24 Facts About Rose Schneiderman

Rose Schneiderman was a Polish-born American labor organizer and feminist, and one of the most prominent female labor union leaders.

Rose Schneiderman is credited with coining the phrase "Bread and Roses," to indicate a worker's right to something higher than subsistence living.

Rose Schneiderman's father died in the winter of 1892, leaving the family in poverty.

Rose Schneiderman's mother worked as a seamstress, trying to keep the family together, but the financial strain forced her to put her children in a Jewish orphanage for some time.

Rose Schneiderman left school in 1895 after the sixth grade, although she would have liked to continue her education.

Rose Schneiderman went to work, starting as a cashier in a department store and then in 1898 as a lining stitcher in a cap factory in the Lower East Side.

Rose Schneiderman's brother was communal worker and editor Harry Schneiderman.

Rose Schneiderman returned to New York in 1903 and, with a partner worker, started organizing the women in her factory.

Rose Schneiderman obtained wider recognition during a citywide capmakers' strike in 1905.

Rose Schneiderman quickly became one of the most prominent members and was elected the New York branch's vice president in 1908.

Rose Schneiderman left the factory to work for the league, attending school with a stipend provided by one of the League's wealthy supporters.

Rose Schneiderman was an active participant in the Uprising of the 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York City led by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in 1909.

Rose Schneiderman was a key member of the first International Congress of Working Women of 1919, which aimed to address women's working conditions at the first annual International Labour Organization Convention.

Rose Schneiderman expressed her anger at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2,1911, to an audience largely made up of the well-heeled members of the WTUL:.

Rose Schneiderman subsequently became president of its New York branch, then its national president for more than twenty years until it disbanded in 1950.

In 1920, Schneiderman ran for the United States Senate as the candidate of the New York State Labor Party, receiving 15,086 votes and finishing behind the Prohibitionist Ella A Boole and the Socialist Jacob Panken.

Rose Schneiderman's platform had called for the construction of nonprofit housing for workers, improved neighborhood schools, publicly owned power utilities and staple food markets, and state-funded health and unemployment insurance for all Americans.

Rose Schneiderman became a popular speaker with suffrage organizations that focused on working women, including Harriot Stanton Blatch's Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, and the American Suffragettes, a militant group based in New York City.

In 1917, the same year that New York would vote on a women's suffrage referendum, Rose Schneiderman was appointed head of the industrial section of the New York Women's Suffrage Association.

Rose Schneiderman is credited with coining one of the most memorable phrases of the women's movement and the labor movement of her era:.

In 1949, Rose Schneiderman retired from public life, making occasional radio speeches and appearances for various labor unions, devoting her time to writing her memoirs, which she published under the title All for One, in 1967.

Rose Schneiderman never married, and treated her nieces and nephews as if they were her own children.

Rose Schneiderman had a long-term relationship with Maud O'Farrell Swartz, another working class woman active in the WTUL, until Swartz's death in 1937.

Rose Schneiderman died in New York City on August 11,1972, at age ninety.