THE FORMATION OF THE WTUL—INTEGRATING WOMEN INTO THE LABOR MOVEMENT

The American WTUL had its origins in the settlement house tradition, which brought together middle-class social reformers and women workers. Through living together, these reformers got a first-hand look at the miserable working conditions under which industrial women toiled. Many of them, however, would grow frustrated with the limits of the settlement house approach to aiding the working class and seek other methods of assistance. Gertrude Barnum, a middle-class settlement worker who helped establish the Chicago branch of the WTUL and would later be active in the national organization, expressed this frustration in 1905:

Another such reformer and settlement worker who wanted to do more for women workers was William English Walling, a socialist, economist, and millionaire, who would later play an integral role in the founding of the NAACP. Walling lived and worked in multiple settlement homes, and he had become particularly interested in trade unionism while at Hull House in Chicago. In 1902, Walling took up residence at University Settlement in New York. There he learned of the organizing work of the British WTUL, which had formed in 1874.Footnote ²⁴ As Daniel Rodgers suggests, this type of cross-pollination of ideas between Europe and America was typical in this period.Footnote ²⁵ That same year, 1902, Walling also observed an ongoing boycott and series of demonstrations against Jewish butchers that was carried out by the working-class women of New York's East Side. Walling was impressed with the militant and articulate activism of the women involved, and he became convinced that unionization of working-class women might be feasible on a larger scale. With the blessing of fellow settlement workers, such as Florence Kelley and Lillian Wald, Walling left for England in 1903 to learn more about the activities of the British WTUL. He would be particularly impressed by the league's mixed class effort to organize women workers into unions and returned to the United States with a plan to form an organization on that model.Footnote ²⁶

Walling arrived in Boston in November of 1903 to attend the annual AFL convention. He approached fellow settlement resident Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, who was a bookbinder and working-class labor leader, with his plans to establish an organization aimed at unionizing women, and she enthusiastically agreed to assist him in getting the group off the ground.Footnote ²⁷ Fittingly, the WTUL began with a cross-class partnership that would become its hallmark. A series of meetings were held at the convention that included several AFL delegates along with a group of Boston settlement workers. Not surprisingly, all of the labor delegates—save one—who would attend these meetings were men, whereas the Boston settlement workers in attendance were predominantly women. At the close of the convention, the new organization had a name, a constitution, and a set of officers.Footnote ²⁸

The constitution of the new league set out very clearly that its mission “shall be to assist in the organization of women workers into trade unions.” Soon after, that statement was supplemented with the rationale for collective bargaining for women, the constitution now reading “and thereby to help secure conditions necessary for healthful and efficient work and to obtain a just return for such work.”Footnote ²⁹ The WTUL would come quickly to wear many hats, committing to several different approaches to helping women workers, but at its initial formation it was single-minded in its commitment to organizing women and to functioning as an umbrella labor organization, or federation, for union women.

What made the WTUL unique as an SMO at this time was its ambition to bring middle-class feminist reformers into an ostensibly working-class labor organization in order to assist in the task of unionizing women. These middle-class, and upper-class, members of the group were called allies, and their role was anticipated in the league constitution. The constitution mandated that anyone was eligible to become a member and hold office, so long as they declared themselves “willing to assist those trade unions already existing, which have women members, and to aid in the formation of new unions of women wage workers.”Footnote ³⁰ However, Walling and his fellow founders were adamant that the WTUL not be dominated by the allies. Walling described the ally in a letter to Leonora O'Reilly, a New York garment worker and original board member of the WTUL, as someone who had “patience, lofty faith and unalterable humility. It is the girls who must ever be the movement, but the ally can help immensely.”Footnote ³¹

He warned that the league not become a vehicle for imposing middle-class values on women workers. Unfortunately, it would become increasingly difficult for the league to heed this warning as they faced year after year of disappointment because of the intransigent male leadership of the labor movement. Walling envisioned the WTUL as part of the labor movement first and foremost, and its goals at the direction of women workers. To that end, the constitution stipulated that the executive board was to be divided as follows: “The majority … shall be women who are, or have been, trade unionists in good standing, the minority of those well known to be earnest sympathizers and workers for the cause of trade unionism.”Footnote ³² The initial leadership of the WTUL would reflect this mixture. Mary Morton Kehew, a wealthy reformist and former president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), was selected as the league's first president, and Jane Addams of Hull House was tapped to be vice-president. Kenney O'Sullivan, the one-time AFL organizer, was named secretary. The initial board would be true to the working-class character required by the constitution with at least nine members who had some union organizing experience. Reflecting on the formation of the WTUL and its labor-first character, member and early editor of the league periodical Life and Labor, Alice Henry, would refer to the WTUL as “a federation of trade unions with women members,” that happened to also provide a “niche” and an “honorable and useful function for the wives of workingmen, for ex-trade-union women, and for others who endorse trade unionism and gladly give their support to constructive work, aiming at strengthening the weakest wing of labor, the unorganized, down-driven, underpaid working-girls.”Footnote ³³

What emerged from Boston in 1904 was the first labor organization, though itself not a trade union, geared toward working women's needs and interests of a national scale, which could organize women through local branches, the three largest being established in Chicago (by settlement workers at Hull House), New York (by settlement workers at University Settlement) and Boston (by settlement workers at Denison House), while simultaneously linking them together through the national organization to allow for communication, cooperation, and the exchange of ideas.Footnote ³⁴ The league would provide direct organizing assistance, such as networking, lobbying of labor and industrial leaders, education, financial backing, and strike support, to ensure that women could either join pre-existing unions, preferably affiliated with the AFL, or if necessary, form new ones of their own. As an umbrella organization, the WTUL was distinct from trade unions themselves, which might choose to associate with the WTUL in a manner similar to their association with the AFL or other union groupings, possessing a reach that was not only national in scope, but also cross-industrial. This broad reach, and expressly woman-focused agenda, distinguished the WTUL as an important actor on behalf of working women from even the largest and most powerful unions in the garment trades that possessed significant female membership.

The WTUL faced an immense and difficult task from the start. Only about 3.3 percent of women working in industrial occupations were organized into unions in 1900, a number that would actually decline to about 1.5 percent by 1910. As a point of comparison, 1 in 5 men in industrial occupations by the 1920s belonged to a union compared to only 1 in 15 women.Footnote ³⁵ Such paucity in numbers was partly because very few unions were open to women at the start of the twentieth century, and many of the industries where women worked en masse were insufficiently unionized. For instance, the three largest garment industry unions, which would eventually house about 40 percent of all organized women during the 1920s, were either literally or virtually nonexistent before 1910.Footnote ³⁶ For example, the New York City-based International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) formed in 1900 but did not experience a serious upsurge in membership until a mass strike in 1909, known as “The Uprising of 20,000.” This strike, incidentally, would be significantly aided by the women of the WTUL, serving as both elite negotiators and foot soldiers on the picket lines (some WTUL members of course being themselves ILGWU members), in one of their most significant victories on behalf of the unionization of women.Footnote ³⁷

Given this uphill battle, if the WTUL was truly to be a successful labor organization, embedded within the labor movement and capable of integrating women into the established centers of labor power, if it was truly to be an organization dedicated first to the economic advancement of women as workers rather than their social and political advancement as women, then it needed a solid relationship with organized labor.Footnote ³⁸ For all practical purposes, this meant maintaining a solid relationship with the AFL, which dominated the labor movement during this period. From the start, Walling and other league founders were eager to ensure good relations with the AFL. After all, they had come to the AFL's annual convention to start their organization. The WTUL did not ask for an immediate endorsement from the AFL in 1903, waiting instead to make some tangible accomplishments first. The WTUL was also hesitant due to the lack of female representation among the AFL delegates present who would be able to press for AFL action. A desire for ties with the AFL was clear, however, from the decision that an annual meeting of the WTUL be held jointly with the AFL convention.Footnote ³⁹

