For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality

By Dorothy Sue Cobble

A history of the twentieth-century feminists who fought for the rights of women, workers, and the poor, both in the United States and abroad

For the Many presents an inspiring look at how US women and their global allies pushed the nation and the world toward justice and greater equality for all. Reclaiming social democracy as one of the central threads of American feminism, Dorothy Sue Cobble offers a bold rewriting of twentieth-century feminist history and documents how forces, peoples, and ideas worldwide shaped American politics. Cobble follows egalitarian women’s activism from the explosion of democracy movements before World War I to the establishment of the New Deal, through the upheavals in rights and social citizenship at midcentury, to the reassertion of conservatism and the revival of female-led movements today.

Cobble brings to life the women who crossed borders of class, race, and nation to build grassroots campaigns, found international institutions, and enact policies dedicated to raising standards of life for everyone. Readers encounter famous figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Mary McLeod Bethune, together with less well-known leaders, such as Rose Schneiderman, Maida Springer Kemp, and Esther Peterson. Multiple generations partnered to expand social and economic rights, and despite setbacks, the fight for the many persists, as twenty-first-century activists urgently demand a more caring, inclusive world.

Putting women at the center of US political history, For the Many reveals the powerful currents of democratic equality that spurred American feminists to seek a better life for all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691220598

Book preview

FOR THE MANY

AMERICA IN THE WORLD

Sven Beckert and Jeremi Suri, Series Editors

Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality

Roberto Saba, American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation

Katy Hull, The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism

Stefan Link, America’s Antagonists: Making Soviet and Nazi Fordism in the Global Thirties

Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History

Michael Cotey Morgan, The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War

A. G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History

Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside

Kiran Klaus Patel, The New Deal: A Global History

Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics

Jürgen Osterhammel and Patrick Camiller, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

Edited by Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence & Andrew Preston, America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror

Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective

For a full list of titles in the series, go to https://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/title/america-in-the-world.html

For the Many

AMERICAN FEMINISTS AND THE GLOBAL FIGHT FOR DEMOCRATIC EQUALITY

DOROTHY SUE COBBLE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright © 2021 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cobble, Dorothy Sue, author.

Title: For the many : American feminists and the global fight for democratic equality / Dorothy Sue Cobble.

Description: Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2021. | Series: America in the world | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020047372 (print) | LCCN 2020047373 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691156873 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691220598 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Women—Political activity—United States—20th century. | Women social reformers—United States—20th century. | Feminism— United States—History—20th century. | Feminists—United States—Biography. | Equality—United States—History—20th century. | Democracy—United States— History—20th century.

Classification: LCC HQ1236.5.U6 C63 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1236.5.U6 (ebook) | DDC 320.082/0973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047372

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047373

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Priya Nelson, Thalia Leaf

Jacket Design: Layla Mac Rory

Jacket image: Faculty and students from the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, Photo Archives, SSWWI_00079

For Florika, and her gifts from afar

For there can be neither freedom, peace, true democracy, or real development without justice.

MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE, FROM HER SPEECH CLOSED DOORS, 1936

It takes all the brains that humanity can muster to operate a democracy.

MARY RITTER BEARD, LETTER TO ETHEL WOOD, AUGUST 9, 1950

CONTENTS

Prologue: From Equal Rights to Full Rights1

PART I. CITIZENS OF THE WORLD

1 Sitting at the Common Table15

2 A Higher Standard of Life for the World51

PART II. DREAMS DEFERRED

3 A Parliament of Working Women77

4 Social Justice under Siege102

5 Pan-Internationalisms124

PART III. NEW DEALS

6 Social Democracy, American Style155

7 A Women’s New Deal for the World189

PART IV. UNIVERSAL DECLARATIONS

8 Wartime Journeys223

9 Intertwined Freedoms255

10 Cold War Advances294

PART V. REDREAMINGS

11 The Pivotal Sixties339

12 Sisters and Resisters380

Epilogue: Of the Many, By the Many, For the Many415

Acknowledgments427

Abbreviations435

Notes445

Index551

PROLOGUE

From Equal Rights to Full Rights

Leonora O’Reilly. Pencil on paper, 1912, by Wallace Morgan. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

