Feminism or Unionism? The New York Women's Trade Union League and the Labor Movement

Abstract

By the turn of the twentieth century, more than 350,000 women were gainfully employed in New York City. The majority of these women, like the majority of female wage earners in the United States generally, worked in service occupations. Nearly 150,000 were personal servants and domestic workers. Additional tens of thousands labored as retail clerks, waitresses, and laundresses.1 A substantial and rapidly growing minority of female laborers made up New York City's industrial work force. In 1900, 132,535 women worked in the city's manufacturing establishments.2 As a center for the manufacture of nondurable goods and as the home of the women's and men's clothing trades, New York employed more female industrial workers than any other American city.3 Female factory workers in New York City labored in a large number of industries and were involved in a broad variety of work processes. Thousands of women stripped, rolled, and packed cigars. They assembled paper boxes, dipped and wrapped candies, trimmed hats, and created artificial flowers and feathers. The heaviest concentration of female industrial workers was in the needle trades. Approximately 65,000 women were engaged in the manufacture of clothing: over 15,000 were employed in the men's garment industry and over 50,000 in the women's ready-made clothing trades.4 Despite the growing importance of women in New York City's industrial work force, very few of them were organized. Union membership was rare among early twentiethcentury New York City working women. Trade union membership statistics paint a dismal picture of women's record from 1900 to 1909. Although more than 350,000 women were employed in the city at the turn of the century, fewer than 10,000 belonged to unions.5 What was more, although the numbers of female workers increased during the first decade of the twentieth century, the number of female unionists in New York City followed a downward trend from 1900 to 1909, particularly during the economic depression of 1907-1908.6 The experiences of the Women's Trade Union League of New York, a feminist labor organization founded late in 1903, are valuable for understanding the special difficulties involved in organizing early twentieth-century working women. In addition, the history of the New York League is useful for examining the problems feminists faced in synthesizing a commitment to the women's movement with a commitment to organized labor. The New York Women's Trade Union League, like its parent organization, the National Women's Trade Union League of America, was made up of female social