Even in these earliest moments of the WTUL, the relationship with the AFL was erratic, marked by both moments of embrace and dismissal. In his autobiography, Samuel Gompers recalled warmly welcoming the formation of the league and promoting its program of work. “When they submitted to me a proposal,” he wrote of Walling and Kenney O'Sullivan's presentation of the league at the 1903 convention, “I gave it most hearty approval and participated in the necessary conferences. It was a step toward the realization of the economic organization of women. I defended the movement against the dubious and tried to contribute counsel for its guidance.”Footnote ⁴⁰ However, Gompers did not make any approving remarks following Kenney O'Sullivan's announcement of the formation of the WTUL at the podium of the AFL convention, nor did he announce its formation in the American Federationist in the news report from the convention.Footnote ⁴¹

As the fledgling WTUL departed Boston and began its operations, its members were optimistic, but they faced a difficult task in unionizing women. Whereas some women did belong to unions prior to the twentieth century, they comprised only a small percentage of total union members, and where they did participate in unions, that participation was typically limited to local unions and did not extend to the national level.Footnote ⁴² Due to rapid industrialization, by 1900 one in five women in America were part of the workforce, and women had representation in a broad array of occupations, but the vast majority remained unorganized.Footnote ⁴³

Women had a different occupational pattern than men that did not lend itself to existing practices of unionization. The typical woman worker in industry at this time was young and single, normally beginning work in her mid-teens, often an immigrant who did not speak English, and likely to remain in the labor force for only an average of six to seven years. Marriage was a natural interruption to employment, although many women returned to industry later out of necessity.Footnote ⁴⁴ This transient nature of women's employment not only contributed to the “working only for pin money” myth of women's employment that was widely accepted at this time, but also made it difficult for both men to see the value in organizing women and women to see the value in making the effort and taking up the expense (dues) to join a union. These differences in employment patterns were largely due to societal belief that women belonged in the home, not the workplace.Footnote ⁴⁵ The ideological commitment to the cult of true womanhood was pervasive during this era and, as will be discussed below, created an immense barrier to the integration of women into the labor movement.

UNIONIZING WOMEN FALTERS—THE WTUL'S DIFFICULT COURTSHIP OF THE AFL AND WOMEN WORKERS

Even against these structural and cultural barriers to organizing women, the WTUL held fast during its early years to its original commitment to trade unionism as the critical means to empowering women workers.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, the drift to legislative work as a focal point would occur quickly as the organization faced resistance to unionization of women from both organized labor and working women. Capturing the resources of the AFL, through coalition and cooperation, was necessary to achieve success in organizing women, particularly in light of the structural and cultural difficulties that made women reticent to unionize. Despite its efforts, the WTUL would not succeed in winning much cooperation from the AFL. This failure to gain AFL support was attributable to many factors, including ideological hostility to women as wage-workers by male trade unionists and fear of female competition, the craft bias of the AFL and its federated structure, cultural differences between men and women workers, inflexibility by the AFL in accepting women's unions or adapting to their needs, a failure of the AFL to provide tangible support to unionization efforts, and certain suspicions that the AFL had about the WTUL itself, particularly based on its cross-class character.

The AFL's official stance on the organization of women from the beginning of its existence was that women's unions should be represented upon an equal footing with those of men within the AFL and that there should be equal pay for equal work. In much the same way that the AFL had always officially welcomed black workers, such platitudes were routinely offered at the annual conventions, but little actual effort was put forth to unionize women or to give those women that were unionized a voice in the AFL. Only two national affiliates of the AFL, the Cigar Makers' Union and the Typographical Union, during these early years accepted women members, and many other affiliates had prohibited female members or discouraged their active participation in union affairs at the local level. In fact, only one female delegate appeared at an AFL convention prior to 1891, and as discussed earlier, the AFL council put limited effort toward a national approach to organizing women, having only employed one woman organizer in its history prior to 1908, Mary Kenney O'Sullivan in 1892 for a mere five months. The WTUL would force little change of this disconnect between AFL policy and AFL practice.

The WTUL felt compelled to court the AFL given its dominance of organized labor, but the AFL represented the interests of craft unions first and foremost, and most women laborers were unskilled.Footnote ⁴⁷ This made the AFL a less than ideal coalition partner from the outset, as it was already predisposed against industrial unionism. This same problem had stymied the efforts to unionize African-American and immigrant men. Frustration over AFL hostility to unskilled workers was frequently vented within the WTUL, but it did not change the necessity of winning its cooperation.Footnote ⁴⁸ To that end, the WTUL insisted on craft organization of women, but the policy proved ineffective. Unskilled women inside craft unions were isolated and powerless, their interests routinely ignored by their skilled male counterparts. This was a particular problem in the garment industry where tremendous gains were made in the raw number of women organized with WTUL help, but these women failed to earn many concessions or assume any power within their unions.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even within the powerful ILGWU, where women dominated the membership in terms of numbers, they found themselves frequently patronized by the union's male leadership and their particular interests ignored. The WTUL proved to be a haven for many of these women, serving as an alternative vehicle through which to fight for the interests of working women.Footnote ⁵⁰

Compounding the problem of the craft union bias was the AFL's commitment to trade union autonomy and noninterference. Even if Gompers and the national leadership had been so inclined to strenuously press the incorporation of women, skilled and unskilled, into the trade union movement, they could do little of consequence to force the matter locally. It was up to the WTUL to win cooperation not only of the national AFL leadership, but also the individual federated unions.

The greatest obstacle to unionizing women, however, was the prevalent attitude throughout society and among trade union men themselves that women did not belong in the labor force, but rather in the home. Despite the surface commitment of the AFL to unionizing women, hostile attitudes to women working as being against the natural order, contributing to societal decay, and serving as a blow to proper masculinity, were readily apparent among its members at the turn of the century and onward.Footnote ⁵¹ One member wrote in the pages of the American Federationist:

Another member complained that:

Furthermore, an 1897 submission used perhaps the most colorful language of all to express the unnatural and insidious effects of wage work for women:

Buttressing this ideology of proper womanhood and belief in the confinement of women to the domestic sphere was fear among working men that unskilled women workers were undercutting their wages and taking their jobs.Footnote ⁵⁵ Gompers himself wondered whether women belonged in the workforce, given their negative effects on the male breadwinner's wages. “It is the so-called competition of the unorganized, defenseless woman worker, the girl and the wife, that often tends to reduce the wages of the father and husband,” he wrote in 1906.Footnote ⁵⁶ Of course, removing women from the workforce altogether was not feasible, so the AFL increasingly gave begrudging lip service to unionizing women but emphasized that it was for men's protection as much as for women. Gompers, in the same article quoted above where he lamented women working at all, concluded that AFL policy would be best served if they were “to throw open wide the doors of our organization and invite the working girls and working women to membership for their and our common protection.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, the WTUL confronted an ambivalent coalition partner in the AFL, filled with latent hostility to the mission of the WTUL. The AFL possessed only pragmatic and begrudging motivations to counteract that hostility and to cooperate with the unionization of women.

