ACTIVIST SPOTLIGHT FROM THE PAST: ROSE SCHNEIDERMAN

Photo Credit: Jewish Women’s Archive

“The woman worker needs bread, but she needs roses too.” 

This week, we are featuring an activist from the past. Reflecting on past activists allows us to engage with the Workers Circle’s rich history and learn from our past. The activists we’re spotlighting from history, like Rose, often pioneered advances in the causes we are committed to today: strengthening democracy, economic justice, immigrant rights, racial justice, and worker rights. Their approaches to impactful activism in their particular contexts help us see contrasts and similarities to our own and remind us that our work builds upon the tireless activism of those who came before.

Rose Schneiderman was a socialist, Yiddish-speaking, Jewish, Polish immigrant, and early women’s rights leader who pioneered what we might call today multi-cultural or culturally-rooted activism at the turn of the 20th century on the Lower East Side of Manhattan garment industry. 

Rose was born in Saven, Poland in 1882. She and her family emigrated from Poland to New York City in 1890. Two years after arriving in the United States, her father died of meningitis. Her mother did everything she could to support her family, but eventually Rosa had to leave school at age thirteen to get a job. Her first job was at a department store, but after three years, she became a garment worker due to the slightly higher wages. This switch from department store worker to garment worker set the stage for a prolific career as a union organizer.

Among her many achievements as a union organizer, Schneiderman unionized her garment shop for the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers’ Union at just twenty-one years old. Leadership roles in American labor unions were typically reserved for men. However, she made history as the first woman elected to national office in a labor union. Her organizing achievements helped set the stage for the Uprising of the 20,000, a massive strike of New York’s garment workers in the winter of 1909. 

Throughout her time as a labor organizer, Schneiderman reached out to people from different religious, cultural, racial, and language backgrounds. Women’s participation in the shirtwaist industry skyrocketed as teenage girls and women in their twenties were employed as “learners” or “operators,” earning a fraction of what their male counterparts earned assembling button-down shirts (known as shirtwaists). This female workforce was predominantly Yiddish-speaking and Jewish but also included an Italian minority. 

As she organized women garment workers for the New York Women’s Trade Union (NYWTU), Rose went directly to the hub of the Italian community in Brooklyn and worked with a local priest to identify potential women garment worker leaders and help build community supports for these workers similar to what Jewish garment workers had already created. She then brought Jewish and Italian women workers together for shared actions that led to dramatic improvements in wages and safety. 

Rose Schneiderman helped build a community of organized women workers who didn’t have to check their ethnicity, language, and culture at the door. Rather, she knew that culture and ethnic community support were critical for workers to analyze, strategize, and demand new, humane rights in the workplace, and that this multi-cultural base strengthened not only the workers but brought new, decisive power to the labor movement. As a Jewish social justice organization today, the Workers Circle remains committed to using our Jewish culture as a touchstone and catalyst for collective activism that welcomes the diversity of the many cultural heritages of our activist community to power the social justice advances we all need.

In addition to being a successful organizer, Rose Schneiderman was also a fierce advocate for women’s suffrage. This combination was relatively rare as most in the suffrage movement were middle or upper-class. In 1911, she helped start the Wage Earner’s League for Woman Suffrage. She was instrumental in New York women getting the right to vote in 1917. 

If being a union organizer and suffragist wasn’t enough, Rose Schneiderman also served as an advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She was the only woman on the National Labor Advisory Board and wrote the labor codes for industries that were mainly female. 

Rose Schneiderman famously stated that “The woman worker needs bread, but she needs roses too.” By bread, she meant basic human rights, such as fair wages and hours. By roses, she meant additional benefits, like networks and schools and the ability to enjoy a full, cultural life. Today, the Workers Circle remains committed to social justice activism so that  everyone can have both bread and roses. 

Sources

Daniel Katz, All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 50. 

Read more about Rose Schneiderman, from the Jewish Women’s Archive, Accessed August 29, 2022.