CHAPTER FIFTEEN

`“Bread and Roses” and Votes for Women Too`

ACCORDING to the Massachusetts suffragist Florence Luscomb, “no state was ever carried for suffrage until it was sown ankle deep in leaflets.” These fliers—“brief, snappy arguments in handbill form on the cheapest, gay newsprint”—were distributed by the hundreds of thousands to the so-called “man on the street,” who held the fate of woman suffrage in his hands. The fact that so many male voters were immigrants—in 1910, approximately 15 percent of the American population was foreign-born—called for some creative campaign material to drive the point home.¹

Around 1915, NAWSA began to circulate suffrage fliers in a variety of foreign languages, including German, Polish, Italian, Yiddish, and French. Since suffrage speakers fluent in foreign languages were in short supply, these fliers were a novel and efficient way to reach this untapped constituency. The foreign-language fliers usually employed the same typeface and layout as their English language counterparts; in fact, they were such literal facsimiles that it was possible to move back and forth between the two using the English version as a crib sheet and vice versa.

No matter what language they were in, the fliers explained the reasons women should be enfranchised in simple, direct, and compelling terms. Why do women want to vote? “Frauen sind Bürger und wollen ibre Bürgerpflicht erfüllen” (Women are citizens and wish to do their civic duty). This sentiment was widely shared among “arbeitende frauen” (working women), “hausfrauen” (housewives), “mütter” (mothers), and “lehrer” (teachers). “Gerecḩtigkeit” (justice) and “Gleicḩḩeit” (equality) support their demands.

It turns out there are lots of ways to say votes for women: “Das Stimmrecht für Frauen!” “Voti per le Donne!” “Le Suffrage Pour Les Femmes!” “Votos par alas Mujeres!” “Glos Dla Kobiet!” Learning how to reach out to these constituencies—both male voters and female family members who could use these arguments to convert them—broadened the suffrage movement and contributed to its ultimate success.

ON MARCH 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory off Washington Square in Greenwich Village. The employers had locked the doors and blocked the emergency exits, supposedly to keep the workforce from leaving early, but now they were trapped. Because of that callous decision, 146 workers (primarily young women, but also including twenty-three men) lost their lives, many having jumped from the upper floors to escape the flames. Two years earlier, the labor organizer Rose Schneiderman had led many of those same workers on strike as part of the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand that swept through the sweatshops on the Lower East Side. The strikers won many of their demands, but the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was one of the shops that held out. If its owners had agreed to the strikers’ demands for a half-day on Saturday, there would have been no workers inside when the fire broke out that fateful afternoon.

Foreign language flier, National American Woman Suffrage Association. *Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.*

Rose Schneiderman lost several friends in the conflagration, but she hardly needed a personal connection to fuel her outrage. At a mass meeting the wealthy socialite Anne Morgan organized to demand stronger laws protecting the health and safety of New York garment workers, Schneiderman’s response was impassioned. Only ninety pounds and four and a half feet tall, with fiery red hair and the rhetoric to match, Scheiderman quickly shushed the restive audience at the Metropolitan Opera House. “I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship,” she told the huge crowd. “This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 143 of us burned to death.” Then she drew this powerful conclusion: “I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my own experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.”²

Too often the images of the suffrage movement are of elite, white, native-born women, but that is an incomplete view. Working-class women played active and vibrant roles in the movement, especially in its last decade. These suffragists, coming out of the trade union movement and committed to organizing women into unions alongside men, were street-smart and politically savvy. They helped to revitalize the suffrage movement in its final years, and they contributed a broader theoretical perspective by arguing that class solidarity must always be prominent alongside gender. As experts on their own lives, they sought the vote as a critical tool to increase their power vis-à-vis employers, the state, and, not incidentally, middle-class female allies. Working women insisted they should have a say in what happened to them. It was literally that simple.