For the Many is a story of how women changed American politics and moved the United States and the world in a more egalitarian, social democratic direction. A politics for the many, not the few, predominated among politically active US women for much of the twentieth century. Understanding how they and their global allies created a more just and inclusive democracy changes the way we think about the past and future of American politics and America’s relation to the world. Over the course of the last century and against great odds, the women profiled in For the Many articulated a transforming social vision, moved into positions of economic and political power at home and abroad, and enacted reforms of lasting value.

For the Many tells the story of individual women. Yet it is not a book celebrating individual heroism or the deeds of great women. It is what might be called a collective biography. Famous women—Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frances Perkins, to name a few—grace these pages and were indispensable to the intellectual and political revolutions of their day. But just as much attention is given to other women, many from less privileged backgrounds, who traveled alongside them. The courage, inventiveness, and stamina of women like Rose Schneiderman, Mary McLeod Bethune, Frieda Miller, Maida Springer, Esther Peterson, and countless others propelled the struggle for democratic equality. This is a story of women, famous and not so famous, who acted together to change the world.

I began my research thinking the egalitarian, social democratic traditions of American women, little understood and often underestimated, worthy of reconsideration. After more than a decade I feel that way even more strongly. Today, much of what the women in For the Many believed and accomplished is under assault. Yet as writer Zadie Smith insisted in 2016, as she accepted a literary prize a few days after Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency, history is not erased by change, and the examples of the past still hold out new possibilities for all of us.¹

The women at the heart of this book sought women’s rights in a fairer, more democratic world. They were feminists because they believed women faced disadvantages as a sex—a perspective not widely shared in their day—and they sought to end those disadvantages. Yet they wanted more than equality between men and women. They wanted a world where all women and men could thrive. To capture their multi-stranded politics, I refer to them throughout the text as "full rights or social democratic feminists. I adopt the modifier full rights," their phrase, to foreground their desire for the full array of rights and their belief that civil and political rights are intertwined with social and economic. Real equality, they judged, must be substantive, universal, and multidimensional. I place them in the social democratic tradition because they held fast to economic and political democracy, sought to curb the power of elites, and believed progress must be social.²

Yet full rights feminists and their social democratic politics turn up under different labels as For the Many moves through the twentieth century: socialist or progressive in the early decades, New Deal liberal or social democrat in the middle decades, and left-liberal Democrat or democratic socialist in the 1960s and after. Some labels persist; others drop by the wayside. I adopt these and other labels when appropriate, but not without trepidation. Our political labels, past and present, are frustratingly imprecise and change meaning over time.³ Nor do such labels adequately convey the complexity, contradictions, or dynamism of the politics of individual people or of the communities in which they lived and worked. But whatever their label, the central figures in For the Many shared a desire for a more egalitarian, democratic world, and they fashioned institutions, laws, and social policies in the United States and abroad to realize those aspirations.

This is a book about women’s politics, but it is not just about women. Men too advanced the ideas recounted here and at times proved indispensable allies. The women in For the Many organized alongside men in grassroots movements for democracy and social justice. They also joined with like-minded men in various political parties. Before the 1930s, full rights feminists could be found as often in the Progressive, Socialist, or Republican Parties as in the Democratic. But after the transformation of the Democratic Party in the 1920s—a revolution led by women—they operated largely within the New Deal framework and saw the Democratic Party as the principal political vehicle carrying forward their broad egalitarian aspirations. From the 1930s to the 1970s, coterminous with the heyday of American social democracy, they pursued their aims in the elite governing spaces usually reserved for men, serving as cabinet officers, members of Congress, high-ranking diplomats, and delegates to intergovernmental assemblies. At the same time, they continued to bolster democratic labor and civic organizations outside of government, believing pressure from below kept states responsive to the majority.