Trade union men were not alone in having absorbed the middle-class ideology of proper womanhood. Many women workers likewise believed that they did not belong in the workforce on a full-time basis, and they were apathetic about unionizing because they expected to return to the home when they married. This self-identification as being a part-time or supplementary worker also contributed to disinterest by women in unionizing and a failure to see the importance of solidarity with the collective bargaining efforts of their fellow male workers, which was as the AFL feared. The WTUL frequently used women workers' own identification as wives and mothers (or soon-to-be wives and mothers) first and industrial help-mates second as a marketing tool to women for unionizing. Women needed to unionize, if not for themselves, then as part of their responsibility to their family as good wives and mothers, either now or in the future when they might marry, as marriage remained the expectation for these women. President Margaret Dreier Robins explained to the 1909 WTUL convention that “if the young woman acts as an underbidder before marriage, then her husband must bring home a lesser wage after marriage … and she must suffer a lower standard of living all the remaining years of her life.” Furthermore, Robins explained that if husbands earned lower wages, they would have to work longer hours, causing wives to lose the “fellowship of a husband” and their children to lose the “companionship of a father.”Footnote ⁵⁸

The WTUL was not shy about exploiting the ideology of womanhood and the family wage as a tool for unionizing women, but class considerations ran in both directions. For many working-class women, association with middle-class reformers, be they in the WTUL or other organizations, provided an air of social respectability. Just as middle-class progressive reformers were finding a way in this period to balance a new vision of womanhood that married activism to preexisting domestic values, working women were seeking similar means by which they could be both wage earners and “ladies.”Footnote ⁵⁹

There existed, however, even more practical and mundane obstacles than ideology and competitive fears to unionization of women; social and cultural differences between the sexes, and their relative positions in the labor force, were significant factors in the WTUL's struggles. Union dues were a greater hardship on lower paid women than on men. This was more often the case in AFL unions, which typically insisted on higher dues than unaffiliated unions, thus WTUL policy to incorporate women into AFL unions led to a greater financial hardship on women through higher dues. This was a hardship that the AFL was unwilling to work around and that the WTUL lacked the funds to defray.Footnote ⁶⁰ As for social and cultural problems, union meetings often took place in saloons and other locales where women were socially prohibited, and meetings very often took place at night when many young working girls, particularly immigrant girls, were expected by their families to be home.Footnote ⁶¹ Furthermore, male organizers were limited in where they could go themselves to recruit women. For instance, decorum required that they could not call on women who lived alone in their own lodgings.Footnote ⁶² Alice Henry would also point out that the relative youth of women workers made them resistant to the commitment necessary to participate in union meetings, as they were at the “play age” and likely to view union activities as “tiresome and boring past endurance.”Footnote ⁶³ Added to all of these barriers to unionization was the reality that women workers had domestic responsibilities that absorbed their time outside the workplace.

Helen Marot, a WTUL organizer and ardent trade unionist, aptly summarized the above challenges to unionizing women when she wrote of “the woman's problem” in labor. Marot wrote:

The ideology of separate spheres; the “glittering generality” that marriage, not work, was a woman's proper role, accepted by both men and women; and the reality of domestic responsibilities proved to be a vice with a grip too powerful for many women to overcome via successful unionization. An approach was needed that could assist women in meeting capital “in her own way.”

To do just that, the WTUL believed that the AFL needed to do more to adapt to the special needs of women in its recruiting of female labor. The vehicle for this, in the WTUL's view, was women organizers who could meet these special needs of women workers and appeal to their unique problems in organizing.Footnote ⁶⁵ The training of women organizers became a central focus of the league very early on, as the concrete effort involved in actual unionization drives often was too much for the members of the WTUL themselves, particularly the allies.Footnote ⁶⁶ The New York branch, which had been the most aggressive organizer in early years, reported in 1908 that it recognized “that the strength of the league lies in its capacity to train wage-earning women for the work of organization.”Footnote ⁶⁷ To this end, the WTUL in 1913 would establish a school for the training of women organizers, which involved both fieldwork and coursework for selected working-class women in topics such as parliamentary procedure and the writing of business letters that were skills needed to operate within existing unions.Footnote ⁶⁸ Already the skills of the college-educated, middle-class members were coming to the fore. The WTUL lobbied hard for the AFL to hire woman organizers, but the AFL employed only thirty-eight woman organizers between 1908 and 1923, and most for short tenures of only a few months.Footnote ⁶⁹ This meant that most of the organization of women that was taking place was occurring in unaffiliated unions that held less power and stability and less of a chance of eventual affiliation. This also meant that the AFL was unwilling to take concrete steps toward indicating favoritism for women in the workforce, and even more to the point, for women to be integrated into the labor movement.Footnote ⁷⁰

Class was also a significant barrier to AFL cooperation in ways that went beyond ideological dissonance. The mixed-class character of the WTUL made Gompers and others in organized labor uneasy, as Walling and other founders had worried. This uneasiness manifested itself in several ways. The AFL refused to seat delegates from the WTUL at conventions, limiting them only to ceremonial and informational participation in AFL business. Gompers wrote to Gertrude Barnum of the WTUL to explain that union members were not comfortable that the ladies of the league would be, in their participation, “voicing the sentiments and reaching the conclusions desired by the membership.”Footnote ⁷¹ Gompers's own hostility to the WTUL also manifested itself in the 1908 selection of a woman organizer for the AFL. Gompers selected Annie Fitzgerald of the rival Union Label League to serve rather than the WTUL candidate. Fitzgerald was hostile to the WTUL, and league members took this snub by Gompers personally. Even this tainted victory for women in labor was short-lived as Fitzgerald's commission was revoked quickly.Footnote ⁷² Gompers also viewed the WTUL as filled with dilettantes and prone to socialist beliefs.Footnote ⁷³ Trade unionist men also distrusted the WTUL's sincerity as a labor organization, suspecting it of being a political organization and a suffragist group in disguise.Footnote ⁷⁴ The league was always aware of the men's distrust built on class suspicions and of their fear of the interloping of the women's movement and its agenda. Thus, the WTUL felt it particularly important to work hard to secure the “confidence of the official movement,” because, as Helen Marot explained, “the league was composed of two groups of people, unionists and sympathizers … [the league] is in danger of creating a feeling that the latter look for strength to forces other than labor.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Despite these frustrations with the AFL, the WTUL continued to devote resources to organizing women, but the AFL's response to the revolution in the garment trades between 1909 and 1913 would disillusion the WTUL and refocus its approach to helping women workers.Footnote ⁷⁶ Ostensibly, the series of strikes that took place in the garment trade from New York City, to Philadelphia, to Chicago, to Kalamazoo, to Lawrence were successes for women in unions and for the WTUL, which had supported the major strikes. The WTUL earned great praise in the press and even from the AFL for its participation in strike support, including the unprecedented participation of allies on the front lines, particularly in the New York strike of shirtwaist workers that lasted for several months.Footnote ⁷⁷ Rose Schneiderman, a WTUL organizer and later president, nicknamed the society ladies who faithfully picketed manufacturers in the ILGWU “Uprising of 20,000” the “Mink Brigade.”Footnote ⁷⁸ However, the gains made for women in unions fell far short of what was possible given the hostility of the ILGWU and the United Garment Workers (UGW) to women within their unions. Time and again the WTUL witnessed the UGW, in particular, marginalize the concessions to be given to women workers within their ranks despite the overwhelming number of women workers that participated in the strikes.Footnote ⁷⁹ The AFL did nothing to pressure the affiliated UGW to change its ways, and when the WTUL experimented during these strikes with supporting unaffiliated unions that were more receptive to unionizing and supporting the needs of the largely immigrant and unskilled women in the garment trades, it made little headway with employers and only sparked the ire of the AFL.

Tensions between the AFL and the WTUL would come to a head with the strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912. The socialist enemy of the AFL, the International Workers of the World (IWW), dominated the strike, and the AFL union that represented the striking skilled workers, the United Textile Workers (UTW), advised the WTUL to avoid involvement lest the AFL get wind of any association between the women in the WTUL and socialists. However, members of the Boston branch of the league decided to assist the women strikers once the size and importance of the strike became apparent. The UTW begrudgingly permitted the league to assist the women strikers, but the UTW quickly negotiated a settlement with the mills that benefited only the skilled male workers in their union and ordered the WTUL to cease assistance in light of the settlement, despite having left the mass of unskilled women workers who were and were not members of the UTW unprotected. The WTUL, given its commitment to AFL principles, complied, but the incident inflamed the league.