Rose Schneiderman had traveled a long way to get to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. She was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in the small village of Saven, in Russian Poland, in 1882. Her father was a tailor and her mother was a skilled seamstress, who made sure that her oldest daughter had access both to public education and traditional Hebrew schooling. In 1890, the family migrated to New York City, settling on the Lower East Side. Although it was only a few miles from the Schneiderman’s tenement to the uptown enclave of successfully assimilated Jews like Maud Nathan and Annie Nathan Meyer, they lived in separate worlds. Two years after the family immigrated, her father died, leaving her mother pregnant with their fourth child. She tried to support the family by taking in boarders and doing piecework sewing, but for a time, the three older children lived at a Jewish orphanage. When the family reunited, Mrs. Schneiderman went back to work, and young Rose took over running the household.³

Rose Schneiderman first entered the paid labor force at the age of thirteen, working as much as seventy hours as a department store cash girl for the paltry wage of just two dollars a week. When she turned sixteen, she switched to industrial work, which was lower status but paid somewhat higher wages. Settling into the cap-making industry, she discovered not only the camaraderie of the shop floor but also the exploitation that workers, especially working women, faced at the hands of their male employers. In 1903, she and two other women organized the first female local of the Hat and Cap Maker’s Union. Two years later, she emerged as a leader during a successful thirteen-week strike in which the workers resisted employers’ attempts to introduce an open shop (that is, a non-union factory). For the rest of her life, she was involved in broader questions of trade unionism and working women, primarily through the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL).

The Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903, brought together working-class activists and middle- and upper-class reformers in a single organization devoted to unionizing working women and securing labor legislation to improve their lives both on and off the job. Margaret Dreier Robins, the president of the New York branch, recruited Schneiderman to the organization in 1905. She was dubious at first, fearing she would just be a token, but Robins convinced her that this was a unique opportunity to participate in a true cross-class coalition. By then, Schneiderman had grown weary of male union leaders’ total lack of interest in organizing women in the trades. Hoping that this new organization offered a different way to work for social change, she threw her lot in with the women reformers, an association she maintained for the rest of her professional life.

Being a young, working-class woman in an organization where she was expected to interact with older, middle- and upper-class allies was challenging. For one thing, unlike elite women who could volunteer their time, Schneiderman needed a salary to live on. The NYWTUL put her on the payroll, her salary made possible by contributions from wealthy women; no doubt there were times she had to tone down her outspoken socialism in order not to offend her wealthy benefactors. Other working-class activists got caught in this trap as well. The Irish shirtmaker Leonora O’Reilly, also a dedicated socialist, was a paid organizer for the WTUL until she had a falling out with Margaret Dreier Robins and quit; she later returned, but she never totally overcame her suspicions. This divide between the majority of reformers, who could contribute their time and energy to the cause, and the minority that needed to earn a living often complicated the union’s internal organizational dynamics. As a general rule, the leadership of the woman suffrage movement was almost exclusively in the hands of those who could afford to forego a salary.⁴

Schneiderman’s suffrage activism began in 1907, when she joined the newly established Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, which Harriot Stanton Blatch had conceived as an independent organization to attract working-class women to the suffrage movement. In part because of her time in England (her husband was British), Blatch was probably the most class-conscious elite American suffragist. Like Alice Stone Blackwell, she boasted a proud suffrage patrimony but, in response to changing political and economic conditions, took her activism in new directions. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was another influence on the Equality League—and an early member. Building on Gilman’s emphasis on the importance of work and economic independence for women’s emancipation, the group welcomed “any woman who earns her own living, from a cook to a mining engineer.” More than two hundred showed up for the first meeting.⁵

Schneiderman made her first public speech for suffrage at an April 1907 meeting at Cooper Union and quickly became the Equality League’s most popular speaker. She was especially at home as an impromptu street speaker, drawing directly on her years of union organizing to spontaneously attract a crowd when a factory let out for the day or wherever strollers congregated in public parks and squares. Besides being a good way to reach working people, these impromptu meetings were basically free, and certainly much cheaper than hiring a hall and distributing fliers.⁶

In May 1908, the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women sponsored a trolley tour campaign between Syracuse and Albany to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. The plan was to bring suffrage speakers to small towns in upstate New York using the inexpensive and convenient intercity trolley system. Harriot Stanton Blatch had already developed a close working relationship with Rose Schneiderman through the League, and she recruited her to join the tour.