Full rights feminists were not always at home in male-dominated political realms or movements. Nor were they always welcomed. Men were adversaries as well as allies. Women were denied political rights both before and after the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment prohibiting voting restrictions on the basis of sex. Equally frustrating, male-led parties and movements ignored women’s voices, underplayed the disadvantages women faced as a sex, and mistook masculine norms and aspirations as universal. In response, female activists organized separately from men, even as they continued to participate in predominantly male organizations. They constructed women’s committees, caucuses, and divisions inside grassroots movements and political parties. They established independent organizations and created all-female networks. This tradition of female political separatism was strongest in the early twentieth century and reemerged in the 1970s, but it never wholly disappeared. Women from different classes, cultures, religions, and racial groups participated in this female world, and a surprising number of immigrant and working-class women held positions of political and intellectual leadership in it.

Still, some of the stiffest opposition faced by full rights feminists came from other women, including other feminists. Divisions among US feminists intensified after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, and for the next half-century American feminism split into warring camps. From the 1920s to the 1970s, full rights feminists joined with others in a social feminist coalition to oppose the National Woman’s Party and its allies.⁴ Full rights feminists judged the National Woman’s Party, with its unwavering single focus on equal rights, or formal legal equality between the sexes, as narrow, individualistic, and elitist. In their view, the pursuit of women’s rights in tandem with other broad social reforms was necessary for the majority of women to advance. Only by confronting multiple and intertwined injustices, they argued, could the problems of the many, men as well as women, be solved. The war between the two camps, symbolized by conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, subsided in the 1970s, but US feminism has continued into the twenty-first century as a contentious, multifaceted movement.

Full rights feminists also battled with conservatives—men and women, feminists and non-feminists—on some of the great social and economic issues of the day. They clashed with conservatives over the desirability of social welfare and labor legislation; the role of the state in constraining corporate power and ensuring shared prosperity; and the rights due workers, immigrants, and people of color. Because they wanted greater democracy and more socialized markets, they disagreed with those who found authoritarian workplaces or unregulated cutthroat capitalism acceptable. They parted ways too with isolationists and go-it-alone nationalists—and not so amicably—over the extent and nature of America’s responsibilities in the world, its relation to international institutions and alliances, and how best to achieve global stability and peace.

At the same time, they took issue with those on the left who espoused revolutionary violence, or who, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, conflated socialism with Soviet-style Communism. They rejected authoritarianism from the left and right, opposing the dictatorship of any person or class. They pursued egalitarian reforms through democratic means: popular education, the ballot box, democratic trade unionism, and legislative policy making. They chose nonviolent direct action: marches, strikes, sit-ins, and boycotts. Physical force was a last resort, and for some, never justified. Armed struggle and one-party rule, they believed, were weapons of the arrogant and the unimaginative—better to change hearts and minds through moral suasion and democratic debate.

For the Many is a global story. American politics has never been American-made. It sprang from the foreign born and the native born, from noncitizen and citizen, from those who visited the United States for days or stayed years, and from those who never set foot on US soil. The world made America, as Eric Rauchway once put it, and to study American politics one must see its borders as porous and its history affected by global ideas, peoples, and events.⁵ For the Many foregrounds the cross-class, multicultural, and multiracial character of social democratic women’s movements inside the United States and sees activists outside it as crucial shapers of US women’s politics. Social democratic women forged alliances across geographical borders and built international institutions to move forward their reforms. They learned from women and men in other countries. They believed America’s problems could not be solved apart from the world.