WTUL frustration with the AFL's intransigence on organizing women boiled over. Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, co-founder of the WTUL, ignored AFL (and WTUL) directives and stayed on to assist the strikers and subsequently quit the league in disgust.Footnote ⁸⁰ The opinion of Sue Ainslie Clark, president of the Boston league, on the futility of alliance with the AFL was representative of the views of many within the WTUL. She wrote:

Here again the craft bias was rearing its head as unskilled workers in these unions found themselves marginalized. Melinda Scott called the AFL “a bag of wind.”Footnote ⁸² WTUL president, Margaret Dreier Robins, confessed to her sister that she was growing immune to the insensitivity of the AFL. “It is just as well that I have no illusions regarding the men,” she wrote.Footnote ⁸³ Rose Schneiderman left the WTUL for a time to join the suffrage fight following the crushing disappointments of the general garment strikes, blaming the AFL for the failures the WTUL had encountered in organizing women. “We have come to the American Federation of Labor,” she complained, “and said to them, ‘Come and help us organize the American working girl’ … but nothing was done.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Despite this disillusionment, the WTUL saw little choice to adhering to AFL principles and policies when unionizing and continuing to attempt to draw on the established resources of the AFL. The WTUL could offer little in the way of assistance to women workers if it organized them into unions that had no influence with employers or staying power within the labor movement. Thus, the WTUL held firm to coalition with the recalcitrant AFL when unionizing women. As Raymond Robins, husband of the WTUL president, explained to the restless New York branch, “The AFL with all of its shortcomings—and few people know these better than ourselves—is none the less the true representative body of organized labor in this country … As a matter of expediency you must cooperate with the policy of the American Federation of Labor.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Not surprisingly, given the futility of this expectation of AFL cooperation, the WTUL increasingly looked to channel its resources into other methods for aiding women workers. Propitious then was the constitutional victory of Muller in 1908, which invigorated the prospects of securing protective labor legislation for women in the workplace.

MULLER MEETS DISILLUSIONMENT—THE WTUL REINVENTS ITSELF

At the 1913 convention of the WTUL, the national secretary summarized the first ten years of the league's existence. She announced that:

The next ten years proved distinctive in the undertakings of the WTUL and did show definite results, as the league turned its attention to a legislative program. Even in reflection on the first ten years, however, it was clear that the league had shown more skill and had greater success in awakening public opinion to trade unionism than it had in actually organizing women.

In fact, it was apparent almost immediately that the WTUL's natural strengths lay in providing educational and public relations support to the cause of unionization of women. The organization did not possess a reservoir of membership with field experience in unionizing women or with inside connections to labor unions. Thus, at the first executive board meeting, the national league agreed that it would be best suited to aid the cause of organizing women through providing general education and investigating factory conditions. William English Walling and Jane Addams dedicated themselves to publishing pro-union propaganda, and a Wellesley College professor among their ranks was put to work on a bibliography on labor topics that could educate both the league and the public on the importance of unionization for women.Footnote ⁸⁷ At the first annual meeting of the league in 1904, the WTUL decided to create a bureau of information for members on labor statistics and factory investigations and to appear before women's clubs to promote the league in order to achieve their goals of unionization of women.Footnote ⁸⁸

These natural strengths and strategic predispositions of the league could be attributed in large part to the presence of the allies in the WTUL.Footnote ⁸⁹ These women were articulate and predominantly college-educated, thus they were naturals at publishing and propaganda. The WTUL published frequently in labor periodicals, such as the Union Labor Advocate, and even started a periodical of its own, Life and Labor, to reach a labor audience. Also, its position within the network of the women's movement was a tremendous resource to be exploited, such as with the aforementioned informational appearances before women's clubs, in order to raise middle-class awareness of the significance of trade union organizing for women. Indeed, the first president of the WTUL had first helmed the GFWC. Such awareness fed the interests of middle-class women to make a social difference, prompting them to donate money or engage in ethical consumerism. Time and money were also resources that the allies possessed in greater abundance than the working-class membership, and thus skewed the methods employed by the league. The experience of members within the women's movement created a comfort level that also pushed the WTUL toward engagement with the state as a technique of activism.Footnote ⁹⁰

The state was also opening in new ways during this period to interest group activism by social movements. Daniel J. Tichenor and Richard A. Harris write of the explosion of interest group activity during the Progressive Era, as channels into government opened in Washington and elsewhere.Footnote ⁹¹ Elisabeth S. Clemens similarly highlights the way decay in party politics during this period opened new sites for policy activism, such as in legislatures, administrative agencies, and even the court of public opinion, beyond traditional electoral competition.Footnote ⁹² Thus, the WTUL found itself well-suited for political work at just the moment that the state was opening to manifold forms of political activism.

Buttressing the dominance of these strategic predispositions and resources for education, public relations, and political work was the WTUL's financial problems. The league did not even hold an annual convention in 1906 due to money woes. The AFL never provided any financial assistance to the WTUL, thus the league relied on the generosity of its allies, particularly the wealth of its long-time president Margaret Dreier Robins, who kept the league periodical afloat with her own money.Footnote ⁹³ Due to these financial exigencies, the WTUL could only afford to underwrite a limited number of approaches to organizing women, and thus when squeezed the league often defaulted to the methods that the allies excelled at and felt at home with, methods and interests which would quickly prove particularly conducive to legislative and suffrage work.

Suffrage work, in particular, became extremely important to the league, which would seem only natural, at least to the middle-class allies who prioritized the ballot. However, class tensions also came to the fore in suffrage work, as working-class members of the league were frequently less enthusiastic about the vote, often seeing it as a middle-class distraction. One working-class member complained to Leonora O'Reilly that, “[w]oman suffrage is beginning at the other end. What the women need is economic emancipation, and, Sister, dear, how they need it! And they can't get it without organization.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Rose Schneiderman received some criticism from her industrial sisters when she departed the league to engage in suffrage work, providing a working-class voice to the campaign. This did not stop the league, however, from marketing the ballot to women workers as an important political resource for electing representatives who favored union interests, trying to harness them for the suffrage cause.Footnote ⁹⁵

Thus, the WTUL in its early years not only experienced frustration with organizing efforts and rejection by the AFL, but also discovered that its organizational and membership strengths and interests predisposed it to the kind of publicity and bureaucratic work that was best aimed at lobbying the state rather than at transforming the attitudes of working-class union men and recruiting working-class women to unions. Contributing to this confluence of factors pointing to a new direction for the WTUL would be the blossoming of the gendered Constitution in Muller and the prospect of an attractive partnership with the NCL and other organizations within the women's movement.

From its inception, the WTUL maintained a legislative agenda. In 1903, the organization noted that one of its objectives would be “to secure new legislation to protect women workers and to obtain better enforcement of existing laws.”Footnote ⁹⁶ In 1904, the WTUL board got somewhat more specific, as it recommended that the league work for the “adoption of progressive industrial legislation and uniformity in factory laws throughout the United States.”Footnote ⁹⁷ This progressive industrial legislation included not only laws geared toward workplace safety and sanitation, but also the limitation of hours to be worked by women to eight hours per day and fifty hours per week, along with a prohibition against night work.Footnote ⁹⁸ At the WTUL's first national convention in 1907, the league adopted a platform that included, in addition to calls for the organization of women into trade unions, equal pay for equal work, the promotion of the economic principles of the AFL, full citizenship for women, and the eight-hour day.Footnote ⁹⁹

At this point in time, these legislative goals were fairly unremarkable. While the AFL was moving away from supporting a legislative program for shorter hours in the workplace in this first decade of the twentieth century due to judicial hostility, it had not yet turned fully hostile to state labor reform.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Likewise, there were a growing number of legislative campaigns for hours restrictions for working women that had spread to assorted states. At this point, the success of a legislative approach to limiting the hours women worked had been erratic, as state and federal courts struggled with balancing state police powers with a developing commitment to free contract liberty, which would not fully triumph until 1905 with Lochner. Thus, in these early years of the WTUL, there was no special advantage to working on legislative reform. The uncertain constitutionality of protective labor legislation for women made the state an unreliable resource for the advancement of the interests of women workers. Given this uncertainty, and more importantly the still fresh, and perhaps naïve, enthusiasm for the trade union approach, the WTUL treated legislative work as a supplementary approach to aiding women workers. This would quickly begin to change after 1908.

