Women's Trade Union League - Origins

Origins

The roots of the WTUL come from a British organization of the same name founded thirty years earlier. The British League had originally supported the creation of a separate women’s labor movement but, by the 1890s, merged its own aims with the mainstream British labor movement and functioned as an umbrella organization of women’s trade unions. Its first American supporter was the socialist William English Walling who met with British WTUL leaders in 1902. He returned to the United States and began to generate support for a similar American organization

Organized in 1903 at the American Federation of Labor convention, the WTUL spent much of its early years trying to cultivate ties with the AFL leadership. By 1907, the WTUL saw its purpose as supporting the AFL and encouraging women’s membership in the organization. In its constitution that year, the WTUL defined its purpose in assisting “in organizing women into trade unions...such unions to be affiliated, where practicable, with the American Federation of Labor.” In response, the AFL leadership generally ignored the League. When the WTUL decided to hold its annual conference at a different location than the AFL in 1905, Samuel Gompers was furious and refused to attend. Still, the League did push the AFL towards a pro-suffrage position and did manage to organize more women into the Federation than at any previous time.

It also drew on the earlier work of activists in the settlement house movement, such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, and budding unions in industries with a large number of women workers, such as garments and textiles. The WTUL leadership comprised both upper-class philanthropists and working-class women with experience organizing unions, including a significant portion of the most important female labor leaders of the day, including Mary Kenney O'Sullivan and Rose Schneiderman.

But the heyday of the League came between 1907 and 1922 under the presidency of Margaret Dreier Robins. During that period, the WTUL led the drive to organize women workers into unions, secured protective legislation, and educated the public on the problems and needs of working women.