Part III

Fragmentation

In 1905, Lizzie Swank Holmes summed up her early work in an article for the AFL magazine, the American Federationist. She was proud and confident of the future of women in the labor movement.

Chicago is said to be the best organized city in the United States for women workers…. But that handful of humble, earnest, working women who laid the foundation of the present excellent organization, who “broke the ground,” as it were, who introduced the idea of solidarity to the indifferent, scoffing, or apathetic working women of thirty years ago, are never mentioned in the records of labor’s achievements. But they do not mind the neglect. They did not work for glory, but for the rights of poorly paid, toiling women and children, and they rejoice today to know that the class is recognized, and that the necessity of union and of mutual helpfulness is so well understood by working women in general.¹

She had good reason to be proud of the work of the 1880s and 1890s, for the situation of women in Chicago’s labor movement was unique. Over thirty-seven thousand women were organized (as compared to five thousand in New York)² in mixed and all-female locals. In 1903 Lou Grant, assistant secretary of the Illinois Bureau of Arbitration, found separate women’s locals among men’s clothing workers, paper box makers, school teachers, bindery girls, cracker packers, twine workers, rubber workers, shoe workers, can makers, telephone and switchboard operators, women’s clothing workers, knitters, janitresses, feather duster makers, woven wire mattress makers, picture frame makers, candy dippers, core makers, horse nail makers and novelty workers. Women were also in mixed locals of the printers, cigarmakers, commercial telegraphers, and post office clerks.³ It was an impressive achievement.

But it was short-lived. The industrial depression of 1907–1909 devastated these women’s unions, driving the women—the most marginal and lowest-paid workers at best—out of the labor force or forcing them to keep their jobs on their employers’ terms. By 1909 the results were clear; the president of the Women’s Trade Union League estimated that the number of women in Chicago unions was reduced to ten thousand, and there was not a single all-female local left.⁴

This decline in the number of female unionists was not matched by a similar decline in the number of men in unions, a number which remained constant throughout the period. Industrial cycles and employer persecution affected both sexes but affected them unevenly, because of women’s more insecure place in the work force and the fact that much of their value to the employer depended on their remaining marginal.

Employers were hostile to unions in general but found women’s unions intolerable—and not only because they were new. Industries that had not yet reached the monopoly stage, such as the garment industry with its thousands of small “cockroach” manufacturers, depended on the cheapness of female labor. If they had been compelled to pay women a living wage, many such manufacturers would have gone under. And the chief reason for the women’s cheapness was their lack of organization. Andrews and Bliss summed up the situation in their government report of 1911:

The low wages at which women will work form the chief reason for employing them at all. … A woman’s cheapness is, so to speak, her greatest economic asset. She can be used to keep down the cost of production where she is regularly employed. Where she has not been previously employed she can be introduced as a strike breaker to take the place of men seeking higher wages, or the threat of introducing her may be used to avert such a strike. But the moment she organizes a union and seeks by organization to secure better wages she diminishes or destroys what is to the employer her chief value.⁵

In times of depression when jobs were scarce, the argument that a woman’s place was in the home had considerable force among laboring men, who were often dubious at best about the need to organize women and did not recognize that women had joined the industrial work force to stay. The men had themselves only recently begun to form stable unions, and in many industries these were also hard pressed. The AFL was becoming increasingly conservative, and radical influence on its leadership was declining, particularly after a large part of its left wing seceded again in 1904 to form the Industrial Workers of the World, and began to build revolutionary industrial unions among the unskilled workers that the AFL had neglected. It is impossible to know whether or not the male unions could have sustained women’s locals if they had given them more assistance, since they barely tried. As Alice Kessler-Harris has noted, the end result of the AFL’s attitude was “to divide the working class firmly along gender lines and to confirm women’s position as a permanently threatening underclass of workers who finally resorted to the protection of middle-class reformers and legislators to ameliorate intolerable working conditions.”⁶

Other things changed with the turn of the century. The socialist and feminist movements became too divided to do consistent united front work. In 1901, disgusted with the sectarianism of the Socialist Labor Party, a number of influential radicals formed the Socialist Party. This in turn developed a gap between its left and right wings that by 1912 had become unbridgeable. The feminist movement was dominated by the mainstream National American Women’s Suffrage Association, and radical feminists from the Congressional Union (later called the National Woman’s Party) had split off to develop more militant tactics in the suffrage battle Another sector of the feminist movement, often called the social feminists, led by settlement workers like Jane Addams, remained concerned with working women and was instrumental in the formation of the Women’s Trade Union League. The League could occasionally muster support from the whole united front of women, as in the 1909 shirtwaist makers’ strike, but these moments became increasingly rare and fragile. Because of all these schisms, those who were trying to organize working women could no longer assume the kind of united support that had helped Elizabeth Morgan and Corinne Brown.

The following chapters examine the united front of women in this period of fragmentation, with particular emphasis on the Women’s Trade Union League, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Socialist Party as they dealt with the question of alliances across class lines or, in the case of the IWW, unity between housewives and working women.

5

Leonora O’Reilly and the Women’s Trade Union League

Long have we lived apart,

Women alone;

Each with an empty heart,

Women alone;

Now we begin to see

How to live brave and free,

No more on earth shall be

Women alone.

Now we have learned the truth,

Union is power;

Weak and strong, age and youth,

Union is power;

On to the end we go,

Stronger our League must grow,

We can win justice so,

Union is power.

For the right pay for us,

We stand as one;

For the short day for us,

We stand as one;

Loyal and brave and strong,

Helping the world along,

For end to every wrong,

We stand as one!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

anthem of the Women’s Trade Union League¹

The Women’s Trade Union League was founded in 1903 and lasted until 1950. It marked a renewed attempt to build a united front of women centered around working women, and, particularly in its early years, it did valuable pioneer work in demonstrating various ways these women could be reached, especially in the garment industry.

The impetus behind its formation came from William English Walling, a socialist intellectual and settlement worker who had been excited by a similar organization in England. On his return in 1903, he contacted Mary Kenney O’Sullivan in Boston. Though now a widow with young children, she was as full of energy as ever and had maintained her connections with both the AFL and the settlement movement. Together the two decided to try to create a new organization at the 1903 AFL convention, and since the trade union women there numbered a dismal four, they called upon various settlement workers to represent the sex. A few—a very few—male trade unionists participated as well.

By the end of the convention, the new women’s organization had officers,² a constitution, and a program consisting of five demands: (1) the organization of all workers into trade unions; (2) equal pay for equal work; (3) an eight-hour day; (4) a minimum wage scale; and (5) woman suffrage.³ It was decided to set up local leagues in Boston (where Mary Kenney O’Sullivan played a leading role), in Chicago (with help from the women at Hull House and the University of Chicago Settlement), and in New York, where William English Walling immediately contacted a one-time shirtwaist maker turned settlement worker, Leonora O’Reilly.