In Poughkeepsie, one of the tour’s last stops, Blatch and Schneiderman crossed paths with Inez Milholland, later known as the beautiful suffragist on a white horse, but in 1908 still a student at Vassar College. Milholland wanted to hold a suffrage rally on campus, but Vassar’s conservative male president flatly forbade any such political gatherings. Undeterred, Milholland decided that if she couldn’t hold the meeting on campus property, then she would hold it off campus in a public space. And what could be more convenient—and newsworthy—than holding it in the local cemetery?⁷

That was how, on a May afternoon, around two dozen brave Vassar students and a smattering of alumnae and spectators gathered under a banner beseeching, “Come, let us reason together,” for one of the most stellar impromptu suffrage protests ever held. Blatch, herself a Vassar graduate (class of 1878), addressed the small crowd, as did the successful lawyer Helen Hoy (class of 1899). Next up was none other than Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose Women and Economics was practically a Bible to that generation of college students. But the speaker who made the strongest impression on the students was Rose Schneiderman, “a very youthful, popular industrial worker, graduate of that University of Life down on the East Side of New York,” as Blatch later described her. Only twenty-six years old, Schneiderman more than held her own with seasoned suffrage speakers twice her age.⁸

Schneiderman began to make a name for herself during the 1909–1910 garment workers’ strike in New York. As the historian Annelise Orleck has argued, the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand represented “a moment of crystallization, the sign of a new integrated class and gender consciousness among US working women.” By 1919, half of all women garment workers in the country belonged to labor unions. The strike was notable for the cross-class alliances it supported, with wealthy women—the so-called “Mink Brigade” of Alva Belmont, Anne Morgan, and others—marching on picket lines and raising money for bail and strike support, a harbinger of the roles wealthy women would play in the final stages of suffrage. During the strike, Schneiderman was all over the place—giving speeches, raising money, bailing out strikers, and forging strategy, all under the auspices of the NYWTUL.⁹

Schneiderman’s strong sense of class solidarity undergirded much of her suffrage advocacy. As a self-supporting working woman, she was able to point out how far women’s lives had already strayed from the domestic sphere. For example, she often poked fun at the idea that voting would somehow “unsex” women, especially in comparison to the rigors of industrial work. “Surely … 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.” Or as she said on another occasion, “What does all this talk about becoming mannish signify? I wonder if it will add to my height when I get the vote. I might work for it harder if it did.”¹⁰

So far, Rose Schneiderman’s story—and by extension, those of other working-class suffrage activists such as Leonora O’Reilly, Clara Lemlich, and Pauline Newman—has mainly been a New York story, for good reason: between 1868 and 1908, over 70 percent of all Jewish immigrants stayed in New York, mainly settling and working on the Lower East Side. But in 1912, Rose took a leave of absence from the NYWTUL to campaign in Ohio for NAWSA, which had hired her to reach out to voters in urban and industrial regions who were crucial to the campaign’s prospects. As usual, Schneiderman did not disappoint. An Ohio suffrage leader reported to national headquarters, “ ‘we have had splendid speakers here before, but not one who impressed the people as she did. Strong men sat with tears rolling down their faces. Her pathos and earnestness held audiences spellbound.” Still, Ohio voters decisively defeated the suffrage referendum.¹¹

Soon Schneiderman was back in New York, which was gearing up for a massive referendum of its own in October 1915. This referendum was initially Harriot Stanton Blatch’s idea, and she had spent several years in Albany laying the groundwork for the legislature to agree to put the question before the voters. Her argument was brilliantly simple—I’m not asking you to endorse suffrage, she told legislators, just throw your support behind a referendum to allow male voters to register their opinions. By now, Schneiderman was channeling her suffrage work through the Industrial Section of the New York Woman Suffrage Party, which she oversaw along with Leonora O’Reilly and Pauline Newman. (The earlier Wage Earners’ League for Woman Suffrage, announced just three days before the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, had come to naught.) Vast resources of money and energy poured into this 1915 campaign, and hopes were high. But once again, the referendum went down to defeat, a discouraging turn of events for New York suffragists.

