Women and Reconstruction; Being the Report of the Committee on Social and Industrial Reconstruction of the National Women's Trade Union League of America.
[Labor]. (Schneiderman, Rose). Pamphlet: “Women and Reconstruction Being the Report of the Committee on Social and Industrial Reconstruction of the National Women’s Trade Union League of America, Meeting in New York, December 9-12, 1918.” Chicago: National Women’s Trade Union League of America, [ND, but c. 1919].
3-13/16 x 8-3/4”; stapled beige wrappers printed in brown; mild offsetting at front panel, but generally very good.
A concise statement of the League’s agenda for post World War I reconstruction with the provisions they want to see incorporated in the peace treaty: education to 16 years of age, abolition of child labor, equal pay for equal work, and retirement, disability and maternity benefits. The pamphlet sets out the League’s political platform: amnesty for all political prisoners; legal recognition of labor’s right to organize; woman suffrage (“We urge the full enfranchisement of women, and that they be accorded political, legal and industrial equality...”); government ownership of public utilities and the nationalization of natural resources. The Committee also outlines a series of measures it thinks necessary for the protection of women wage earners. Committee members include a number of early and important women labor activists: Margaret Dreier Robins (1868-1945), President of the WTUL from 1906 to 1922; Rose Schneiderman (1882-1972), organizer of the first women’s local of the Jewish Socialist United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers' Union in 1902, vice president of WTUL in 1906 and in 1910, a full-time organizer for the WTUL; and labor organizers, Elizabeth Maloney (waitresses); Agnes Nestor (glove makers) and Melinda Scott (hat trimmers). Though a small pamphlet, it delivers an exemplary summary of the WTUL’s program and objectives.
The Women’s Trade Union League had formed in 1903 as the result of women labor organizers (such as Leonora O'Reilly and Ellen Lindstrom) and middle-class reformers (such as Jane Addams) joining forces to further organize working women and to publicize the concerns of working women.
Timelines Of American Women’s History, pp. 118-119.
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