A charismatic speaker and organizer, Leonora O’Reilly seemed to the League’s middle-class members—usually called “the allies”—a miraculous example of working-class spirituality; no one who met her ever forgot her, and one of her oldest friends described her as “one of those rare nun-like spirits whose only adequate medium of expression is divine service to mankind. And this service she achieved, not through remarkable intellectual power, a quality much more common, but through the divine fire, the infinite tenderness and compassion of her own spiritual life.”⁴

Leonora O’Reilly in fact embodied all the contradictions of the united front of women in her own person. She was eager for education and culture, yet defiantly proud of the strengths of her own class. Hating the condescension of her female allies and the indifference of male trade unionists with equal passion, and torn by her own ambivalence and sharp perceptions, she was to find no peaceful haven in the Women’s Trade Union League. She was a searcher, an idealist, a positivist practicing “The Religion of Mankind,” at various times an active member of the Knights of Labor, the Henry Street Settlement, the Women’s Trade Union League, the suffrage movement, the Friends of Irish Freedom, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Socialist Party, the support movement for the anti-imperialist struggle in India, and the pacifist movement. She was in turn a shirtwaist worker, a sewing teacher at the Manhattan Trade School, a settlement worker in Brooklyn, and a full-time organizer for the WTUL until—her heart weakened by years of child labor—she lapsed into illness, depression, and a slow death at the age of fifty-seven. She was in many ways the soul of the WTUL, the only one beloved by all factions. Something in it died with her.

Leonora O’Reilly grew up in a household of Irish rebels on the Lower East Side in the 1870s and 1880s, at a time when the neighborhood teemed with every kind of radical. Marxist exiles from Bismarck’s Germany, Italian revolutionaries in red Garibaldi hats, Jewish anarchists and socialists from Russia, and survivors of the Paris Commune, all mingled with American adherents of the “cooperative commonwealth,” trade unionism, free love, votes for women, and every conceivable kind of deism. Leonora O’Reilly was deeply influenced by two friends of her family, both survivors of the Paris Commune, Jean Baptiste Hubert and Victor Drury. Drury, an acquaintance of Karl Marx, had also been one of Mazzini’s soldiers in the war for Italian independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Leonora O’Reilly drank in her friends’ stories of “self-sacrifice, of renunciation of all those personal ties held dear by most of us, all their splendid, heroic deeds.”⁵ She went to work in a shirtwaist factory when she was eleven, and when she was sixteen, Hubert recruited her into the Knights of Labor, to which her mother already belonged.

In that same year Leonora O’Reilly became part of a small group that called itself the Working Women’s Society. It included Ida Van Etten, a woman of independent means who had taken up the cause of working women and had worked with Eva McDonald Valesh in 1892 to persuade the AFL to hire a woman organizer. Its leading spirit was Alice Woodbridge, who had worked for many years as a retail clerk and led the new group in investigating and exposing conditions in the stores. What they found was so dreadful that they took the facts to a group of women philanthropists, including Josephine Shaw Lowell, noted for her interest in the labor movement, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Louisa Perkins; they all joined the Society.⁶

Possibly because of the influence of its middle-class members, the Working Women’s Society was uninterested in organizing women into unions. Like the Illinois Woman’s Alliance, it was a transitional form between the charity organizations of the nineteenth century, which sought to ameliorate bad conditions through private means, and the trade union organizations and government agencies of the twentieth century. The members of the Society decided that trying to organize a union of salesclerks would be fruitless: the clerks were all women and “consequently usually timid and unaccustomed to associated action;” they were young and therefore inexperienced and flighty; and they were unskilled and therefore easily replaced.⁷ The Society decided instead to direct a barrage of appeals to the female consumer:

It is the democratic demand for cheapness that keeps alive this sad condition of things. It is our needs and our desires that regulate a large part of production. In our eagerness to make our little money go far, are we not too careless about the claims of those who make for us, or stand behind the counter which we face? When a neatly made garment is offered to us as “cheap,” do we stop to ask at whose expense is the cheapness? …

Are we not all sisters one of another, and should not a woman’s heart thrill at being called on for help? … Where it is a possible thing, let the buyer come into personal contact with the worker. Let each woman buy her material… as our ancestors did. Then let her go to the home of the workers, and pay a fair price for the making, giving loving and sisterly interest and sympathy into the bargain.⁸

When this effort to turn back the clock, along with attempts to get women to shop early so that clerks would need to work only eight hours,⁹ proved insufficient, the Society turned to legislation. Samuel Gompers supported their proposal for a state eight-hour law for women and children—although he did not believe in similar legislation for men—and a bill for women factory inspectors. The former failed, the latter passed in 1890.

The main work of the Society, however, was in consumer education, and its work in this area became the basis for the Consumers’ League, founded in 1890, an organization for middle- class consumers only (neither workers nor employers were eligible for membership, to ensure that the society be “nonpartisan”) that sought to reform working conditions through public pressure. In 1899 Florence Kelley came from Hull House to head the Consumers’ League.¹⁰

Leonora O’Reilly was a factory worker, and she was more interested in organizing and educating workers than in consumer groups. She, Alice Woodbridge, and the other working-class women in the Society began to concentrate more on legislative and strike support work than on consumer education.¹¹ She was, however, deeply influenced by some of the middle-class women in the Society, particularly her close friend Louisa Perkins, who felt that the socialist emphasis on class conflict was too narrow and that enlightened people of all classes should work together to create a fair society: “I know and you know, that the perfect engine with which to bring about radical reforms is to be composed of strong disinterested men and women, representatives of the varied industries and interests of society, grouping money, trained intellect, practical experience and noble insight.”¹² “This strategy for change—one of the main ideas of the Progressive Era and almost a textbook description of an elite—was to have great influence in the Women’s Trade Union League.

Although she worked twelve hours a day, and had become a forewoman by her mid-twenties, Leonora O’Reilly wanted to be as educated and cultured as the middle-class radicals she met. She was the only female factory worker in the Social Reform Club, a study circle that covered everything from economics to Dante to Comte and the “religion of humanity,” and that included Edward King, a pioneer in workers’ education on the Lower East Side; Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement; Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture Society; and Arthur Brisbane of the New York Journal. On her own, she learned shorthand and went to the YWCA gym. As she wrote a friend, “I am studying every night in the hope of making something more out of my life than a mere manager to make money for someone else to spend.”¹³ She yearned to leave the factory and find more scope for her talents, even though Louisa Perkins told her that she could make her job as forewoman into a work of Christian charity, “real mission work of the noble kind. That place must always be filled and if you can stand as a middle man of righteousness, faithful and just to the interests of all, you can not only help your own shop, but set a higher standard for the place or position everywhere. And you must be supremely careful to be just to the employer.”¹⁴

Most of Leonora O’Reilly’s settlement friends found it “incongruous” that such a brilliant creature should spend ten hours a day in a shirtwaist factory.¹⁵ In 1894 some of these women—Louisa Perkins first among them—raised the money to buy her a year’s freedom. She and her mother went to live next to the Henry Street Settlement, and she took on two new tasks: running a model shirtwaist factory to teach girls how to do quality sewing, and organizing a women’s local of the United Garment Workers. But her health was already failing. Even as she was beginning her new life, she wrote in her diary: “June 28. O most wretched day. Hardly able to crawl around. I wonder if this means that I am breaking down. True I have worked hard enough to break down some people but then I ought to be made of better stuff than that. What an awful thing, if just now when I have found freedom if I could not use it.”¹⁶

The experimental “little shop of the new idea” was based on the belief that if young girls could be taught to do fine sewing and make complete garments instead of mere pieces, they could make more money. This idea was not a realistic one, considering the way the garment industry was becoming increasingly rationalized and tasks in it divided. When the model shop ended after a year and a half, the girls went back into the factories, able only to earn a few dollars more because of their increased skill. The work the little shop turned out was too fine to be marketable except at a very high price, and the cooperative did not even pay for itself.

