Rose Schneiderman stood only four and a half feet tall, so a mere soap box wouldn't do. For street meetings, she stood on a ladder carried around from one factory entrance to another. With her unruly red hair pulled back in a bun, her crisp white shirtwaist tucked neatly into a long dark skirt, the tiny woman climbed up onto her ladder and unfurled her trade union banner. Her round face flushed with passion, she spoke in Yiddish and in English, calling on the young women in the garment trades to join together and demand better treatment and a living wage. When she spoke about woman's need for voting rights, she made grown men laugh, and as she continued, her pathos and passion could make them cry.(1) In 1910 and 1913 she helped organize major strikes of garment workers in New York City. And in 1914, without her ladder, she traveled to Washington for a meeting with the President of the United States. She looked up at the tall, grey-templed Woodrow Wilson and told him that while he worried about the war in Europe, there was an industrial war going on in his own country. She knew that war well, because she had been living in the middle of it, trying to find a way to peace.(2)

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[After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the New York state legislature passed several new laws regarding factory safety, including a law limiting the work week to fifty-four hours for women in many factories.]

The new law, however, was rarely enforced. In 1913, girls in candy factories still spent thirteen hours a day packing chocolates; in an ostrich feather shop seventeen-year-olds worked from early morning until 9 pm three nights a week. In the canneries, where the new law did not apply, women worked as long as 119 hours a week during the harvest season. And in 1913, youngsters in the white goods trade were still working 60 hours a week, in spite of the 54-hour law.(3)

The white goods workers had watched the shirtwaist strike and they were encouraged. They watched the Triangle fire and they knew that their own shops, in rundown wooden tenement buildings and basement sweatshops, were even more dangerous. Finally, they began to listen to Rose Schneiderman. She came back, again handing out circulars in front of factory doors and climbing up onto her little ladder to speak. She asked them to come to meetings after work; she urged them to join the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Her work was matched by Fannia Cohn, another Jewish immigrant–-a middle class woman who had chosen life as a garment worker because of her commitment to the cause of workers. In her childhood in Poland, Cohn had absorbed a revolutionary fervor, and she passed it along to the young white goods workers as she taught them English and the principles of trade unionism at the same time.(4)

An underage white goods worker carrying kimonos for finishing at home. The New York white good strikers of 1913 insistend on an end to the home work system in their trade. Photograph by Lewis Hine, courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (102-LH-2861).

Still, for all this effort, no more than 300 women in the city's white goods shops were ever organized at one time. With more than 10,000 white goods workers in the city, and with constant turnover in the trade, a shop-by-shop campaign could never reach them all. The situation called for a dramatic and risky gesture-–a general strike. If they could get all the white goods workers to go out together, the unions could negotiate for them all at once. Leaders of both the Women's Trade Union League and the ILGWU resisted the idea, but Schneiderman and Cohn and their small corps of white goods workers pushed forward.

Again they distributed handbills outside the factory doors, morning, noon, and night–-this time calling a meeting on January 6, for all white goods workers, asking them to come and vote on the question of a general strike. On the night of the meeting, Cooper Union was filled to overflowing, and a second meeting had to be convened at a nearby temple. The vote was unanimous. On Thursday morning, the white goods workers would not go to work.

Instead they went to meeting halls set up in neighborhoods around the city. By the afternoon of the second day, 7,000 of them were on strike–American-born women and girls, as well as immigrants. One social worker described them as "the youngest, the most ignorant, the poorest and most unskilled group of women workers who ever went on strike in this country."(5) Fourteen and fifteen year olds went out on picket duty like little soldiers, into the cold and snow of a New York City winter. Sometime during the day they would come back into the meeting halls for warmth and for food. Volunteers made sandwiches on thickly sliced bread, and served sympathy and encouragement along with hot coffee. By the time the strike was just a few days old, this lunch was the only meal many girls had each day. Some of them needed more help–-a couple of dollars to pay the rent, perhaps. And the strike committee tried to answer the need, or the volunteers opened their own purses to keep a girl from starving or being evicted from her rented room.