In writing this book, I followed the thread of US women’s social democratic politics over time and across place, surprised by where it led, heartened by what I found. I picked up the thread as it sprang into view in the years before the First World War. I held on as it crossed borders of nation and culture and into places I had only, and at times wrongly, imagined. I crisscrossed the globe, daunted by the difficulties of international travel and cross-cultural communication. I visited immaculately restored castles and overgrown empty fields, searching for where American full rights feminists and their allies had gathered. I found traces in archival folders delivered by mistake and in mislabeled boxes I opened as an afterthought. Some of my most important discoveries happened when I visited the wrong archive or took the wrong elevator to rooms rarely frequented. I found out more about the famous in the untouched letters of the obscure than from many days sorting through the voluminous, carefully arranged papers of the notable. I lived in countries not my own for long stretches, experiencing some of the fear, disorientation, loneliness, and exhilaration uprooting can bring. How much more intense were those feelings for the women in this book, American born and otherwise, whose sojourns in nations not their own extended for years or lasted a lifetime.

In the end, I returned home to an America much in need of the wisdoms of its social democratic foremothers. They too lived in a world of stark inequality and diminishing democracy. They too despaired at the cruelty of political tyrants and the selfishness of capitalist elites. And they too pondered the seemingly intractable hierarchies of race, nation, sex, and culture. Their solutions to these problems, though partial, bear revisiting.

Today, few dispute the great chasm separating rich and poor nations. But it has taken longer to recognize the severity of economic inequality within nations, including within wealthy nations like the United States, where the maldistribution of income and wealth ranks among the worst in the world.⁶ The full rights feminists in For the Many made solving economic inequality a top priority, and to their credit they sought a fairer distribution of the world’s wealth both within and between nations. Diminishing the stark inequalities in US society meant thinking seriously about America’s role abroad and how its international policies affected others. US prosperity rested on global prosperity, which in turn depended on flourishing economies in other nations and raising income and standards of life worldwide.

Economic reform, they determined, could not happen without an intellectual revolution. Full rights feminists began their assault on economic inequality in the early twentieth century by attacking the social Darwinist beliefs that justified it. Extreme inequality and mass poverty were not the inevitable result of hereditary differences between the poor and the rich, they insisted. Nor were such problems the product of natural market laws, as conventional economic theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries held. Economic stratification as well as class and race hierarchies were man made, they proclaimed, and therefore could be unmade. The intellectual revolution they pushed forward enabled the social transformations of the 1930s and later. Today’s resurgent social Darwinism, with its fictional gospel of unalterable market dynamics, engrained racism, and class condescension, must again be dislodged if we are to move toward economic fairness and shared prosperity.

Their proposals for lessening economic inequality varied as economic circumstances and political opportunities shifted over the course of the century. Yet some premises did not change: the US economy could not be walled off from the world, and no single remedy would suffice. To tackle inequality at home and abroad, they pressed for a package of reforms. They called for the rights of workers to organize and bargain in the United States and other countries; regulation of domestic and global economies; higher international social and labor standards; and fairer, more democratic systems for determining the rules of state and workplace governance. They believed in the economic benefits of regulated trade and immigration. They defended workers’ freedom of movement across borders and argued for the full rights of men and women of all races, religions, and nationalities. Poverty and oppression anywhere, they insisted, threatened living standards and freedoms everywhere.

Ensuring democracy in all realms of society—in government, at work, at home, and in the community—loomed just as large in their politics as fixing the economy.⁷ They looked to states, intergovernmental bodies, and international organizations as crucial vehicles for economic and social reform and demanded that they be democratized. Yet they never stopped encouraging organization from below. They sought democratic decision-making at work and the freedoms—the right to vote, to free speech, to freely assemble, and to a free press—necessary for civil society to flourish. They created socially inclusive grassroots organizations within and across national boundaries to sustain democracy and promote the full representation of all people.

At times, their democratic experiments languished, and authoritarianism gained the upper hand, claiming to be the better route to redistributing wealth and providing economic security. Yet the full rights feminists in For the Many refused to abandon democracy, as messy and frustrating as it was. They believed democratic states, if guided by and beholden to democratic labor and community organizations, could do much to ensure a fair share of wealth and power to the world’s many.