At the same time that they experimented with their model workshop, Leonora O’Reilly, Lillian Wald, and a few other settlement women were trying to organize women garment workers into Local No. 16 of the United Garment Workers. The UGW was in general indifferent to the fate of unskilled women clothing workers, and particularly so in New York.¹⁷ Local 16 was organized in the spring of 1897, and excerpts from Leonora O’Reilly’s diary show some of the difficulties she faced in trying to organize women’s locals in shops where there were already men’s locals:

The W.W.G.U. #16 met tonight. The meeting was not so large as it ought to be. The men sent word, that, as yet, they are too busy with contractors to spare a minute to strengthen the organization of either men or women; but this week will end the strike….

June 24…. Mr. Cohen the official walking-delegate and organizer of the G.W. now on strike accepts the proposition that when he starts out to organize the men, a woman from the W.G.W. branch shall go with him and organize the women for Local #16….

June 29…. Miss Persky just saw Mr. Cohen who says they are organizing men at the rate of twenty-five shops a day. The women laugh at him or refuse point-blank to attend. This will not do says our Com[mittee]. Miss Wald dispatches a letter at once … stating that our Com[mittee] is ready to help the men organize the women as agreed to by the men with our body and in their contract with the bosses….

June 30. Got the cards from the printer, went to Mr. Schoenfeld’s office, received the list of shops which are already organized as far as the men are concerned; but not organized for women. In the morning L. O’R visited sixteen of these shops; most of them had three women employed, all of whom were given the cards, asking them to attend Wednesday night meetings. Some of the women responded. Others looked as if they feared even to touch the foreign thing; the ticket.”¹⁸

Seven women came to the first meeting; none but the organizers came to the second. The committee again resolved to “go to the meeting of the different branches of the trade and see if the men can be stirred up to a consciousness of their duty to help the women to see the need for organization.”¹⁹ And so it went. New York was a far cry from Chicago in this period.

Without more assistance than this from its union, a woman’s local could not survive for long. In the late 1890s, Local 16 filed a formal resolution at the United Garment Workers’ convention, censuring the union’s executive board because “the female garment workers have not been given the necessary cooperation by the other tailor unions of the United Garment Workers of America in order to improve their conditions.”²⁰ No help was forthcoming, and Local 16 gradually faded out of existence.

By 1903, when the Women’s Trade Union League was founded, the working-class women who joined it—Leonora O’Reilly, Mary Anderson, Agnes Nestor, Rose Schneiderman, and others—had all had experiences of this sort. They knew that they would get less help than they needed from their brothers in the AFL, but it took them some years of testing various approaches to realize exactly how little help they could indeed expect.

From the beginning the AFL gave the WTUL lip service rather than money, organizers, or practical assistance. League delegates went to the 1907 AFL convention to ask the executive board to appoint a woman organizer and waited two weeks without even getting a hearing. The only money the WTUL ever got from the AFL was $150 a month in 1912, and this was cut off when the League strayed slightly from the path laid down by the United Garment Workers during the controversial Lawrence strike. Margaret Dreier Robins, the League’s national president, went to the AFL convention every year with little or no result. After a meeting with Gompers in 1915, she reported back:

We met Mr. Gompers. He stated … that the Exec. Council of the American Federation of Labor recognized the need of organizing women, but they did not think women were qualified to organize women, that, in the first place, women were very difficult to organize, if they could be organized at all; that, secondly, women organizers were rarely worth anything, that they had a way of making serious mistakes—and used some other language which, frankly, I don’t want to repeat.²¹

Most members of the League were sure that the reason the AFL would not appoint women organizers was that its leaders wanted all the jobs for themselves, despite the evidence that women workers could be more easily organized by other women than by men. Margaret Dreier Robins told the AFL executive board:

I know the average man feels that organization is his job and that the woman is an interloper, and, in addition to that, I know that it is really serious for you to put a woman in a man’s place, because the man does represent a political entity and the woman is a disenfranchised human being. Just as soon as Brother Duffy [leader of the carpenters’ union] will help vote for the enfranchisement of women the sooner … we will be a little more on a footing with the men in the labor movement.²²

The AFL leaders were suspicious of the WTUL because of the allies: they believed in pure trade union organization, not reform amalgams. On the other hand, they themselves were less than active in promoting unionism for women, and they realized that this left a vacuum that made it difficult to criticize the League. They frequently took the tack of recommending the League follow the example of the Union Label League, a women’s auxiliary to the AFL whose only function was to persuade consumers to buy union goods. The Union Label League gave organizational form to the idea that, even in the labor movement, woman’s place was in the home: it neither organized women workers nor educated housewives in the principles of trade unionism, and since most women workers were unorganized, the union label goods that women were supposed to buy were almost all made by men. The song of the United Garment Workers, “The Union Label Man” by M. Y. Lane, expressed the AFL’s attitude toward the “flighty” woman as well as toward the label: once she catches her man, the heroine forgets all about the needs of organized labor.

I met a little maiden down at Coney by the sea

She wasn’t very tall, she wasn’t very small.

I said to her, and took her hand, “Now you must marry me.”

She said, “I’m not so sure at all.

You see I am a fac’try girl in dreary shop all day,

We girls must bend o’er our machines and work our lives away;

For living wage, the Union Label is our only guarantee.

Is it on ev’ry thing you wear?” I smiled and said, “just see.”

CHORUS

“I wear the Union Label on my coat and pants and vest,

I wear it on my collar and my tie.

To help the girls who made them and the one I love the best,

I ask for it on everything I buy.

I wear it on my overalls, my shirt, and on my hat,

I wear it on the insole of my shoe,

I wear the Union Label wherever I am able,

And now I’ll Union Label you.”

A year had sped and we were wed and one day I espied

No label on the broom. I glanc’d about the room,

“No label on the crackers, bread or cereals,” I cried,

And threw them out unto their doom.

My wife was cutting out a dress, the pattern was unfair,

And as she rose I also found no label on her chair,

No label on the stove, the toilers’ long and weary day.