Out on the street, the police and the hired guards again treated the strikers brutally. One officer, escorting a strikebreaker home, pushed a striker off a moving streetcar.(6) Another drew a gun on a small group of girls and threatened to shoot them. And again the mink brigade mobilized for their protection. Fola La Follette, an actress, feminist, and daughter of Senator Robert La Follette, visited the picket lines and the jails, creating headlines in the paper and, ultimately, convincing her father to sponsor an investigation.(7) Leonora O'Reilly, vice president of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), serving on picket duty, was arrested for calling out "Scab!" as strikebreakers came out of a factory building. The word "Scab," a derogatory term for a strikebreaker, could be seen as a threat, and O'Reilly claimed that she had only cried "Shame, Shame!" She and eight other picketers were nevertheless hauled off in the police wagon, singing the "Marseillaise" all the way to the station. Edna Kenton, a prosperous writer, was also on that picket line, but the police, seeing her fur coat, refused to arrest her along with the others.(8)

The striking white goods workers were not always blameless in the conflicts with police. Especially during the early part of the strike, picketers occasionally attacked strikebreakers, punching, scratching, and pulling hair.(9) More often, the women were peaceable. When the Women's Trade Union League brought more than two dozen cases of false arrest before the Police Commissioner and charged officers with use of undue force, a number of policemen were removed or reprimanded.(10) But for the most part the young women simply had to endure the fines and imprisonment. Where companies had asked the court for special injunctions against picketing, even peaceably walking up and down the sidewalk could lead to arrest. When one worker justified her picketing with the claim that "this is a free country," the judge replied "the freedom of this country, young lady, will cost you $3.00."(11)

White goods workers were not the only rebels in the winter of 1913. The shirtwaist makers had walked out again, and so had men's tailors and workers in the kimono and wrapper industry. Altogether more than 150,000 New York City garment workers were on strike.(12)

Their cause got a further boost when Teddy Roosevelt showed up at one of the union halls. The former president-–still a potent force in American politics–-arrived by cab at a hall on Henry Street, where several hundred young kimono makers had gathered for the opportunity to meet him. With his hat tucked under his arm, Roosevelt strode in, smiling broadly and shaking hands all around, then leaned against a desk and raised his hand to call for silence. "Now, young ladies," he said, "I want to know all about your lives; how you work, and how you manage to be cheerful. Just gather around me and tell your stories." His request, translated into four languages, brought a rush of testimony–-first from a sixteen-year-old Spanish girl who told him that she had been working for two years, from eight in the morning to nine at night, making thirty-six kimonos a day. Roosevelt's smile faded quickly, as one after another the girls told about long hours and low wages, about paying the company for the use of the sewing machines, about not being allowed to sing while they worked, and about trying to support themselves and often their younger siblings on six or seven dollars a week. After two hours, the burly ex-president turned to the child welfare worker who had brought him to the meeting and pronounced his judgement: "This is crushing the future motherhood of the country. It must be stopped. It is too horrible for words." After visiting a second meeting hall, Roosevelt vowed to promote state legislation to protect the young factory workers.(13)

Pushing bones into corsets. Women's Bureau photograph, courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (RG-86-G-2B-1).

Amid all the publicity, union organizers still had to take care of the business of running the strikes. When the white goods strike began to look like it might succeed, the men who had control of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union finally offered their support and took over some of the day-to-day business of coordinating the picket lines and providing relief to the workers. Rose Schneiderman, however, was still kept busy as chairman of the Settlement Committee. The manufacturers had formed their own organization to deal with the strike committee, and they soon agreed to most of the workers' demands: a standard 50 hour week, extra pay for anything over 50 hours, an increase in wages with a minimum of $5 per week, and an end to the practice of sending work out to sweatshops and home workers. But they refused to recognize the union or to guarantee that strikers could come back to work. They also resisted creating a "preferential shop" in which union members would be hired unless a non-union member was better qualified. This last had been the critical component in the Protocol of Peace, negotiated by Louis Brandeis during the cloakmakers' strike of 1910. Brandeis, at this point not yet a Supreme Court justice but a prominent attorney who took a great interest in the peaceful settlement of industrial conflicts, intervened again. Finally, when the strike was five weeks old, the manufacturers recognized the union and agreed to the preferential shop. Then, as Rose Schneiderman said, "the joy of the strikers was complete."(14)