Schneiderman, Rose (1882–1972)

President of the Women's Trade Union League who struggled for workers' rights, helping to establish the eight-hour day, minimum-wage regulations, and safer working conditions. Name variations: Rosie. Pronunciation: SHNY-der-men. Born Rachel Schneiderman on April 6, 1882 (some sources cite 1884, but 1882 is documented), in the small village of Saven in Russian Poland; died in New York at the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged on August 11, 1972; daughter of Adolph Samuel Schneiderman (a tailor) and Deborah (Rothman) Schneiderman; attended public school to

ninth grade; attended nightschool at the Rand School of Social Science; never married; no children.

Family moved to New York (1890); spent a year in a Jewish orphanage; began work at 13; founded first women's branch of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers' Union (1903); joined the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) (1905); served as vice president of New York WTUL (1906); co-ordinated garment workers' strikes (1909–14); was national organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) (1915–16); was a speaker and organizer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1913, 1915, 1917); served as president of New York WTUL (1918–49); helped found International Congress of Working Women (1919); member of WTUL delegation to Paris Peace Conference (1919); ran for U.S. Senate (1920); organized Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers (1921); served as president of the National League (1926); served in the National Recovery Administration (1933–35); secretary of the New York State Department of Labor (1937–43).

Selected publications:

All for One (Eriksson, 1967).

On Saturday, March 25, 1911, more than 500 employees of the Triangle Waist Company were working overtime in New York City's ten-story Asch building when the 4:30 power-off bell rang. Leaving their sewing machines for the washrooms, the workers made their way through the narrow rows past wicker baskets overflowing with finished goods—silks, lawns, laces, and the shirtwaists made famous by artist Charles Dana Gibson. Tomorrow's work, layers of lawn alternating with layers of tissue paper, waited on the cutting tables above bins brimming with rags, and in the midst of such fire hazards employees puffed on their cigarettes, versed in the art of blowing smoke under their coats to help their employers ignore such blatant violations of fire regulations. The Asch building was, after all, fireproof.

The fire began in a rag bin. At 4:35, the eighth-floor bookkeeper sent a message to the ninth floor's main offices: "The place is on fire: Run for your lives." From the street below, onlookers, including James Cooper of the New York World, watched the first signs of disaster. "For fully a minute," wrote Cooper, "the spectators seemed in doubt as to whether the smoke meant fire or was simply some unusual smoke that might come from a machine…. Within an other minute the entire eighth floor was spouting little jets of flame from the windows." As it was Saturday, those on the street assumed that the building was deserted until "suddenly something that looked like a bale of dark dress goods was hurled from an eighth-story window…. Another seeming bundle of cloth came hurtling through the same window, but this time a breeze tossed open the cloth and from the crowd of 500 persons came a cry of horror. The breeze disclosed the form of a girl shooting down to instant death."

Rose Schneiderman">

I came to see that poverty is not ordained by heaven, that we could help ourselves.

—Rose Schneiderman

Many workers jumped; others rushed to blackened stairways, locked doors, rusted-shut windows, and a fire escape that collapsed beneath their weight. By the time firefighters connected their hoses, the entire eighth floor was ablaze. Jumping as many as three together towards the safety nets hastily held out on the street below them, the young women brought the nets down to the pavement or ripped holes straight through them. Continued Cooper:

A young man helped a girl to the window sill on the ninth floor. Then he held her out deliberately, away from the building, and let her drop. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. He held out a third girl who did not resist. They were all as unresisting as if he were helping them into a street car instead of into eternity. He saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames and his was only a terrible chivalry…. Quick as a flash, he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upwards—the air filled his trouser legs as he came down. I could see he wore tan shoes.

Nearly 150 workers, most of them Jewish immigrant women, lost their lives in the Triangle Fire because the building failed to meet required safety standards. On April 5, "the skies wept," reported the World, as a group of working men and women marched in procession to mourn the fate of "their fellows who perished in the fire at NO. 23 Washington Place, March 25 last." Among the mourners was a woman named Rose Schneider-man. As a union leader and activist, her resolve was intensified: workers would never again be forced to risk their lives to earn their livings.