“Have you forgot the workers, dear?” I cried, then smiled to say;

CHORUS²³

Not surprisingly, women in the WTUL felt that the Union Label League was no answer to the problems of organizing working women, raising class consciousness, or promoting solidarity between men and women workers. As Robins noted:

Can’t you see that we cannot go on using women just for the service they can render men? That the purpose of women is to be of service to themselves and their sisters, and what we are especially organized to do is to make possible an organization of women in the industries. We are pledged to help the women and children, to help little girls, not to help iron workers.²⁴

This was a particularly telling comment because the ironworkers had a clause in their constitution reading: “Any member, honorary or active, who devotes his time in whole or part to the instruction of female help in the foundry or in any branch of the trade, shall be expelled from the union.”²⁵ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn of the IWW pointed to the same problems with label leagues in one of her many criticisms of the AFL approach:

Men unionists are not themselves stirred to great enthusiasm over the label on shoes, hats, overalls, cigars, etc…. How much less can we expect of the women in the homes, many of whom know nothing of the significance of the label, to demand it on the countless purchases they make. No special efforts have ever been made seriously to interest the wives in what the men consider “man’s affairs.” Many a wife hasn’t the remotest idea what the union that John goes to every night consists of.”²⁶

The AFL leadership countered such criticisms by pointing accusingly at WTUL tendencies to suffragism and socialism. The latter was a particular fear, raised during the League’s tiny show of sympathy for the IWW-led Lawrence strikers and made credible by the fact that on certain political questions the League was more progressive than the AFL. In 1909, for instance, the League condemned the Asiatic immigrant exclusion bill that Gompers believed to be the one defense U.S. labor had against the “Yellow Peril”; demanded that the size of the U.S. Navy not be increased; and called on the AFL to form a labor party. Gompers took note of this “problem” in his autobiography, in a unique equation of middle-class “egotism” with socialist ideology, the implication being that, while honest working people would have nothing to do with socialist ideas, the middle class is vulnerable to them in its search for self-aggrandizement;

To these efforts [of the League] to help women, interested women of means contributed funds. This sort of subsidizing created a problem of control—whether wage-earning women or those interested in wage-earning women should guide the movement. I had to be on guard constantly to help maintain the balance for trade unionism. It is hard for those who have not been a factor in real production enterprises, to appreciate the nature and selfefficiency of economic power. A trade union movement is inherently a self-dependent movement. The friendly outsider may contribute advice and assistance, but there is no opportunity for him to play a conspicuous part. Consciously or unconsciously, it is personal egotism that leads him to decry trade union methods and inclines the outsider to Socialism in which he may have a leading part.²⁷

If problems with the AFL were acute on the national level, they were devastating when the fate of a local union of women, or a woman organizer, was involved; the AFL did not use its power to organize women workers, but to keep them unorganized.²⁸ AFL leaders would say women could not be organized because they were unskilled and the AFL charter was only for skilled workers. They would then refuse to allow women to become apprentices and so learn a skill. Or the national leadership would refuse to decide which international (there was one for each craft) had the right to organize a group of workers. If a group of women workers applied for admission to the international in their craft and the international turned them down, they would appeal to the AFL leadership, who would reply that they had no control over the decisions of any international in the federation. If the women then asked the AFL to charter them as an independent local union, the AFL would refuse on the ground that this would violate the jurisdiction of the international in that craft. The buck would be passed back and forth until the women’s organization disintegrated in sheer demoralization. Sometimes an international would consent to organize women workers, but would organize separate locals for men and women in the same factory, and a joint committee would negotiate with the company. The women usually got the worst of such negotiations.

A few craft unions, mainly in the garment industry, did try to organize women. They included the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. With the help of the Women’s Trade Union League, these unions called general strikes of all the workers in one industry, a tactic that had much in common with industrial unionism and was very different from the usual AFL methods. But the women’s participation in running locals was not particularly encouraged, even in the garment unions, and as a result women were seldom found in leadership positions above the lowest level.

The AFL stand on women workers had a devastating effect on the labor movement as a whole. Manufacturers were able to hire women at lower wages than union men, and thus undercut the wage level of the entire working class. Women workers often had no alternative but to scab. The workers were divided among themselves and their ability to fight for improved conditions was weakened.

In the absence of support from the mainstream labor movement, it was inevitable that working women would turn increasingly to their middle-class female allies for help and leadership. The allies were for the most part drawn to the Women’s Trade Union League by their sense of feminist solidarity, though a few, like Helen Marot, were deeply interested in labor. Most of them were professional women or were independently wealthy: they were the wives and daughters of well-to-do professionals and small capitalists, with an occasional maverick like Margaret Dreier Robins’ husband Raymond, who had struck it rich in the Alaskan gold rush. Many of the allies were breaking new paths for women, finding ways to live collectively in settlement houses, often eschewing the bonds of family, husband, and children that would have held them back from social activism. Leonora O’Reilly admired their independence: she valued their work on eight-hour and child-labor legislation, on improving schools and housing, and she saw that they were trying to serve the labor movement selflessly. But she found in them the same denial of the realities of class, of struggle, of her own experience, that she had seen in Louisa Perkins ten years earlier. Their denial of the class struggle was well expressed by Jane Addams, the first vice-president of the League: workers did not need their own movement; rather, the goal should be to merge labor organizations into a general movement of universal progressivism.

There is a temperamental bitterness among workingmen which is both inherited and fostered by the conditions of their life and trade; but they cannot afford to cherish a class bitterness if the labor movement is to be held to its highest possibilities. A class working for a class, and against another class, implies that within itself there should be trades working for trades, individuals working for individuals. The universal character of the movement is gone from the start, and cannot be caught until an all-embracing ideal is accepted.²⁹

Although Leonora O’Reilly also had high ideals, her experience as a factory worker from childhood had taught her the meaning of class struggle in a way that women like Jane Addams, however well intentioned, could never fully understand.

Some of the working women who came into the League and remained there were strong individuals who fought their way into the trade unions, often as the first women in their locals. Others were—like most of the female work force—young girls living at home who had energy and enthusiasm but lacked political experience. A few members had risen against considerable odds to become union officers, and some of these went on to become full-time staff members for the League.³⁰ Because of the difficulties of combining marriage and children with political work, most of these, like the settlement women, were single; they tended to drop out of the League when they got married.

The League was thus a united front organization of women from different classes and different occupational and ethnic groups. Its members were united by their feminism and by their desire to organize women workers. They believed this would be possible only if they worked through the AFL to enlist women in craft unions; they feared industrial unionism because of its association with the radical IWW. Only in its second decade did the League begin to relinquish this goal and give more emphasis to legislative work than to organization.³¹

Within the framework of the League’s general unity, there were substantial political differences. Some of these arose from the varying class origins of its members, but they were not reducible to class alone. On certain questions, such as favoring organizing over legislative work, the League’s working-class members would tend to be on the same side; on others they would split along ethnic or political lines. One hotly debated issue, for instance, was whether the New York League should stress organizing the downtown Jewish workers or the uptown “American girls.” Struggles over such questions were probably sharpest in New York, where the League’s socialist element was strongest. Although most of the League’s socialists believed that the revolution would come about peacefully through an accumulation of reforms and electoral victories, rather than through a general strike or uprising, they nevertheless stressed class consciousness and militancy and believed that more fundamental changes were needed than those that could come about solely through unity among women. This sometimes set them in opposition to both the allies, who usually agreed with Jane Addams, and the AFL leadership, which was increasingly opposed to mixing politics with economics.

