Rose Schneiderman

Rose Schneiderman was born Rachel Rose Schneiderman on April 6, 1882, the first of four children of a religious Jewish family, in the village of Sawin, 14 kilometers (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 Manhattan's Lower East Side. Her brother was communal worker, writer, and editor Harry Schneiderman. The main theme of many of Schneiderman's most impactful speeches was that it would not make that big of a difference if a woman got the vote; however, women needed to vote to be able to get protection through the laws. She knew that a woman physically being in office would not make a huge difference and chose to not hide that fact. Instead, Schneiderman presented the idea of women voting to change laws instead of making laws in the first place. This idea helped her gain traction and the number of people who supported her boomed. This gave Schneiderman motivation and proved that she was doing something right. == Career ==

Schneiderman returned to New York in 1903, and with a partner worker started organizing and coordinating with the women in her clothing factory. When they applied for a charter to the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union, the union told them to return after they had succeeded in organizing twenty-five women. The women already knew they wanted to join, so they got to work recruiting others. They did that within days, and the union then chartered its first women's local. The first strike of that union that Schneiderman participated in centered on a factory in Bayonne, New Jersey run by employers who had left Manhattan in an effort to avoid unionization. During this strike she gave a speech to workers that went over very well and contributed to her being elected a member of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union's general executive board. At just twenty-two, Schneiderman became the first woman to hold a position at that level in the trade union movement. Schneiderman obtained wider recognition during a citywide capmakers' strike in 1905. Elected secretary of her local and a delegate to the New York City Central Labor Union, she came into contact with the New York Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), an organization that lent moral and financial support to the organizing efforts of women workers. She quickly became one of the most prominent members and was elected the New York branch's vice president in 1908. Schneiderman left the factory to work for the league, attending school with a stipend provided by one of the League's wealthy supporters. She was an active participant in the Uprising of the 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York City led by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in 1909. She also was a key member of the first International Congress of Working Women of 1919, which aimed to address women's working conditions at the first annual International Labour Organization Convention. In 1912, on behalf of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), she traveled throughout Ohio's industrial cities, giving lectures to working men to garner support for a state suffrage referendum. To win men's support, she emphasized how beneficial the enfranchisement of working women would be for labor issues. As she later explained, "My argument to them was that if their wives and daughters were enfranchised, labor would be able to influence legislation enormously." While Schneiderman was hailed as a powerful speaker, the 1912 referendum did not pass, and it would not be until 1923–after the passage of the federal Nineteenth Amendment that granted women the right to vote-that the phrase "white male," in reference to voting, would be removed from the Constitution of Ohio. In 1917, the same year that New York would vote on a women's suffrage referendum, Schneiderman was appointed head of the industrial section of the New York Women's Suffrage Association. In this capacity, she spoke at men's union meetings (though many employers had attempted to ban men from speaking to activists), distributed literature, and instituted a series of open letters that explained how suffrage could help women improve their own working conditions. On the day of the election, Schneiderman and several friends staffed three election districts–the first time, she later wrote, that they had seen the inside of a polling station. The referendum passed, granting New York's women full enfranchisement. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, feminists regrouped and, under the leadership of the National Woman's Party, pursued passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States Constitution, which proposed equal rights for all citizens, regardless of sex. Like other female labor activists, however, Schneiderman opposed the ERA, fearing it would deprive working women of the special statutory protections for which the WTUL had fought so hard, including the regulation of wages and hours, and protection against termination and dangerous working conditions during pregnancy. == Legacy ==

Schneiderman is credited with coining one of the most memorable phrases of the women's movement and the labor movement of her era: Her phrase "Bread and Roses," became associated with a 1912 textile strike of largely immigrant, largely women workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It was later used as the title of a song by James Oppenheim and was set to music by Mimi Fariña and sung by various artists, among them Judy Collins and John Denver. 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. 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's death in 1937. It is unknown whether this relationship was romantic or not, but Swartz and Schneiderman were indeed work and travel partners and were invited to events together and gave gifts together. According to historian Annelise Orleck, "Schneiderman gives no more specific description of her feelings for Swartz than to say that 'she was a wonderful companion.' Euphemistic or not, that probably provides an emotionally accurate sense of their relationship." Rose Schneiderman died in New York City on August 11, 1972, at age ninety. In an obituary appearing in The New York Times, she was credited with teaching Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt "most of what they knew about unions," and having an indirect influence on the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (also known as the Wagner Act), the National Industrial Recovery Act, and other New Deal legislation. The obituary also declared that she had done "more to upgrade the dignity and living standards of working women than any other American." Maine mural controversy In March 2011, almost 100 years to the day after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Maine's Republican governor Paul LePage, who was inaugurated in January of the same year, had a three-year-old 36 foot-wide mural with scenes of Maine workers on the Department of Labor's building in Augusta removed and brought to a secret location. Schneiderman is featured in the panel titles "Labor Reformers" and can be seen in the background of this mural panel. According to The New York Times, "LePage has also ordered that the Labor Department's seven conference rooms be renamed. One is named after César Chávez, the farmworkers' leader; one after Rose Schneiderman, a leader of the New York Women's Trade Union League a century ago; and one after Frances Perkins, who became the nation's first female labor secretary and is buried in Maine." On April 1, 2011, it was disclosed that a federal lawsuit had been filed in US district court seeking "to confirm the mural's current location, insure that the artwork is adequately preserved, and ultimately to restore it to the Department of Labor's lobby in Augusta". On March 23, 2012, US District Judge John A. Woodcock ruled that the removal of the mural was a protected form of government speech and that LePage removing it would be no different from his refusing to read aloud a history of labor in Maine. A month later, supporters of the mural filed a notice of appeal in the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. The court rejected the appeal on November 28, 2012. On January 13, 2013, it was announced that the mural had been placed in the Maine State Museum's atrium per an agreement between the Museum and the Department of Labor, and that it would be available for public viewing the next day. ==Notes==