Rose Schneiderman - Legacy

Legacy

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

"What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with." —Rose Schneiderman, 1912

Her phrase "Bread and Roses", became associated with a 1912 textile strike of largely immigrant, largely women workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.It was later used as the title of a poem and was set to music by Mimi Farina and sung by various artists, among them Judy Collins and John Denver.

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

Schneiderman never married, and treated her nieces and nephews as if they were her own children. She had a long-term relationship with Maud O'Farrell Swartz (1879-1937), another working class woman active in the WTUL, until Swartz' death in 1937. Rose Schneiderman died in New York City on August 11, 1972, at age ninety.

In March 2011, almost 100 years to the day after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Maine's Republican Governor Paul LePage, who was inaugurated in January of the same year, has had a three year old 36 foot-wide mural with scenes of Maine workers on the Department of Labor's building in Augusta removed and brought to a secret location. The mural has 11 panels, and has also a picture showing Rose Schneiderman, although she has never lived or worked in Maine. According to the New York Times, "LePage has also ordered that the Labor Department’s seven conference rooms be renamed. One is named after César Chávez, the farmworkers’ leader; one after Rose Schneiderman, a leader of the New York Women’s Trade Union League a century ago; and one after Frances Perkins, who became the nation’s first female labor secretary and is buried in Maine."

On April 1, a lawsuit against the governor was filed in U.S. District Court in Bangor. It was turned down and the judge wrote in his opinion that "the resolution of this vigorous debate must not rest with judicial authority of a federal court. It must rest instead with the ultimate authority of the people of the state of Maine to choose their leaders." The attorneys for both sides will meet with the court to discuss how to move forward with the case.

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Famous quotes containing the word legacy:

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