These differences occasionally came into the open, as in the election for the executive board of the New York League in 1913. Rose Schneiderman, a Jewish socialist who had taken a leave of absence to do suffrage work, was running against Melinda Scott, a feminist hat trimmer who was rather conservative politically. She was one of the few members of the League to side with the AFL leadership and vote for Chinese exclusion from the United States. She was also identified in the New York League with the policy of dropping organizational work among the Lower East Side Jews in order to concentrate on the Irish and American-born workers uptown. The electoral battle was bitter and factionalized. As Pauline Newman, a close friend of Rose Schneiderman, saw it, the allies campaigned for Scott while the workers were for Schneiderman. She wrote Rose Schneiderman after the election;

I hardly slept last night, and am still excited. For the reason that the vote was so close. Linda got 58, and you 54. Think of it! And please don’t think me excited when I say I don’t think the Counting was right….

… [Helen Marot] went to the teachers who happen to be members of the League and told them that “Miss Schneiderman is interested in Suffrage more than in Trade Unionism.” But we got hold of these people and they did not come at all. Mary [Dreier, president of the New York League] too, told Nel. [Eleanor] Schwartz that it would be too bad were you elected as she needs you so much in the suffrage work. Nel. told this to Mary Van Kleeck, but Mary told her that Rose is needed for a bigger job, than suffrage, and therefore she will vote for Rose. Mrs. Laidlaw [the auditor of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1911–1913, Harriet B. Laidlaw] came in to vote, and in talking to me she said that she is going to vote for Linda because she does not want to lose you. So you see, that nothing was left undone by them to line up a vote for Linda on the grounds that you were a Socialist, a Jewess, and one interested in suffrage. With all that, Linda got only four votes more.³²

On the surface the battle may have been fought on the issue of suffrage versus trade unionism, but there was behind-the-scenes opposition to Rose Schneiderman because she was a socialist. This is clear in a letter Raymond Robins wrote his sister-in-law Mary Dreier;

I think I would patently make it an issue that the W.T.U.L. must support the general policies of leaders like Miss Scott…. She is working all the time to organize working women for their industrial freedom. Most of the others are working for a socialist millennium. They have a perfect right to work for this end, but they have no right to do so under cover of the W.T.U.L. Rose is the only one of the socialist group in your league for whose ability I have any respect. I would keep Rose and fire the others if I could. If she would not stay than I would fire all the paid workers that will not play steady with Melinda. Either this or resign.³³

There were from the beginning differences of interest and politics between most of the allies and the trade union women. As early as 1905 Gertrude Barnum, a Chicago judge’s daughter who was the League’s first national organizer and one of the allies least sensitive to class issues,³⁴ reported: “It has not been simple to keep a ‘fair game’ between Trade Unionists—who chafe at the inactivity of allies, and allies who criticize the activities of the Unionists.”³⁵ Despite a formal provision in the League’s constitution that a majority of its executive board were to be current members of trade unions, its founders foresaw a division of labor that gave trade unionists the role of technical advisors rather than policymakers. The minutes of the organization’s first meeting are quite clear on this point: the purpose was to “unite College women to give ideas, women of social position to give influence to create a social sensitiveness, and Women of the Trades to supply the practical information.”³⁶ The idea was not to transform existing class relations but to duplicate them while creating a benevolent elite that would function on behalf of the masses of working-class women.

The organizational principle of building an elite and the educational ideas that developed from it ran directly counter to the democratic impulses and ideas of class solidarity that drew working women into the trade-union movement to begin with. This contradiction created a fundamental problem in the work of the League. When women in the garment industry were swept into its unions through mass strikes, they joined not only for practical reasons, but also because of their desire to develop both as people and as a class. Chicago garment worker Anna Rudnitsky expressed this complex of feelings in the League’s magazine, Life and Labor:

What bothers me most is time is passing. Time is passing and everything is missed. I am not living, I am only working.

But life means so much, it holds so much, and I have no time for any of it; I just work.

In the busy time I work so hard. … I am too weary for anything but supper and bed. Sometimes union meetings, yes, because I must go. But I have no mind and nothing left in me. The busy time means to earn enough money not only for today but to cover the slack time, and then when the slack time comes I am not so tired, I have more time, but I have no money, and time is passing and everything is missed….

I have been thinking. First we must get a living-wage and then we must get a shorter work-day, and many many more girls must do some thinking. It isn’t that they do not want to think, but they are too tired to think and that is the best thing in the Union, it makes us think. I know the difference it makes and that is the reason I believe in the Union. It makes us stronger and it makes us happier and it makes us more interested in life and to be more interested in life is oh, a thousand times better than to be so dead that one never sees anything but work all day and not enough money to live on. That is terrible, that is like death.”³⁷

This messianic vision of the labor movement was not reflected in the methods or the leadership philosophy of most allies. Many working-class women who took part in mass strikes experienced trade unionism as something that transcended their everyday lives. They were uplifted and transformed by their sense of class and female solidarity. But the allies had no such experience. Their main contact with transcendence was through art, and they did their best to communicate its beauties, often by leading the sort of “outing” to a museum or the opera that Mary Kenney O’Sullivan had deplored in her early experience with the Working Girls Clubs. While many of the working women tended to think, in the phrase of Eugene V. Debs, of rising with their class not from it, the allies thought in terms of improving conditions for the many while uplifting a special few.

An exchange between Leonora O’Reilly and Laura Elliot, an ally who was for a time head of the New York League’s education committee, illustrates these differences. Laura Elliot’s plan for her committee emphasized culture—trips to the opera, lectures on art; this was very different from either political education or the industrial training that Leonora O’Reilly thought essential. Leonora O’Reilly, who had been exposed to Dante and Comte and “high culture” extensively in her own early contacts with middle-class reformers, had spent years studying only to find out in despair that her labors had not even equipped her to pass the civil service examination. She found letters such as this one from Laura Elliot maddening:

Society does not mean to me just one producing class. I believe, with all of those men who have had the divine leisure to develop the evolutionary spirit of man, in the cross fertilization of culture as one of the greatest factors in growth and progress….

… You cannot push me out, and you cannot make me afraid of any working girl sister, or render me self conscious before them. I refuse to be afraid to tell them that I can teach them music, that I can take them to the Metropolitan Museum and teach them and help them….

Dear Sister, get into the Cosmic Band Wagon and be a Monist, and hear the Human Counterpuntal Symphony, where every point is sustained by every other point, then you will see that it takes all kinds of men to make and run a world….

Leonora O’Reilly, do you honestly, honestly, honestly believe in Evolution, believe in Karl Marx, and that the time has come or is coming when the wage earning dog is to have his day…. Sometimes I feel that you do not see any future for your sister and brother wage-earners.

