Rose Schneiderman

Rose Schneiderman was nine when her family left a village near Chelm, in Russian Poland, for Manhattan's Lower East Side. Her father, a sewing-trades worker, died two winters later, and her mother's wages as a seamstress could not stretch far enough to keep all four children fed — for a stretch, two of them lived in a Jewish orphanage while their mother worked. Schneiderman left school after sixth grade, worked briefly as a department-store cashier, then in 1898 took a job lining hats at a Lower East Side cap factory. In 1902 the family moved briefly to Montreal, where she first encountered organized socialism, and she came back to New York a year later ready to organize the women beside her.

Schneiderman recruited 25 women into the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union in 1903 and, at 22, became the first woman elected to its general executive board. She rose through the Women's Trade Union League, eventually serving as national president for more than two decades, and after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 workers in 1911, she told a Metropolitan Opera House crowd, 'We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting,' arguing the only real protection was 'a strong working-class movement.' She is credited with the line 'the worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.' She served on Franklin Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration Labor Advisory Board in 1933, its only woman, and ran New York State's Department of Labor from 1937 to 1944.

The suffragist who spent a decade telling working women the vote would fix their conditions turned around after 1920 and fought the Equal Rights Amendment for the rest of her career, arguing it would strip away the wage floors, hour limits and pregnancy protections that women-only labor law had won. She never married, and lived for decades with fellow labor organizer Maud O'Farrell Swartz in a relationship her biographers describe as ambiguous in name but not in devotion — the two traveled and worked together until Swartz died in 1937. Through the 1930s and 1940s Schneiderman also worked to get European Jews out of Nazi-controlled territory, effort Albert Einstein singled out by letter as saving lives few others were trying to save.

She retired from public life in 1949 and published a memoir, All for One, in 1967. Her New York Times obituary in 1972 credited her with teaching Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt 'most of what they knew about unions' and tracing a line from her advocacy to the Wagner Act and the rest of the New Deal's labor law. In 2011 a Maine labor-history mural featuring her image was pulled from a state building by Governor Paul LePage over its pro-union content, a fight that ended with the mural in the Maine State Museum — an argument over her memory, decades after her death, about the exact thing she had spent her life organizing around.

Rose Schneiderman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union, women's local other
  Organized 25 women workers into the union's first women's local 1903
• Triangle fire memorial address speech
  Metropolitan Opera House, April 2, 1911 — "we have found you wanting" 1911
• National Recovery Administration, Labor Advisory Board other
  Only woman appointed to the board 1933
• All for One book
  Memoir of the labor movement she helped build 1967

• 1890 aged ~8 Immigrates with her family to Manhattan's Lower East Side
• 1898 aged ~16 Begins work as a lining stitcher in a cap factory
• 1903 aged ~21 Elected to the cap makers' union general executive board, at 22 First woman ever elected to it.
• April 2, 1911 aged 28 Delivers the Triangle fire memorial address
• 1917 aged ~35 Helps win New York women full voting rights
• 1920 aged ~38 Runs for US Senate on the New York State Labor Party ticket
• 1933 aged ~51 Appointed to the NRA Labor Advisory Board
• 1937 aged ~55 Becomes secretary of labor for New York State
• August 11, 1972 aged 90 Dies in New York City, at 90

• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. taught about unions
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. appointed by
• Frances Perkins 1880–1965
  First woman in a presidential cabinet and labor secretary who helped create Social Security, minimum-wage, and workplace protections. fellow labor-reform contemporary
• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. commended her wartime work