The Progressive Era battle over protective labor legislation for women began in Illinois in the 1890s. There had been sporadic attempts to limit the hours women could work in Massachusetts and a few other states beginning in the 1870s, but these laws were weakly drafted and largely unenforceable.Footnote ¹⁰¹ For the most part, these laws survived judicial review, but the courts did not engage in any extensive analysis of the relationship between women, the police power, and the parameters of individual liberty at this time.Footnote ¹⁰² In Illinois, Florence Kelley worked with her fellow settlement residents at Hull House to draft and to lobby for an aggressive law governing factory practices and inspections, which included limitations on the hours women could work. The law, which had far more bite than earlier forays into protective labor legislation in Massachusetts and elsewhere, passed in 1893, and Florence Kelley was appointed as the state factory inspector, a job she took quite seriously.Footnote ¹⁰³ However, this protection for women workers in Illinois was short-lived, when the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the hours provision in 1895 in Ritchie v. People.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In Ritchie, gender did not play a significant role in the decision of the Illinois Court. The justices upheld a general right to freedom of contract that trumped the police power of the state, glossing over any discussion of sex.Footnote ¹⁰⁵Ritchie was part of a larger period of constitutional adjustment, as courts around the country worked out the proper parameters of the police power in light of developing commitment to ideals of economic due process liberty that had first found voice in Field's dissent in The Slaughter-House Cases, had gained acceptance in state cases such as In re Jacobs, and would culminate in the victory of freedom of contract in Lochner.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In the years that followed Ritchie and preceded Lochner, a few other states would instead uphold maximum-hours laws for women in the face of this constitutional uncertainty, but the disappointment of Ritchie dealt a setback, though not a deathblow, to the movement for protective labor legislation for women.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Florence Kelley did not give up on protective labor legislation for women, despite the experience in Illinois, and she would go on to spearhead campaigns for hours laws, and later minimum-wage laws, to protect women workers at the helm of the NCL.

The NCL began as a movement of individual consumer leagues that developed in several states in the 1890s and then consolidated in 1899 as the NCL. Florence Kelley was brought on board that year as the NCL's general secretary. The NCL agitated for better working conditions for women that worked in shops and factories. To win these better working conditions for women, the NCL relied on ethical consumerism (regulation through consumption). To that end, the NCL publicized “white lists” of shops that treated employees well, provided “white labels” for merchandise manufactured under safe and sanitary conditions, and undertook a variety of consumer campaigns to bring about changes in the workplace that were not covered by state regulation or collective bargaining, such as the “shop early” campaign, which encouraged women to do their Christmas shopping early so as to avoid unhealthy hours for shop girls at the holidays. The NCL worked closely with the GFWC on these projects, using the clubs to raise consumer awareness and serve as an information distribution network for their lists and labels.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The NCL was the quintessential embodiment of “social housekeeping,” which was the ideological extension of domesticity.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The organization embraced and utilized the domestic role of the woman as homemaker and therefore purchaser of household goods—as a force for positive social change that benefited the community at large. Its reform program, which exported the duties and responsibilities of the maternal role in the private sphere to the public sphere, was an exemplar of what Paula Baker calls the “domestication” of American politics during this era.Footnote ¹¹⁰

With Florence Kelley at the helm, the NCL quickly added the pursuit of protective legislation for women and children to its slate of consumer campaigns.Footnote ¹¹¹ Buoyed by the success of a Utah maximum-hours law for miners before the Supreme Court in 1898, which took some of the sting out of Ritchie, the NCL sponsored legislative campaigns in several states.Footnote ¹¹² Between 1900 and 1908, branch consumers' leagues participated in campaigns to secure new or improve existing hours laws for women workers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Oregon, Connecticut, Michigan, and Tennessee.Footnote ¹¹³ They also worked, during these pre-Muller years, on campaigns for laws against women's night work and secured such legislation in four states, including New York.Footnote ¹¹⁴

In 1905, the Supreme Court struck down a maximum-hours law for bakers in Lochner, and freedom of contract was solidified as a constitutional principle. Protective labor legislation was now imperiled everywhere. However, Lochner also contained hints that a gendered exception to free contract liberty might be possible. The majority opinion, echoing language found in the plaintiffs' brief, spoke of the “intelligence and capacity” of bakers, like other men, to “care for themselves” without state interference in their “independence of judgment and action.” Bakers, as a class, were in “no sense wards of the state.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Women did not possess such robust independence, judgment, and capacity for self-protection according to the conventional wisdom and legal conventions of the period. However, it would not be male state officials or judges' themselves that would bring such an insight to the fore when a maximum-hours law for women only subsequently made its way to the Supreme Court. Women themselves, through the NCL, would be responsible for bringing such arguments to the constitutional table.

The NCL became involved in the litigation of the hours laws they helped pass. Florence Kelley and Josephine Goldmark, the NCL member who was the chief researcher and co-author responsible for the famous Brandeis Brief used in Muller, attended the judicial proceedings on New York's night work law, which was challenged in 1905 in the wake of Lochner, to show women's support for the measure. They were horrified to discover that the state attorney had assigned no one to argue the case and had merely submitted a brief, which Florence Kelley described as “a disgraceful display of ignorance.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Kelley became convinced that the NCL needed a concerted litigation strategy to protect NCL-sponsored legislation. States were for the most part validating these laws, but in light of Lochner, it was likely that the Supreme Court would weigh in and settle the matter.

In 1907, the Portland branch of the NCL reported that their state's maximum-hours law for women had survived judicial review in Oregon following a challenge by a laundry owner, but was now headed to the Supreme Court. The NCL recruited Goldmark's brother-in-law, Louis Brandeis, to the cause. Incidentally, Margaret Dreier Robins, president of the WTUL, and her husband participated in Brandeis's recruitment.Footnote ¹¹⁷ This kind of interconnection between reform organizations was typical during this period and demonstrates the comfortable degree to which the WTUL was wired into the power centers of the women's movement, in sharp contradistinction to the league's tenuous connection to the power centers of the labor movement. Thus, cooperation with the NCL in legislative work was a ready resource for the WTUL even before the enticing success of Muller would draw a greater proportion of its attention to political activism.

Brandeis and Goldmark set to work on crafting the amicus brief for the Oregon case. The brief was a landmark in American constitutional history for its voluminous use of statistics and its embrace of sociological jurisprudence, but it also laid the groundwork for a maternalist exception to the established constitutional principle of economic due process liberty.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Brandeis and Goldmark chose not to attack Lochner directly but instead opted to push for an exception for women, perhaps influenced by the masculinist rhetoric of the Lochner opinion itself. The Supreme Court adopted virtually wholesale the arguments put forth by Brandeis and Goldmark, accepting the general point that women's overwork harmed the general welfare because women were responsible for reproduction.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Justice Brewer, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, embraced the medical, social and statistical evidence provided by the NCL to support their maternalist rationale:

Male labor was the constitutional norm and governed by the principles in Lochner that celebrated individualism, but women were distinguished not only by their relative weakness, but also by their significance to the community, which counseled against treating them merely as individuals. Brewer explained (with greater flourish on the point of female dependence than was to be found in the Brandeis Brief):

A gendered Constitution was born, and the NCL had served as midwife.Footnote ¹²²

With unanimous Supreme Court backing of a separate constitutional category for women's labor that favored state protection, and near universal public acclaim for the decision, the NCL, enjoying its now greatly enhanced status as a major leader for social reform, made the promotion and defense of protective labor laws for women its paramount mission and viewed it as the best method for aiding women workers.Footnote ¹²³ The NCL would achieve great success. Between 1908 and 1917 nineteen states and Washington, DC would enact hours laws for women, and twenty states with existing laws would improve them. All these new maximum-hours laws survived judicial challenge.Footnote ¹²⁴ Most gratifying to Florence Kelley was the reversal of the 1895 Ritchie decision by the Illinois Supreme Court in 1910.Footnote ¹²⁵ The NCL was not alone, however, in recognizing the valuable resource of the gendered Constitution and the new promise of the state as a site for reform after so many years of judicial obstruction.