Born in Russian Poland's village of Saven in 1882, Schneiderman was one of four children of Deborah Rothman Schneiderman and Samuel Schneiderman. Samuel's occupation as a tailor forced Deborah to provide for the family on three rubles a week. "Father was inclined to be satisfied with his lot," Schneiderman later recounted, "as long as he could read books and have friends about him"; he shared this pleasure with his family, reading aloud from such works as The Arabian Nights. Teaching his daughter to read and write, he encouraged Schneiderman's dream of becoming a teacher and stressed the importance of a formal education. "Like Mother," she later said, "he was not demonstrative, but he shared his love of books with us, reading to us a great deal and helping me with my lessons. In a way it was natural that I should feel closer to him than to Mother. She had a habit of teasing…. She would praise me to others but never to my face. Father, on the other hand, always encouraged me openly." But if Schneider-man was occasionally at odds with her mother, she also admired her strength, recalling: "When Mother made up her mind, things happened." Though Deborah Schneiderman had never attended school, she had taught herself to read the Jewish prayer book in order to recite the prayers at synagogue.

Finding it difficult to earn enough money in Poland, Samuel moved his family to New York City when Rose was eight. He died two years later. Deborah was left with four children (one of them a newborn), no income, and no means of providing for her family. Along with her four-year-old brother Charles, ten-year-old Rose was placed in an orphanage run by the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society. She was issued a uniform and her hair was shorn. "To say it was humiliating," she later wrote, "is to put it mildly." The girls were marched in line and slept in an enormous dormitory. Disobedience was discouraged with beatings or by locking the girls in a closet for up to 24 hours. They owned only the trunks which housed their dolls and books. Schneiderman, in fact, did not even own a trunk, as her mother could not afford to fill it.

In just under a year, Deborah Schneiderman arrived to reclaim her daughter, but the return to the Lower East Side proved depressing. "Everything looked so drab and dismal," wrote Rose, "I almost wished I was back in the orphanage." For the next two years, she cared for her younger sister while attending school, completing nine grades in four years' time. Then her mother lost her job.

At 13, Rose Schneiderman went to work as a cash girl for Hearn's Department Store, bringing home $2.16 after a 64-hour week. Initially, she tried to continue her formal education through night school but soon found that there were other ways of acquiring knowledge; she read Bible stories in Yiddish to her mother but chose English novels for herself. She also joined the Lady Manchester Club, where she learned parliamentary procedure. Meanwhile, Schneiderman took a position as check girl for another department store and worked the same hours for a nine-cent salary hike. After three years, a neighbor helped her secure a job in a cap factory, despite her mother's disapproval of the less "genteel" post, where she made $6 a week. She soon advanced to sample maker, a position which brought no raise but guaranteed that she would not be laid off during the slack season. During these years, it was she who saw to it that her family was fed, prompting her later reflections of an unhappy childhood marked by a tremendous sense of responsibility.

But when she reached her early 20s, Schneiderman found her life's passion in the labor movement. In 1903, she encountered Bessie Braut , a reportedly "radical and progressive" woman who showed Schneiderman that the male workers were at least a little better off because they were organized. Pay advances made by the men were absorbed by the women workers rather than employers; thus, each half-cent increase for the men equaled a half-cent deduction from the women's paychecks. Convinced that the women workers would benefit from their own union, Schneiderman and two coworkers went to the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers' Union to ask for assistance. They were told to return with 25 signatures. Two days later, they appeared with the signatures, and Local 23—the first women's branch of the Jewish Socialist Hat and Cap Makers' Union—was chartered in January 1903. Schneiderman served as secretary. "To me," she said, "it is the spirit of trade unionism that is most important, the service of fellowship, the feeling that the hurt of one is the concern of all and that the work of the individual benefits all."

The following year, Schneiderman discovered what she later deemed the most important influence in her life: the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL). She recalled that when attending her first meeting, she saw little business transacted, she heard no reports of any kind, and at the meeting's end everyone danced the Virginia Reel. While this did little to subdue her initial reservations about the League, she did encounter Leonora O'Reilly , a League member who made a marked impression upon her. Schneiderman later made an important connection with Margaret Dreier Robins , another League member, and it was largely due to these friendships that she joined the League in 1905.

