lemlich, Pauline Newman, and Rose Schneiderman. This was the Uprising of the 20,000 and it was a very big deal. WTUL support meant attention, good stories in newspapers, and often rich women out there helping out on the lines. Even J.P. Morgan’s daughter showed up in solidarity! When the garment manufacturers would hire prostitutes to pick fights with strikers and then the cops would come in and beat the shit out the strikers (Lemlich went to the hospital with broken ribs after this happening) the WTUL would use their connections to publicize it. The Uprising of the 20,000 was at best a partial success, but there were victories and support from wealthier women definitely helped achieve this. Then, two years later when 146 of these same workers died in the Triangle Fire, the sweatshop owned by the most recalcitrant owners in the 1909 strike, workers and WTUL reformers combined to force through a raft of reforms to working conditions and building safety in New York.

Now, it’s not as if there weren’t tensions here. These rich women mostly were not socialists. They quite often condescended to the Uprising of the 20,000 leaders who they worked with, which later led to women such as Clara Lemlich swearing them off entirely. It’s not like anyone was erasing the class divide here. There were also divides over gender. The ILGWU, despite its membership, had an overwhelmingly male and pretty conservative leadership that didn’t really think of women as first class citizens. So WTUL leaders and ILG leaders frequently argued and the WTUL distanced itself from that union. The radicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World also caused strains. When the textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts went on strike in 1912, the IWW rushed in to organize them. That led the AFL to basically side with the cops in beating the workers. The WTUL was internally divided over this, with some people wanting to help the workers regardless and others wanting to keep good relations with Gompers and scared of the IWW anyway.

Still, the alliance did make a difference in many struggles. In Chicago, WTUL volunteers played an important role in the garment workers strike in 1910-11 against Hart Schaffner Marx. This was also the strike that saw Sidney Hillman propelled to union leadership; not surprising his Amalgamated Clothing Workers had a much better relations with the WTUL than the ILG. In Boston, the WTUL actually took the lead in an organizing campaign of office cleaners that led to an AFL charter, while also doing critical work assisting that city’s large candy industry workers in achieving gains.

The WTUL survived for a long time as well. By the 1930s, women such as Rose Schneiderman had become a lot more mainstream in their politics (other Uprising of the 20,000 leaders had moved left into the Communist Party but most of the leadership of that strike basically left-of-center reformer women) and was happy to work with her wealthier allies on issues in New York. There were major laundry strikes in the 30s, with both white and black workers participating, though the laundries themselves had segregated workforces. The WTUL had a big ally after 1933, with its long-time member Eleanor Roosevelt now in the White House. In this strike, the laundry owners hired strikebreakers and the cops happily beat up strikers. It was 1909 all over again. Amazingly, Eleanor Roosevelt actually had the ability to send Secret Service agents to both protect strikers and intervene with the police!

Despite basically every women involved in the WTUL being a strong suffragist, the organization later became major opponents of Alice Paul and her anti-worker National Women’s Party. With many of the limited reforms made in the workplace during these years based on women’s special status, WTUL leaders didn’t want to give those up based some abstract notion of equality. Plus Paul was a hard-right person on economic issues anyway and didn’t support any workplace justice issues, regardless of gender. Women such as Frances Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt refused to support the Equal Rights Amendment over these issues. Eventually, there wasn’t much use left for the the WTUL and it eventually disbanded in 1950.

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