Muller made an immediate impression on the WTUL. At an early 1909 executive board meeting, a rift developed in leadership with one faction favoring league dedication to educational and legislative missions in light of Muller and the other faction favoring a sustained central focus on organizing women and strengthening women's unions.Footnote ¹²⁶ This strategic disagreement on the most effective role of the organization would keep the WTUL's attentions divided between legislative work and union organizing through a period of adjustment from 1909 to roughly 1914 that coincided with the increasing disillusionment with organized labor, discussed above, that plagued the league in these years. From that point forward, however, the WTUL would be first and foremost a state-focused pressure group. At the 1909 national convention, the WTUL broadened its legislative program, putting the pursuit of the eight-hour day and the elimination of night work for women at the top of its eleven-point platform.Footnote ¹²⁷ However, the WTUL, perhaps given executive dissension over strategy, did not become active at the national level in lobbying for legislation until 1913, instead encouraging local leagues to come to their own decision regarding how much time to devote to legislative lobbying.Footnote ¹²⁸ Many local leagues went immediately to work, forming coalitions with local consumers' leagues and other reform allies, to press the fight for maximum-hours laws. In 1909, WTUL branches campaigned for legislative reform in Illinois and Missouri, followed by local campaigns in Massachusetts in 1911 and Vermont in 1912.Footnote ¹²⁹ The Chicago WTUL was particularly aggressive as a legislative pressure group. It assisted in the passage of the ten-hour law in 1909, but its members believed an eight-hour day was preferable and vowed to continue to fight for the more stringent restriction. Agnes Nestor, the local WTUL president from 1913 to 1948, appeared before every session of the state legislature from 1909 until the bill finally passed in 1937.Footnote ¹³⁰

Although the national league did not fully dedicate itself to legislative campaigning in 1909, it did publicize its platform as a representation of the policy needs and preferences of organized women workers to other SMOs, such as the NCL and the American Association of Labor Legislation (AALL), and encouraged them to incorporate the legislative goals into their own efforts.Footnote ¹³¹ What made the WTUL's 1909 legislative program particularly distinctive was its call for a minimum wage (the final point of the eleven-point platform). The NCL had not yet made such a bold call. This put the WTUL at the forefront of upping the ante of the success of Muller to regulate an aspect of the employment contract that was not so obviously linked to the health and reproductive capacity of women workers, though this would not stop these reformers from making explicitly maternalist appeals and gladly extending the logic of the Brandeis Brief in Muller to the minimum wage.Footnote ¹³²

The Boston branch of the WTUL went quickly to work on leveraging the success of Muller with a minimum-wage campaign in Massachusetts, and by 1911 they had assembled a coalition that included unionists, social workers, and local outlets of the NCL and the AALL, and in 1912 they succeeded with passage of a state wage bill. This success would quickly spread, with eight more states following with minimum-wage laws for women in 1913.Footnote ¹³³ At this point, the NCL would take the lead in the national legislative campaign. The NCL would now spearhead the coalition of reformers, not only because it was better resourced for and more tightly focused on a legislative approach to aiding women workers, but also because the WTUL was still adjusting the scope and focus of its activism, and tensions over that adjustment were high. Kelley explained in 1912 that although the minimum-wage campaign “was first actively taken up by the Women's Trade Union League[, it] … seems likely to be carried to success in the near future chiefly by the efforts of a public commission and the Consumers' League constituency, the Women's Trade Union League being shaken to its foundations by inner dissension.”Footnote ¹³⁴

Muller had significantly impacted the league's strategy and focus and not everyone was happy. Many of the working-class members of the league, and even some of the more radically inclined allies, were alarmed at the de-emphasis on organizing work that was implicit in the redirection of resources to legislative campaigns. The AFL was also displeased with the WTUL endorsement of a legislated minimum wage, exacerbating the tensions between the organizations. Gompers was adamant that there be no minimum wage for men, as a minimum wage might serve as a ceiling on wages that could be negotiated, and such a wage for women might prove to be a slippery slope. “The establishment of such a policy or practice … would infringe upon the liberty of women, and would directly or indirectly affect that of men,” declared Gompers.Footnote ¹³⁵ He conceded that as a resource-conscious strategy it was tempting “to resort to legislative devices that palliate the ills,” but that legislative solutions were inferior to trade unionism, since a minimum wage would not help women develop the valuable qualities of “self-discipline, the development of individual responsibility, and initiative.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Many of the women within the WTUL agreed and resisted the new direction.

By 1915, when the WTUL reiterated its commitment to minimum-wage legislation at its annual convention, the AFL issued a warning that the WTUL was endangering its identification with the labor movement and becoming far too comfortable a creature of the women's movement.Footnote ¹³⁷ Gompers reminded the WTUL that “industrial freedom must be fought out on the industrial field … Protection and regulation may offer immediate relief—but they are not freedom.” He praised the WTUL for having “tremendous opportunity and promise” as an organization but warned that those resources made it attractive to those with other agendas. Being “confronted by dangers and pitfalls,” the league “must protect itself against attempts to dominate it and use it for other purposes.” Shamelessly glossing over the AFL's own failures to organize women and to aid the WTUL in that mission, Gompers contended that “the fight of women for industrial freedom is made doubly difficult … by patronizing social workers and those who would protect woman in order to keep her from exercising her own will power and becoming a member of society upon equality with all.”Footnote ¹³⁸ In invoking “patronizing social workers,” Gompers's class fears and skepticism of the true nature of the league were unmistakable.

The WTUL stood at a strategic and constitutional crossroads. Gompers had reminded the WTUL of the virtues of the labor Constitution, which emphasized the civic value of trade unionism and its ability to create independent citizens and enhance the liberty of the individual who could rely on collective self-help (the union) rather than the state for one's survival. The solution to the labor problem was the liberation of the laborer from the restraint of the state. This constitutional vision of labor was deeply at odds with the regulatory embrace of the gendered Constitution.Footnote ¹³⁹

However, with the WTUL more disenchanted with the AFL than ever following the disappointments of unionizing efforts in the garment trades in the years following 1909, and with the AFL more disappointed with the WTUL than ever due to their legislative efforts on the minimum wage and earlier dalliances with the IWW and other unaffiliated unions, and with the rapid success of legislative campaigns following Muller that showed tangible returns on the resources invested, the pro-legislative faction of the WTUL won out by the middle of the decade.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The voluntaristic labor Constitution had been traded in for the statist gendered Constitution. Trade unionism was not abandoned, but President Margaret Dreier Robins captured the resource- and opportunity-driven reinvention of the WTUL well in a 1914 essay:

Those who disagreed with the strategic change believed that legislative solutions to the problems of working women, though perhaps more easily or more quickly secured, were inferior to the benefits of trade unionism to women workers. The league had always emphasized unionization as a source of fellowship, education, and empowerment for women, but many of its members also echoed the voluntarist rhetoric of Gompers in suggesting that women could obtain better concessions through collective bargaining.Footnote ¹⁴² Helen Marot took a swipe at meddlesome philanthropists and bureaucrats in her 1914 book. “Benevolently imposed measures are weak substitutes for those which are self-imposed and administered,” she wrote.Footnote ¹⁴³ She also enthusiastically cited Gompers's editorial on the material and spiritual benefits of trade unionism for women over any regulatory solution.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Pauline Newman, a working-class organizer and one of the more ardent trade unionists in the WTUL, favored women workers' control of reform. She wrote,“… to shorten the workday and raise wages is, or SHOULD BE, the business of the working woman herself. No one can or will do it better than she herself. … it will have to be done … on the basis of collective bargaining. … And so why not concentrate all efforts to the organizing of the working woman?”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ She went on to explain that unions could better enforce workplace standards than the state. Mary Dreier, president of the New York league and Dreier Robins's sister, emphasized, in opposition to the supplementary work of legislation, “the more important work of organization, for we know that the greatest power to enforce labor laws is trade unions, and a strong trade union can demand better conditions and shorter hours than the law will allow, and then, too, we get education and power through organization, which we do not get through law.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ For these women, domesticity was problematic, but the greatest barrier to the woman worker was her lack of integration into the labor market. Recourse to further segmentation of male and female labor through maternalist legislation in service of a middle-class ideology was not the answer.