You, like the Jews, seem to be so oppressed with oppression. I have never heard you say that you believed relief was coming. And yet I thought this was the meaning of Socialism—the coming to power of the working classes.

Sometimes I seem to stand quite alone meditating upon some dream. Am I lying to these girls?³⁸

By the time Leonora O’Reilly came to the Women’s Trade Union League, she had been thoroughly exposed to this kind of fuzzy-minded uplift and had rejected it. She knew the value of what she was. Some notes she made for a speech to the YWCA in 1908 show the attitude that often made her a center of controversy: “The work which makes people stand on their own feet is the work that counts—-the dignity of labor—teach labor to be self-respecting. Contact with the ‘lady’ does harm in the long run—gives a wrong standard—No use preaching Christianity until you are ready to live it—Brotherhood of man only possible through the brotherhood of labor.”³⁹

The allies, on the other hand, tended to view the working women who came to the League as cultural raw material. The League’s policy was to train working-class women to take the reins of leadership from the hands of the allies—when they were ready. The allies would select those who were particularly promising, according to their own standards, from the various working-class specimens who came forward. They would train them, polish their manners, somehow find the money to put them on staff or send them to school—in short, transform them from working- class activists to female labor leaders who could with comfort take tea on the White House lawn, as did Rose Schneiderman.

One of the prime examples of this process, Rose Schneiderman came to the League in 1907, a young rank-and-file capmaker fresh from organizing a local in her industry. She was soon offered a choice between a scholarship which would have enabled her to become a schoolteacher and a job on the staff of the New York League. She chose the latter and worked her way up. By the time she became president of the national organization in 1927 she had been working in the New York office for twenty years, as well as holding other staff positions in the garment unions and the suffrage movement. She was poised and polished; she disavowed her socialist ideas and left her capmaking days far behind. The WTUL frequently held her up as a model of the way working girls were trained for leadership.

In 1913 the national WTUL set up a school to train young woman trade unionists as organizers. It included courses at the University of Chicago and at Northwestern University (courses that eventually developed into a full-fledged summer school at Bryn Mawr), as well as training in office work. An early class issued a sharp criticism of the school’s fundamental policy, which appeared to be one of remolding the workers:

We believe most profoundly that the School as it is being administered must fail of its avowed purpose, i.e., the training of trade union girls for leadership among their fellow workers. We cite the following reasons:

1.Because initiative and the qualities that make for leadership are neither permitted nor encouraged to develop.

2.Because past experience and knowledge of the movement are discounted and ignored; we resent being made over.

3.Because the treatment accorded us as students in the School has not been that of equals and co-workers in a great cause, but rather that of distrust and condescension.

4.Because on no matter, great or small, are we considered capable of making a decision for ourselves, although every one of us has for many years been not only permitted but forced by circumstances to meet her own problems and make her own decisions….

We submit that office routine work is distinct from organizing work, and that training in the former makes no contribution to the value of the latter.⁴⁰

At issue was the development of the female part of the working class: Should the allies make it in their own image and produce that strange amalgam, the working-class “lady,” or should the League’s educational policies be directed toward industrial and political education and the creation of experienced organizers who were still one with their class? Trade unionists were the majority on the League executive board after 1907, but numerical weight and political weight are not the same. Apart from such matters as the selection and development of certain workers for leadership positions, an imbalance was created by the fact that most of the working women in the League lacked the allies’ self-confidence, poise, organizational experience, and verbal skills. Moreover, they were much younger. How could they be expected to lead the organization?

If power is measured by the opinions that carried the most weight, the politics that tended to prevail, and the people who chose the leadership, the allies held the balance. This comes out clearly when the League’s strike-support propaganda is contrasted with that of the IWW or of other trade unions. The League’s literature always emphasized the poverty of the strikers, their youth, helplessness, femininity, the way they were victimized by the employers and the state. It presented a picture of the working class as pitiful, a suitable object of charity. There is no message of class solidarity in their material, no sense that the working class was potentially strong. The message was “Help these helpless girls, victims of cruel employers,” rather than “Help these workers who are fighting cruel employers; their cause is just.”

Helen Marot, longtime secretary of the New York League, must have been thinking about such differences of emphasis when she wrote her book American Labor Unions in 1914, She discussed the class dynamic that can develop in a united front of trade unionists and allies;

The reformers dominate and the labor men are in the position … of being auxiliaries to others concerned with the administration of labor affairs…. They accept positions of vice-presidents while the reformers assume, quite naturally, the positions of presidents. The reformer is equipped for the campaign with a sort of training and experience which is not labor’s and with which labor is unfamiliar. The reformers formulate their theories and observations of labor conditions with a marvelous precision which they can execute precisely because they are impersonal.⁴¹

While the allies’ power derived in part from their verbal skills and their confidence in political maneuvering, it also came from the power of the purse. They were able to donate large sums of their own money and raise money effortlessly from their own social circle. Neither of these options was open to the working girl. Large donors always have power, but in an organization that exists on donations they need not even threaten to withdraw their money for that possibility to be present in everyone’s mind.

Mary Dreier and Margaret Dreier Robins, independendy wealthy sisters from an upper-middle-class German family, served as both public leadership and financial mainstays of the organization. They were brought into the movement by Leonora O’Reilly, who had met them when she was a social worker at Asacog House in Brooklyn. Margaret Dreier Robins moved to Chicago and became the League’s national president in 1907. During her tenure, which ended in 1924, she virtually supported the national office; a few years after she resigned it collapsed financially, never to regain its old strength. Mary Dreier played a similar role in New York: the balance sheet included in the League’s 1908 report showed that the main source of funds was individual contributions, which totalled $3,539. There was only $158 collected in dues, and of course, the AFL was no help.⁴² Over a third of the contributed money—enough to cover almost all the staff’s salaries—came from the Dreier family.⁴³

This was hardly a stable way to finance a labor movement, and it was bound to affect the work of the League. In 1911 Pauline Newman analyzed its effects on the organization in Chicago in a letter to Rose Schneiderman.

Mrs. Knefler [president of the St. Louis League] is perfectly right when she says the League is owned and controlled by one person. … I find that Mrs. Robins pays everybody’s salary, all other necessary expenses, and as a consequence she has no opposition in the entire organization.

