Women's Trade Union League

Women's Trade Union League. Founded in 1903 as an alliance of working women with middle‐ and upper‐class reformers, the National Women's Trade Union League (NWTUL) wedded feminism with class concerns to create the Progressive Era's most effective voice for working‐class women.The league was a unique blend of reform unionism and social feminism in which Swedish bootmakers, Italian candymakers, and Jewish seamstresses, among others, joined forces with former debutantes and heiresses.

The league's emblem embodied its mission: Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and war, reached over the rising sun and the league's motto—“The Eight Hour Day, A Living Wage, To Guard the Home”—to clasp the hand of a young mother, babe in arms, standing before the smokestacks of a factory. In serving this mission, the NWTUL organized women into trade unions; secured protective legislation, especially minimum wages and maximum hours for women; and educated the public to the needs of working‐class women. At its peak, the organization had twenty‐two branches, with its strength concentrated in New York City, Chicago, and Boston.

The league's most notable achievements, during the presidency of Margaret Dreier Robins from 1907 to 1922, include its support of major garment‐workers’ strikes in New York and Chicago in 1909–1911. Robins and the WTUL played a central role in the development of arbitration mechanisms at Chicago's Hart, Schaffner and Marx men's clothing company, a landmark in labor history that introduced a measure of industrial democracy for workers. The organization published its own journal, Life and Labor, and trained working women as union organizers. Robins recruited as members both reform‐minded women of wealth and poor, young working women like Rose Schneiderman of New York, who became an influential labor organizer and social reformer in her own right.

Never warmly embraced by the American Federation of Labor, the league nevertheless worked effectively in the South during the 1920s. Its role diminished in the 1930s, however, and it ceased to exist in 1950. In its heyday, the WTUL achieved considerable success in pursuing its three‐pronged goal of labor organization, legislation, and education. The league championed the cause of working women at a time when both the industrial workforce and the labor movement were overwhelmingly male‐dominated.
See also Labor Movements; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Nancy Schrom Dye , As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women's Trade Union League of New York, 1980.
Elizabeth Anne Payne , Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women's Trade Union League, 1988.

Elizabeth Anne Payne