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Out of the
Sweatshop, Into the Voting Booth: Working Women and the Struggle for
Suffrage
Full text of a talk
by CARRIE BROWN at the LWVUV Annual Meeting, May 5, 2003
Carrie
Brown is a cultural historian specializing in exploring the human story
behind technologic change and historic events.She has planned
exhibits on Maxfield Parrish, pedal power and early automobiles for the
American Precision Museum in Windsor, Vermont. Her new book,
Rosie's Mom, explores the experiences of women factory workers during
World War I.
In 1910, a
group of women from the National Consumers' League tried to persuade
officials in New York City to appropriate money for factory
inspections. The mayor said to them
"Ladies, why do you
waste your time year after year coming before us and asking for this
appropriation? You have not a voter in your constituency and you know
it, and we know it, and you know we know it."
The women of
the National Consumers' League were among many middle and upper class
women who, in the early years of the 20th century, had become involved
in trying to improve working conditions for the poor. The factory
conditions at that time, in New York and around the country, were far
too often exactly what you might picture when you hear the word
"sweatshop": dark, poorly ventilated fire traps where workers--often
young women and children--performed repetitive tasks at high speed for
10 or 12 hours a day, six days a week. A paper box molding machine
opened and closed thirty times in a minute. In commercial laundries, a
flat ironing machine pressed sheets and tablecloths at forty or fifty
feet a minute while women fed the linens in by hand. At a cigarette
factory, an experienced packer could pack 35-45,000 cigarettes in a
nine or ten hour day. Shrimp pickers in Mississippi worked from three
in the morning to three or four in the afternoon.
Immigration
from Europe provided a steady stream of low-skilled labor willing to
work for bare subsistence wages. A huge labor surplus made it difficult
for workers to negotiate for better conditions.
In many
trades, through the efforts of unions, men had gained far better
working conditions than those of women and children. Women workers were
generally excluded from the men's unions, and were very difficult to
organize on their own. Young, single, planning to work for only a few
years before marriage, they seldom saw the benefit of long-range
planning and of organizing into unions. Trying to unionize young women
in the millinery trade, according to one labor organizer, was "like
trying to organize the wind." There were some older women in
industry--widows, divorced women, or those who never married. But after
working 10 or 12 hours a day they went home to a full evening of
childcare and housework. Even had they wanted to join unions, they had
little time or energy for meetings and planning.
And so many
social reformers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries believed
that special legislation was needed to protect women and children in
the workforce. The workers who had the least economic power, the least
ability to negotiate with employers, needed protection from the
government. The reformers lobbied for maximum hours laws, for minimum
wage laws, for inspections of health and safety conditions in
factories, and for the abolition of child labor. In the laissez-faire
environment of the period, passage of these laws was extremely
difficult.
Some of the
middle and upper class women interested in protection for workers were
also involved in the suffrage movement. As early as 1887, the National
Woman Suffrage Association had begun to talk about a link between the
oppression of women workers and the argument for woman suffrage. The
Association passed a resolution that year that read
"Resolved,
that we call the attention of the working women of the country to the
fact that a disfranchised class is always an oppressed class and that
only through the protection of the ballot can they secure equal pay for
equal work."
But there was
tension in the women's movement, and disagreement over how broad the
new voting rights should be. Not all suffrage workers argued for
enfranchisement of the masses of immigrant working women. Some
suffragists appealed to the class bias of powerful men, calling for
literacy tests and saying that votes for women would help reduce the
impact of the ignorant immigrant men who voted. In the south, race
complicated the question, because votes for white women might also mean
votes for black women. Furthermore, working women themselves had little
time or energy to work for voting rights. Not until 20 years later did
the conditions and the individuals arrive that would actually create a
serious suffrage movement among working women.
This brings me
to one of my favorite figures from the period: Rose Schneiderman. She
was a fiery little redhead whose family had fled Poland to escape the
pogroms and oppression that the occupying Russian government was
inflicting upon Polish Jews. Like most young immigrant girls, Rose had
to leave school early to help support the family, and she became a cap
maker in New York. Unlike most others, she became a union organizer. In
the early decades of the new century, she began to work with an
organization called the Women's Trade Union League, and through the
WTUL she began to know and work with middle class women who had taken
on, as a kind of special mission, the project of improving the lives of
working women.
In 1907,
Schneiderman was one of the founders of a new organization called the
Equality League of Self-Supporting Women. This organization linked
industrial women with business and professional women in the struggle
to gain voting rights. In less than two years, they had 19,000 members.
Also in 1907, Rose Schneiderman spoke at the First Convention of Women
Trade Unionists: "The time has come when working women... must be
enfranchised and so secure political power to shape their own labor
conditions."
There were, of
course, other arguments being made for women's voting rights. The
middle class women who had founded the suffrage movement back in the
mid-19th century had relied largely on the notion that political
representation was a basic human right, recognized--but not fully
realized--by the founders of our country. By the early 20th century,
the Victorian notion of woman as the light of the home and the guardian
of public morality led many suffragists to change the focus of their
argument. Women would, they claimed, clean up politics, create a more
peaceful world, and safeguard American values.
But working
women in the movement believed--and argued persuasively--that they
needed the vote so that they would be taken seriously by the
politicians who make the laws that affect working conditions. Leonora
O'Reilly, who was president of the Wage Earners Suffrage League, spoke
before a Senate committee in March 1912: she described women working
92-hour weeks in sub-cellar laundries, factory women "speeded up" in
mills and factories, shop clerks in New York City whose hours had gone
from 52 per week to 72. "You can not or will not make laws for us. We
must make laws for ourselves. We working women need the ballot for
self-protection."
In 1912, the
New York state legislature was debating the question of votes for
women, and of course a number of senators and state assemblymen made
speeches in which they strongly opposed the notion. In April, the Wage
Earners' Equal Suffrage League and the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League
held a joint meeting in the 900-seat Great Hall at Cooper Union in New
York. The college women served as ushers, but the speakers were largely
the working women. Each speaker took on a statement from one of the
lawmakers who had argued against woman suffrage. Rose Schneiderman was
always one of the favorite speakers at any rally. Her assignment was to
make a rebuttal to the senator who had said "Get women into the arena
of politics with its alliances and distressing contests--the delicacy
is gone, the charm is gone, and you emasculize women."
Rose
Schneiderman pointed out that when the senator worried about damage to
the delicacy and charm of women, he could not have been talking about
working women.
"We have women
working in the foundries, stripped to the waist, if you please, because
of the heat. Yet the Senator says nothing about these women losing
their charm. They have got to retain their charm and delicacy and work
in foundries. Of course, you know the reason they are employed in
foundries is that they are cheaper and work longer hours than men.
Women in the laundries, for instance, stand for 13 or 14 hours in the
terrible steam and heat with their hands in hot starch. Surely these
women won't lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot
in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to lose standing in
foundries or laundries all year round. There is no harder contest than
the contest for bread, let me tell you that."
The suffrage
parade in New York that year brought together debutantes and wealthy
matrons, girls from the sweatshops, waitresses, women doctors and
lawyers, architects and artists and housemaids. But the state of New
York was not yet ready to grant women the right to vote., nor were they
ready when it came up again in 1915.
Woodrow
Wilson, who had first been elected in 1912, spent his first term
ignoring the issue. Re-elected in 1916, he still would not speak out in
favor. Gradually, however, some of the western and mid-western states
were giving women the vote. By the presidential election of 1916, women
were voting in 12 states, and both parties came out with statements in
favor of woman suffrage--though neither presented a plan for how it
might be achieved, and few politicians wanted it to be done through an
amendment to the constitution.
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