Some like Marot would leave the WTUL as a result of the new direction, but others like Newman and Dreier stayed on and begrudgingly accepted that a legislative agenda was both useful and realizable, especially in light of the recalcitrance of the AFL, even if not the best solution. Newman admitted at the 1915 convention that where organization fell short (and for most women workers it did), legislative protections were important. “[I]f the state, which is supposed to serve its people, can help these people get 2 or 3 dollars a week more,” she argued, “not one of us has a right to say to the girls: ‘Don't accept it. Starve rather than accept money from the state.’”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Mary Dreier agreed that organization was regrettably often unobtainable, therefore the WTUL needed to assist in obtaining legislative relief. Dreier wrote to Melinda Scott in 1914 that:

Alice Henry, who came to be a great league defender in later years despite her skepticism of converting the WTUL to a legislative pressure group, summed it up thusly: “What we win for ourselves we ever value more highly and hold more securely. But it would be inhuman to postpone the day of improvement until trade unionism among women becomes so general that they can act through the power of numbers.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

At this point, a legislative strategy had proven to be a faster and more reliable route to results on behalf of working women and in keeping with the inherent resource strengths of the league women and their connections to the reform network of the women's movement. In 1923, Alice Henry would explain that where “organization is too slow a method to relieve oppression, it is on legislation that the League bends its efforts.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The gendered Constitution, which provided an exception to Lochnerian jurisprudence, had proven to reliably provide such a faster route to such results, and protective legislation now absorbed the bulk of the league's attention. By this year, however, the gendered Constitution would no longer hold the same promise as a resource for women's labor activism, given a change of attitude on the Supreme Court. The WTUL would find itself challenged in the 1920s not only by this judicial setback, but also by an internecine battle within the women's movement itself. Moreover, it was in the women's movement that the WTUL now made its true home, having drifted far from its original moorings within the labor movement, to embrace the strategic methods, policy preferences, and support network of women reform organizations such as the NCL.

FIGHTING THE ERA—THE WTUL OUT OF STEP WITH WOMEN WORKERS

As the 1920s approached, the WTUL dedicated itself to a series of political and bureaucratic initiatives consistent with the new focus of the league. One of the most significant of these initiatives was the creation of the Women's Bureau in the Department of Labor. The WTUL first campaigned for its creation in 1909 and intensified their lobbying efforts during World War I, winning the establishment of a women's division of the War Labor Administration. WTUL members were hired to run this division and were integrally involved in the drafting of regulations on women's war-time employment. In 1920, this agency was converted to the Women's Bureau, an autonomous unit of the Department of Labor.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Mary Anderson, a one-time WTUL organizer and member of the working-class, was appointed director. Other significant political activities by the WTUL included creating the International Congress of Working Women (ICWW) in 1919 to deal with post-war reconstruction issues. Consistent with the league's new emphasis, the program recommended by the Congress was geared entirely toward legislative solutions for the problems of working women.Footnote ¹⁵² The WTUL would also join as a charter member the Women's Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC) in 1920, meant to flex the newfound political muscle of women that accompanied the granting of suffrage.

The Nineteenth Amendment marked a tremendous victory for the women's movement but left many of the organizations within it wondering what, if any, policies on behalf of women they should now pursue. One such organization was the National Women's Party (NWP), the most militant of the suffrage groups, which struggled with establishing a new identity and mission for itself following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The group's executive board met regularly in 1920 to hash out its new priorities and convened a convention of members in early 1921 to settle on a new strategic direction. The new mission that emerged was the pursuit of equality, which in NWP leader Alice Paul's view meant the removal of all legal disabilities of women.Footnote ¹⁵³ This new mission created a conflict with the WTUL, NCL and other organizations in the women's movement that had secured protective labor legislation for women on the grounds of women's difference that had been entrenched in the Constitution at their own request. For maternalists, formal constitutional equality was meaningless if women were unable to work in safe and sanitary conditions and earn a living wage. This conflict was only magnified when the NWP decided to pursue their new mission through an amendment to the Constitution—the ERA.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Almost everyone agreed, except the NWP of course, that the gendered exception to Lochner could not survive a sex-based equality requirement in the Constitution.

The NWP floated several versions of the ERA to other members of the women's movement in an effort to reduce the threat to protective labor legislation for women and calm tensions within the movement.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ However, the WTUL, and others, was in no mood to deal. WTUL legislative secretary, Ethel Smith, rejected the olive branch offered to her by her counterpart at the NWP. Smith wrote to Maude Younger to inform her that “I have found no one yet … who believes it is possible to draft a blanket Federal constitutional amendment which would not jeopardize our social legislation.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The WTUL, like the NCL and others, including Mary Anderson at the head of the Woman's Bureau, were too deeply invested in the legislative results they had won since 1908 on a maternalist foundation to jeopardize them for abstractions of sex equality. The WTUL continued to trumpet the maternalist line that the minimum wage was critical to women's ability to function effectively as mothers. Writing to ERA supporter Harriet Stanton Blatch, Rose Schneiderman reverted to the language of the Brandeis Brief, arguing that a woman must be “safeguarded from selling her labor at a starvation wage and that her hours of work are not too exhausting so that the child to come may inherit the strength and vitality rightly due to it.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Both sides dug in their heels on the equality issue and a fierce battle ensued in the press, in the courts, and in legislative hearings.

The WTUL pulled out all the stops in its fight against the ERA, which included recruiting and publicizing union disapproval of the ERA and asserting its own exclusive right to speak for wage-earning women in one voice against the measure. The WTUL took it upon itself to voice the working-class preference for protective labor legislation for women. But this voice was not so singular as the WTUL portrayed. A small but vocal group of skilled and semi-skilled women workers had doggedly challenged protective labor legislation for women for years, and their pitched battle with the WTUL highlighted the distance that had opened up between the WTUL and women workers as the WTUL had increasingly identified itself with the women's movement.

Skilled women workers in the printing trade levied early challenges against protective labor laws for women. After New York's prohibition of night work by women in 1914, many women workers in publishing, such as bookbinders, lost their jobs.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ These women put the WTUL on the defensive for its support of the night-work provision, and the WTUL responded that individual hardship to a small subset of women workers was counterbalanced by the tremendous value of the law to most working women. As one member of the New York league reported telling these workers, “in the case of all good things, the few suffer for the good of the many.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ This was the same response that the WTUL gave to New York waitresses, considered skilled laborers, who had been banned by the state legislature from night work (after 10 p.m.), and who had protested vociferously to the WTUL.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ “The mere fact that in some instances individual hardship is experienced under the statutes is no way controlling as to its constitutionality,” the league explained in support of the state court decision to uphold the law in 1918.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Dissatisfied with the suggestion that sacrifice was a part of progress, the women printers formed the Women's League for Equal Opportunity (WLEO) in 1915 to battle all protective legislation for women. The smaller Equal Rights League (ERL) would be founded in 1917.

The ranks of these two organizations would swell after the war with women workers, largely from the transit industry, who had been displaced by new regulations that prohibited them from working in their traditionally male industry. Incidentally, the WTUL with its newfound legislative and bureaucratic influence in the Labor Department was instrumental in drafting and securing many of these war-time and reconstruction laws and regulations.Footnote ¹⁶²

Members of the WLEO and the ERL attended every legislative session in New York in the years following the war to combat protective legislation. Later they frequently sat side-by-side with members of the NWP, who also attended to protest such legislation. Members of the WLEO and ERL continued by fanning out to battle protective laws in Rhode Island, New Jersey and other states as well.Footnote ¹⁶³ They argued that protective laws ensured that women would remain segregated in low-paying occupations. As one leader explained, “[i]t will drain women out of all the highly paid and highly organized trades, because the law will prevent them from doing the same work as men do.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Frustrated with the WTUL, the WLEO accused it of being out of touch with the needs of working women and too much a creature of the middle-class women's movement. “So-called ‘welfare’ legislation is not asked for or wanted by real working women,” it argued. “These welfare bills are drafted by self-styled social uplifters who assert that working women do not know enough to protect themselves, aided by a few women who once worked but are now living off the labor movement.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Here the class divide between the “social uplifters” of the WTUL and working-class women is made plain, but the question of class is a complex and nuanced one, for these skilled women workers often shared nearly as much in common with a WTUL or NWP member as they did with their unskilled immigrant sisters toiling in the garment and other trades who generally supported protective labor legislation.

