Rose Schneiderman (1882-1972), a Jewish immigrant from Poland, began working as a cap-maker at a factory in the Lower East Side of New York City at age 16. After a fire at the factory, she helped organize the first female-led chapter of the United Cloth, Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers Union, previously an all-male union. This launched what would become her lifelong fight to improve wages and safety standards for American working women. Following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, she drew public attention to unsafe work conditions, and advocated for the passage of the New York state referendum of 1917 that gave women the right to vote. Schneiderman is credited with popularizing the phrase “Bread and Roses,” a central rallying cry of the American labor movement indicating a worker’s right to something more than a subsistence living. In 1926, she was elected president of the National Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), a post she retained until her retirement in 1950. She was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and a consultant to Franklin D. Roosevelt, increasing their awareness of working-class women’s labor politics. In 1933, Schneiderman was the only woman to serve on the National Recovery Administration’s Labor Advisory Board, helping to construct many New Deal labor policies.
Interviewees: historian Hasia Diner, Paul And Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University and author of Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America From Colonial Times to the Present; and labor activist Ai-jen Poo, Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.