O'Reilly, Robins, and Mary Dreier proved strong influences in Schneiderman's life, and she was to work closely with them for many years. Following their examples, she became a more powerful speaker, an "effective, direct, and rather chic woman." In 1906, she was made vice president of the New York League and by 1909 was a full-time organizer for New York's East Side. Though these new appointments meant she would never finish school, her heart, she said, was in the trade-union movement.

November 1909 heralded the "Uprising of the Twenty Thousand"—one of the largest strikes in the history of the East Side. For three winter months, thousands of immigrant women in the shirtwaist industry protested deplorable working conditions, while Schneiderman served as their coordinator. Prominent society women, such as Anne Morgan , joined the picket lines. By the strike's end, their union had not been formally recognized, but the women had effected shorter working days, increased pay, and achieved some safety reforms. Still, without a viable trade union, the workers remained without rights and bargaining power.

Eight months after the strike's conclusion, one of the strikers came before the League, urging action, following a fire in Newark, New Jersey, that claimed the lives of 25 working women. The WTUL then demanded an investigation of all factory buildings. Complaints regarding unsafe working conditions ranged from locked doors to barred windows and buildings without fire escapes. A New York Times article revealed that 99% of factories checked had serious fire hazards. Despite the overwhelming evidence, no action was taken.

In March 1911, three months after the investigation, the historic Triangle Fire broke out. With 146 dead, the tragedy elicited an outpouring of sympathy from the lower East Side ghetto community. Wrote United Press reporter William Shepherd, "I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer."

History has largely credited Schneiderman with laying the groundwork for the reforms that followed. Six weeks after the fire, during a mass meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House on May 2, 1911, the 29-year-old Schneiderman, with her flowing red hair and biting oratory, delivered a speech that swayed public opinion to the labor movement's side and secured the support of wealthy uptown New Yorkers:

This is not the first time girls have burned alive in the city…. Every year thousands are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 140-odd are burned to death…. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us…. It is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

Schneiderman addressed rallies throughout the Midwest, advocating not only trade unionism but socialism and suffragism. In 1918, she became president of New York's WTUL—a position she would hold for some 30 years. In the 1920s, she represented the National WTUL at international conferences, ran for U.S. Senate on the Farmer-Labor ticket, and organized the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Working Women. In 1926, she became president of the National League, holding the position until the organization's demise.

When Eleanor Roosevelt , a woman Schneiderman greatly admired, became a member of the WTUL, the two struck up a close friendship. On frequent visits as a guest at Hyde Park, and through correspondence, Schneiderman educated President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the trade-union movement, eventually becoming one of his trusted advisers. Indeed, FDR liked "Rosie," and as Frances Perkins pointed out, she "made a good many things clear to Franklin Roosevelt that he would hardly have known in any other way." Schneiderman was the only woman appointed to the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), and from 1937 to 1943 she served as secretary of the New York State Department of Labor.

At 85, she published her autobiography All for One, admitting to a childhood longing to become a teacher. She recalled that one of the proud moments in her life occurred when Eleanor Roosevelt stood up at an AFL-CIO convention and told the audience that Rose Schneiderman had taught her all she knew about trade unionism. A few years after she signed herself into an old-age home, Schneiderman died in New York at the age of 90. By the time of her death, the minimum wage and the eight-hour day had become woven into the fabric of American life.

sources:

Brooks, Tom. "The Terrible Triangle Fire," in American Heritage. Vol XIII, no. 5. August 1957, p. 54.

Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe. A Generation of Women. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Schneiderman, Rose. All for One. NY: P.S. Eriksson, 1967.

suggested reading:

Papachristou, Judith. Women Together. NY: Knopf, 1976.

collections:

Correspondence, papers, and memorabilia located in the Tamiment Library, New York University, and the New York State Labor Library, Department of Labor, New York City.

related media:

"The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal" (VHS, 2 hrs.), fictionalized account starring Stephanie Zimbalist, Tovah Feldshue , and David Dukes, Alan Landsburg Productions, 1979.