This complexity of the class divide makes identifying a single legitimate or authoritative voice of working women virtually impossible. Who was the better representative of working women? The native-born bookbinder or bus driver, or the immigrant dress cutter living in the slums, or for that matter the African American domestic worker in the South? Theorists working on what Suzanne Dovi has called descriptive representation have struggled to outline criteria for determining and selecting the optimal representatives of disadvantaged groups in a pluralistic and democratic polity, particularly where disadvantaged groups contain numerous, distinct dispossessed subgroups.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Though this analysis tends to focus on representatives elected or appointed to political institutions, the insight is no less applicable to social movement leaders populating key organizations and directing a movement's political strategies. The thorny question of class, which many theorists of descriptive representation admittedly avoid, is of even greater moment when considering women as a whole, themselves an historically disadvantaged group with manifold dispossessed subgroups crossing the entire racial, ethnic, and class spectrum.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The WTUL's pitched battle with skilled women workers brings the full breadth of this challenge into sharp relief.

The WTUL reacted bitterly to the challenge from these women in the WLEO and the ERL. Their public attacks in the press and lobbying of legislators against protective legislation undermined the WTUL's contention that it spoke for all working women. The WTUL used its influence where possible to silence the WLEO, such as encouraging former member Mary Anderson, head of the Women's Bureau, to exclude the group from government deliberations on women and industry because they were not a national organization and therefore did not represent the true views of working women. The WLEO responded in outrage:

The WTUL also reassured legislators that the groups were a fringe element and that the WTUL was the legitimate voice of women workers. A member told one New York legislator that the WLEO consisted of a few hundred women, whereas:

The WTUL also accused (without evidence) the WLEO and the ERL of being secretly financed by manufacturing groups looking to topple protective legislation in order to deny their legitimacy in representing the views of women workers.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ The WTUL even attempted to have some of the most vocal women printers in the groups thrown out of their own union.Footnote ¹⁷¹

The WTUL was right that the members of the WLEO and the ERL were atypical women workers. They were skilled women working in occupations that required them to compete directly with men for work. Protective labor legislation put them at a distinct disadvantage. These women could be better served economically by joining craft unions and engaging in collective bargaining, which most did. They had the means to gain admittance to and enjoy most of the benefits of the labor Constitution, but legislation interfered. Most women workers, however, were unskilled and sex-segregated by occupation. They needed to worry more about exploitation by men than competition with men. They were harder to unionize than skilled women, and therefore legislative solutions to their problems made better sense from a resource-conscious perspective. This struggle with the WLEO and ERL made for quite an irony, however, as the WTUL's now preferred legislative methods of serving women workers artificially blocked the functions and benefits of trade unionism for this small percentage of women that could successfully unionize and partake in collective bargaining.Footnote ¹⁷² The WTUL was now far afield from the labor solutions to women's problems they had once championed. Commitment to maternalist regulation had completely upended the one-time craft bias of the league, which was now liberated from the preferences of the AFL with the de-emphasis of the trade union approach.

Despite this estrangement with skilled women workers, the larger mass of unskilled women workers generally supported protective labor legislation for women.Footnote ¹⁷³ However, their attitudes toward legislative solutions echoed the same frustrations that had been aired within the WTUL years earlier and that came through in the protests of skilled women workers. Collective bargaining was preferable to legislative intervention, but state protection was useful for those women who could not yet be unionized. Fannia Cohn, one of the most influential labor leaders in the garment trades, and a one-time trainee in the WTUL's school for women organizers, gave voice to this reluctant endorsement of middle-class reform: “I did not think the problem of working women could be solved in any other way than the problem of working men, and that is through trade union organization, but considering that very few women are as yet organized into trade unions, it would be folly to agitate against protective legislation.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ The WTUL spoke for the great bulk of women workers when they challenged the ERA as a threat to protective labor legislation, but mounting such a defense drew even more of the league's resources away from the solution most women workers truly craved—a chance to bargain on their own behalf. Their commitment to maternalist policies was far more instrumental than the ideological investment of many middle-class reformers in social housekeeping and uplift. In fact, to some working women, the rift between the women's movement struck them as little more than a middle-class spat, the ERA being in their view class legislation meant to serve “leisure-class women.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵

The ERA never stood much of a chance of success in the 1920s. The resources arrayed against the NWP were far greater than what it could muster for a pitched political fight on behalf of the ERA. The majority of women's groups were against the ERA.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ So was organized labor, with the AFL now helpfully coming to the WTUL's aid in defending protective legislation that kept women workers out of competition with male workers. Moreover, little political will to fight for another women's issue was to be found on Capitol Hill. The weak political prospects of the ERA, however, did not stop the Supreme Court in 1923 from dealing a severe blow to protective labor legislation for women.

The maternalist exception to the free contract rule of Lochner was based on protecting the health of women so that they could serve as mothers, but such a justification was more tenuous in the case of the minimum wage, which did not directly implicate the conditions under which women worked. The minimum wage for women had survived the Supreme Court's four-to-four non-decision in Stettler v. O'Hara in 1917, but judicial attitudes had shifted, as had the civic status of women, by 1923.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The Supreme Court struck down Washington, DC's minimum-wage law in Adkins v. Children's Hospital.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The Court was skeptical of the police power justification for the minimum wage. What's more, wages were “the heart of the contract” for employment, therefore government had far less latitude in restricting the free contract right on this issue, free contract being “the general rule and restraint the exception.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ However, the Justices went beyond merely pointing out that women possessed some measure of free contract liberty that could not be trespassed on police power grounds. They also suggested that women's free contract rights were becoming virtually as robust as the free contract rights of men, given social trends and the recent elevation of women's civic status. Justice Sutherland explained that:

The “Alice Paul theory of constitutional law” had been adopted and no ERA had been necessary.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Protective labor legislation for women had been dealt a serious blow. The minimum wage, which had boldly tested the parameters of regulatory labor reform, was near death, and there was foreboding even about maximum-hours laws and other occupational restrictions.Footnote ¹⁸²

Muller did survive intact, however, and proof of that came the following year when the Supreme Court upheld the New York night-work ban for waitresses in the interest of women's health and the public welfare, in Radice v. New York. The WTUL had celebrated this case years earlier when it survived the state court, despite the great outcry of the women workers affected.Footnote ¹⁸³ In discussing the Adkins and Radice decisions, Judith Baer points to the irony in the Court's choice to protect the free contract rights of unskilled, low-paid hotel workers, and yet to deny the free contract rights of independent waitresses who could earn their largest tips at night. She writes that freedom of contract had been “sustained in a situation where it did not exist and curtailed in a situation where it did exist.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ The WTUL did little better than the courts in grappling with the contours and impact of the gendered Constitution and with the legislative solutions it enabled, which did not always reflect workplace realities. It is difficult to claim that trade unionism was a more artful and productive approach than the regulatory approach to protecting and empowering women workers given the manifold difficulties in unionizing women, which turned the WTUL to the regulatory approach in the first place when Muller presented itself. However, de-emphasizing trade unionism and the integration of women into the labor movement as a strategic priority did have some negative consequences for the WTUL and women workers. Some of these negative consequences, however, would not become fully apparent until after the New Deal embrace of protective labor legislation for all workers.