Mrs. Robins means well I am sure, but in the end it is bound to suffer. She does not give the girls a chance to use their brains, she does not want them to think, but wants them to agree with everything she does. And unfortunately they do; they have to; she pays their salaries. … A good many organizations here look on them as a philanthropic bunch. They do mingle too much with the other side. The girls here are not imbued with the spirit of Unionism—but philanthropy. What would become of the League as an organization were Mrs. Robins to leave them—is easy to imagine.⁴⁴

The class conflicts within the League were noted by the allies as well as the trade unionists. In her 1909 report to the executive board Mrs. Robins discussed political differences within the organization. The two groups she mentions are clearly allies and unionists:

Some members looked upon the purposes of the League as largely educational, feeling that the investigation of industrial conditions among women workers, looking to the securing of legislation, and the interpretation of trade unionists and allies to each other, constituted its most important functions. Other members felt that to organize women into trade unions, and to strengthen women’s unions already in existence by developing leadership among the working women themselves, were more important; and that, although the two theories were not at all incompatible with each other, the resources of the League necessitated deciding upon one policy or the other at the present time.⁴⁵

Because Leonora O’Reilly was older, more self-confident, and more experienced in united front work than the other working- class women in the League, she inevitably became a storm center of such class conflict. As early as 1904 she made a note to herself to tell William English Walling that the allies “must drop the attitude of lady with something give her sister, altogether—it never goes deeper than the skin.”⁴⁶ She never hesitated to speak up when she felt an ally was being insensitive to class issues, and she resigned or nearly resigned from the League several times, the cause in 1905 being an “overdose of allies.”⁴⁷ “The ally she had had a surfeit of at that time was Gertrude Barnum, who felt impelled to lecture Leonora O’Reilly about her resignation;

I do wonder that while there is a free hand for you to help in organizing girls in the garment trades in New York, you would resign from a commitee which is ready to work and a League which would help.

I shall not resign myself until I am driven by actual hunger and cold—that is until it is proved that I cannot raise enough money in or out of “the job” to keep me alive to do the work.”⁴⁸

The two women also disagreed about Dorothy Richardson’s The Long Day, a book depicting the lives of working women, supposedly by one of their number, that Gertrude Barnum admired and Leonora O’Reilly found insufferably condescending and distorted. O’Reilly felt so strongly about it that she wrote a long diatribe, which was never published, for the New York Journal:

The book sells like hot cakes at a fair—Ministers preach sermons on it. Critics vie with each to review it. It becomes the topic of afternoon teas…. [It appeals to those] who could not be paid to listen to the patient, plodding every day life of the working woman until she is made picturesquely immoral, interestingly vulgar, and maudlinly sentimental….

No, good Mr. Editor, Mr. Publisher, Mr. Sensational Minister and Lady Bountiful of afternoon teas, you may have paid your money for a real working girl sensation, but you did not get the real thing.

No working woman ever wrote like that about her class….

No, we do not pull each other’s hair and enjoy the fight—Nor do we “spit in and bloody each other’s face something fierce.”

Neither do Salvation Army women who are at the same time factory employees drink gin in the corner liquor store and trade on their Redeemer’s name generally.

The “so long” of the working woman is no more to be commented upon than the “upper register” tones of the wouldbes that come among us—language, intonation, and enunciation being largely a matter of environment. The working woman while she may imitate the “upper register” of the lady for fun passes her verdict on it as “different”—while the intellectual lady with less modesty and more egotism calls the one Right and the other Wrong….

That all working women are notoriously clean in their conversation save when led on by certain types of mind who are soon spotted and stamped for what they are worth, I assert positively without fear of contradiction after an experience of over twenty years daily intercourse with them as one of them.⁴⁹

Gertrude Barnum responded to such criticism (on League stationery, with Leonora O’Reilly’s name crossed off the letterhead):

If you keep getting off every committee in which every member does not agree with you in every respect, you will not contribute much to any constructive work! But that’s your business. You may be right about the Long Day. … I should have liked to have read the Long Day with you. It might have helped make me worthy to espouse the Trade Union Cause, which I sincerely wish to do honestly and democratically and faithfully and well. Fortunately everyone does not abandon us “allies” as soon as they disagree with us and we may be useful yet.⁵⁰

One of the issues which caused friction between the allies and the working women was legislation for a minimum wage for women. Mary Dreier, who was head of the New York Minimum Wage Commission as well as of the New York League, suggested in 1914 that the League support the Commission’s bill. She was outvoted, with Leonora O’Reilly, Melinda Scott, and Helen Marot firmly opposed, believing with Samuel Gompers that a minimum wage would become the ceiling rather than the floor wage in a given industry. But the allies were firmly committed to the minimum wage, particularly since the League’s progress in organizing women had slowed considerably and would continue to be problematic without increased help from the AFL. Women workers could not live on the salaries they made, and the allies felt that a minimum wage law was necessary for their survival; they were also furious at the AFL’s opposition to the legislation. Margaret Dreier Robins wrote Leonora O’Reilly:

We are going to have a National Executive Board meeting in Philadelphia in November at the same time as the A.F. of L. meets. I am so eager that we should bombard the A.F. of L. with women and women delegates and force it upon their attention that there is a woman’s cause in this day and generation. If I could but tell you how their arrogance to and contempt of the working women makes me boil!! If only I could get the rank and file of working women I / 10 as mad as I am, something would be doing. … In the June and July numbers of the Federationist Mr. Gompers opposes vigorously minimum wage laws as well as laws limiting the hours of work for women as for men on the plea of freedom of contract! How much freedom of contract did you have Leonora dear when you went to work and how much freedom of contract has any child of 14?⁵¹

Mary Dreier saw it as a clear feminist question, resting upon the issue of suffrage: “What gets me, is that the men decide this question negatively without consulting the trade union women!! But we must be gentle with them if we want them to act with us—they have the votes! … I am greatly concerned with Gompers opposed and the New York men weak or opposed the girls and women will continue to be crushed between the upper and nether millstones—it does sometimes seem to be a rotten world for the women.”⁵²

Apart from its support work for the mass strikes that unionized the garment industry, the League’s major contribution was to prove that different kinds of organizational work were necessary to reach working women than those standard among laboring men. Theresa Wolfson made this point in 1926, and it is as valid today as it was then:

The contribution of the Women’s Trade Union League to the technique of organization was a realization of the special problems besetting women workers and the initiation of methods … and social activities that women understood. Women organizers, women speakers, women trade unionists were developed and encouraged by them to work in a field of organization that had generally been considered hopeless.

… [the] male organizer may have acquired a method of approach in his work with men which he cannot transfer to the organization of women, because they are primarily not interested in … the same [topics] and [he] failed to take into consideration the psychology of the women workers—their habits of thought.⁵³

Most unions met in saloons, where respectable girls would not go; they met late at night when women, overburdened with housework and lacking baby-sitters, found it hard to get out. Equally, male organizers found it difficult to get into women’s boarding houses to recruit for the union. All this was perhaps obvious, but not to the AFL; and, although the League often saw what was needed, it did not have the resources to do it. Its report on organizing work in 1912, a peak year, says it all. Requests for help poured in from across the country, but the League had few people to send and those who did travel could not stay anywhere long enough to set things up properly. The best the League could do was build local chapters and send occasional organizers to help in time of strikes:

In the few instances where we have been able to go to the help of girls in other cities we have really been able to do something. In Sedalia, Missouri, for instance, the girls protested against low wages and other wrong conditions in the overall factory. It was impossible to win the strike but we helped them to open a Union Shirt Cooperative Factory which has up to the present been very successful…. What we need is money to engage organizers from among the trade union girls and choose from among the many different nationalities. If in Chicago we could do with the Bohemian and Italian groups what we have been able to do with the Hart, Schaffneer and Marx workers we would lay a real foundation for the abolishment of the sweating work in the home.⁵⁴