At this point, a consensus was emerging that passing a national constitutional amendment to enfranchise women in one fell swoop was likely to be quicker than the state-by-state approach. Alice Paul had been single-mindedly pursuing this course since she took over the Congressional Committee in 1913, and Carrie Chapman Catt in effect endorsed this strategy with her “Winning Plan” of 1916, but with a significant asterisk. Mindful of the political clout that newly enfranchised women could wield, Catt realized that a victory in a state like New York, with its large congressional delegation and forty-five electoral votes, could play a significant role in the amendment’s chances of passage in Congress. So New York suffragists decided to try again with a second referendum in 1917. Rose Schneiderman had spent most of the prior two years organizing for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, but in 1917, she was back in the suffrage fold for this one last battle. This time, the New York suffragists prevailed.¹²

Rose Schneiderman’s suffrage story differs from other suffrage stories, and not simply because of class, although that is a major factor. Rather than a single thread or story line, her suffrage activism was part of a broad palette of social justice issues, mainly driven by her concern for empowering working-class women. She never had any illusions that suffrage would be a solution or panacea to their problems, but she was convinced that the vote would be an important tool to confront the class and gender discrimination that belied the American dream of freedom and equality for all. Since so much organizational energy and momentum was gravitating toward woman suffrage, Schneiderman deliberately allied herself with this progressive movement, but because of her class consciousness, her vision was always broader than just the vote—something that was not true for all suffragists, many of whom saw the vote solely through the lens of gender.

Like African American suffragists, Rose Schneiderman anticipated the modern intersectional approach which posits that oppressions cannot be singled out or ranked, because they operate in tandem with each other. She knew from her own experience that class could not be separated from gender, and that awareness informed her entire political career. The “race” leg of the intersectional triangle was less well-developed, even though she proved quite forward-looking in trying to organize African American laundry workers in the 1920s, a time when the labor movement totally ignored them. In the early twentieth century, however, especially on the Lower East Side of New York, where most of the working-class suffragists lived and worked, their world was predominantly white. The factories were white, the neighborhoods were white, and the suffrage organizations were white. That was the world that Rose Schneiderman inhabited, for better or worse.

Yet that world opened amazing opportunities to this young Russian immigrant. In 1919, she and Mary Anderson, later director of the US Women’s Bureau, represented the Women’s Trade Union League at the Paris Peace Conference. In the 1920s, Schneiderman and her partner Maud Schwarz played a key role in educating Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt about the conditions of the female working class. When the Roosevelts went to Washington in 1933, Rose Schneiderman joined the advisory board of the National Recovery Administration, where she spent two of the most exciting and professionally satisfying years of her life. She remained a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s until the first lady’s death in 1962.¹³

Rose Schneiderman once said, “The woman worker needs bread, but she needs roses, too.” Bread stood for basic human rights, such as decent wages and hours, safe working conditions, and respect for labor. Roses meant friendship, education, leisure, and recreation—what she called “the spiritual side of a great cause that created fellowship.” In Schneiderman’s view, working women deserved both. In 1916, twenty-six years after her family arrived on Ellis Island, she took out citizenship papers in anticipation of women’s enfranchisement. There could be no more fitting image of how American democracy and woman suffrage were fundamentally intertwined than Rose Schneiderman’s becoming a new citizen and a new voter almost simultaneously.¹⁴