The money, which could only have come if the rest of the labor movement had seen the importance of organizing women, was not forthcoming. As a result, the emphasis of the League gradually shifted from organization to legislation and lobbying. Those workers who had remained in the League cast off their early class struggle ideas and began, with the allies, to believe in the gradual reformation of capitalism through solid legislative work. This was as true of women like Rose Schneiderman who were reform socialists, as it was of women like Melinda Scott who opposed socialism. By 1915 Rose Schneiderman—having been won over, along with the other working women in the New York League, to support minimum wage legislation for women—had come to believe that legislation was more than a palliative. It was a way to help women unionize since it would make it easier for them to take risks by giving them more money. She spoke of legislation almost as the equivalent of a share in state power: “the government can be made to be our own government, that we can do what we want with it, make legislation that we want, and not accept what the masters want us to take.”⁵⁵

The League’s tendency to look to the federal government as a major source of support increased during World War I; William O’Neill estimates that by 1919 members of the Women’s Trade Union League held thirty-eight government posts.⁵⁶ Agnes Nestor, a one-time glovemaker from Chicago, was on the federal Women’s Committee, and Mary Anderson, a Chicago shoe worker, became head of the Women’s Bureau. Such developments contributed to the League’s sense that the federal government was a reliable ally when compared to the AFL, which had never appointed any of them to anything.

Conditions for working women had changed enormously since the early days. It was by now clear that women were not transients in industry but were a permanent part of the work force, and unions for women began to become respectable. Before the WTUL was founded a career as a female trade union organizer didn’t exist. Women who organized for unions did so as a vocation, a calling they could not resist. So Mary Kenney O’Sullivan described her own decision to stop being a bookbinder and become an organizer: “Someone must go from shop to shop and find out who the workers were that were willing to work for better working conditions. I must be that someone.”

The League encouraged the transformation of one section of the female working-class movement into a group of professional labor leaders or government representatives of labor. Under these new circumstances, being a union organizer ceased to seem as dangerous and radical as it had in the days of Haymarket, and became almost a job like any other. In a 1933 pamphlet entitled “Careers for Girls,” the League firmly put forward the ideal of a “career”—as opposed to the ideals of solidarity and struggle, of serving the people.

Sometimes it is necessary for the organizer to take a job in a shop, so as to become acquainted with the workers. She distributes circulars advising the employees of the benefits of trade union organization, acts as intermediary between workers and employers, arranges conferring committees and arbitration committees, and negotiates with employers…. She endeavors to draw favorable public opinion by speeches and by interviews with the press. She must also play with the women with whom she works—dance with them if necessary and otherwise make herself agreeable so as to win their complete confidence….

From the position of organizer in one locality or one branch of an industry, a woman may work up to the position of national organizer, covering the entire country or the industry as a whole. Furthermore, there are notable examples … of woman organizers being appointed to administrative positions in the labor departments of State and Federal Governments….

The obvious satisfactions are those that come from having any considerable share in the quickening of social progress; the molding of opinion, and watching it change lives; the practising of leadership, only to develop it in others and pass it on.

The obvious disadvantages are the long and irregular hours; the excessive demands on physical and spiritual endurance; the collapse of promising successes, and reconstruction from the bottom up.⁵⁷

The women who built the WTUL created the conditions that made it possible for women to do trade union organizing as a career, but with this possibility came careerism. Thus, along with the development of trade unionism among women to the point where it could sustain professional organizers, came the development of the woman labor leader—never a complete equal in the labor aristocracy because she was a woman, but nevertheless able to find her place in its ranks.

The influence of the AFL was decisive in this process. Not only was it the only stable model for union organizing, but it also blocked other avenues of development. Had the labor movement at this period been more open and democratic, more eager to struggle, less dominated by the increasingly bureaucratic leadership of the AFL, the history of the Women’s Trade Union League might have been different. The influence of the allies was important, but the principal reason the League developed as it did was the authority of the AFL.

Not everyone in the League waited to see this drama played out. In 1915 Leonora O’Reilly represented the League at the state AFL convention and plunged into black despair as a result. As long as the AFL continued to dominate the labor movement, she decided, there was no future for her, for women workers, or for the League. She wrote Mary Dreier:

Now, don’t drop dead, but this is my last labor Convention. Also my hands are off the Trade Union job in New York. I shall leave the movement for the movement’s good. My mind is made up….

Trade Unions are necessary. They must be worked for in season and out. Women must be organized better than men are organized. The powers that be in the Labor movement of New York State do not and will not recognize an outside body’s right to help with the work. Worse than that they attribute their own shortcomings to the outside body’s disinterestedness. They use its work to influence personal animosity or worse still to cover up their own crookedness. The crookedness will sooner become known to the rank and file when the outside body is not there as a scapegoat. By keeping in the struggle we shall hinder more than help the rank and file from getting real light as to who it is that is playing foul in the game….

Wages, minimum or maximum regulated by law, the whole damn business is done for at this end of the rope.⁵⁸

Mary Dreier’s reply to her friend urging her not to give up was sensible enough, but Leonora O’Reilly was beyond the reach of common sense; she felt her whole life added up to nothing. She had one last stab at intensive political work, going on Henry Ford’s peace ship to an international conference of women against the war, held in Europe and called by women in the countries already fighting to show the horrors of war in the hope that its spread might be prevented. O’Reilly, who was the sole representative of the U.S. working class at the conference, was profoundly moved by its spirit of international solidarity. When she returned, she was refused the opportunity to speak about the conference at the AFL convention; the leadership felt there were “sinister influences” behind the peace movement.⁵⁹

She was from then on only sporadically active in the League. A close friend spoke of the bitter depression she suffered:

There was in Nora’s life a period of terrible disillusionment, of a cruel awakening from her world of roseate dreams so fearfully different from life as it was…. Even to her consecrated mind, it gradually had evolved that in the actual work about us, there was a great deal of selfishness and ugliness. All her life she had thought of herself last, had given so unstintingly of her time, of her energy, all the beauty that was herself! And often, for her harvest, she gathered only selfishness, malice, and hardness. How that seared her sensitive soul! For two or three years, all the sweetness, all the sunlight seemed to have gone out of her heart. Often would I hear: “Pigs, pigs! All of them!”⁶⁰

In Leonora O’Reilly’s youth she dreamed of making a special contribution, of becoming an apostle of truth and culture who could bring together women of all classes in common service to working women and in unity with working men. All these dreams had become dust, and what she called the “religion of labor” had turned to the worship of false gods. She was in many ways the purest spirit in the League and much of its idealism went with her when she left. Over the years, the League was to become only a shell of a real organization, a staff operation without a mass base. Despite this decline, the Women’s Trade Union League has an important place in the history of the united front of women. It pioneered new methods of organizing women workers and gained a permanent toehold for women within the palace of organized labor. Perhaps it was only a toehold, but that was better than no hold at all.