As fascism spread in the 1930s, the struggle for human rights took on added urgency among social reformers. Yet for many full rights feminists, defending the rights of all people, regardless of race, religion, nationality, or citizenship status, had always been a priority. For some, deeply held religious beliefs in the sanctity of each person motivated their human rights advocacy. Support for human rights flowed as well from secular beliefs in fairness and social justice and from personal, painful experiences of exclusion and persecution. From early in the twentieth century, full rights feminists conceived of human rights broadly to encompass economic and social guarantees as well as civil and political rights. And by mid-century, as women of color moved into positions of leadership in the movement, human rights came to mean ending the global color line and extending self-government to colonized peoples.

None of the goals of full rights feminists—economic justice, democracy, or human rights—could be achieved apart from education. Educating the mind and cultivating the spirit were not afterthoughts. Democratic workplaces and governments required an educated citizenry. A fairer world rested on expanding human capacities for compassion, empathy, and tolerance. Without that, politics—whether left, right or center—could dehumanize and demean. Social democratic feminists pioneered urban settlement houses such as Chicago’s Hull House where rich and poor, native-born and immigrant, engaged in sustained cross-cultural learning. They also created emancipatory education programs for women workers in community centers, workplaces, and college campuses across the country. The most famous of these experiments in democratic pedagogy and social solidarity, the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, lasted from 1921 to 1938. A multiracial group of participants from the eight-week residential Bryn Mawr school look back at us from the cover of For the Many. Taken after students voted in 1925—with the Second Ku Klux Klan at its peak nationwide—to open the school to all women, the image evokes the school’s egalitarian spirit and its dedication to resisting prejudice and hate. Bryn Mawr—and the many other education programs encouraged by full rights feminists—proved pivotal in fostering a liberatory, inclusive women’s movement.

To be sure, the women in For the Many did not always live up to the democratic and inclusive ideals they espoused, nor did their actions always have the desired effects. They could be ethnocentric and misguided, endorsing policies that sustained rather than dismantled inequities. Power imbalances and hierarchical notions of nations and peoples affected their choices and at times blinded them to the needs and realities of others. How to reconcile the competing demands of near and far, of local and global, was hardly self-evident. Still, many rejected the dominant imperial, racist, and elitist presumptions of their day.⁸ Immigrant women and women of color tended to see peoples beyond US borders not as them but as us. Religious and moral values also nourished cosmopolitan proclivities and propelled many toward more egalitarian alliances. They traveled, they learned, they changed. They navigated differences within their own ranks over how to address the deep and abiding tensions of social class, religion, and race. They adopted ideas from those they admired and understood, as well as from those they underestimated and misunderstood. Mutually beneficial outcomes could and did occur.⁹

The story of US women’s social democratic politics over the last century was not one of ever upward progress. It moved in fits and starts, with tragic detours and dispiriting defeats alongside celebrations and gains. For the Many opens with the rise of US women’s organizing for political inclusion and economic justice in the early twentieth century—a pivotal era for working women’s politics at home and abroad. In the wake of World War I, US full rights feminists deepened their transnational connections with labor and social democratic women outside the United States and won surprising victories on the global stage. Political advance slowed in the 1920s in the face of resurgent conservatism at home and thwarted alliances abroad. Yet as American women remade the US Democratic Party in the late 1920s and built dynamic multiracial left-leaning movements from below in the 1930s, democratic egalitarianism revived in the United States, even as much of the world slipped into authoritarianism. From the 1930s to the 1970s, social democratic feminists secured far-sighted and consequential reform. In an oft-repeated and troubling pattern, however, some of the policies closest to their heart, especially those boosting social and economic guarantees, won more adherents abroad than at home. The late twentieth century witnessed widening inequalities among women as well as men, and a feminism for the many remained in the wings, waiting for its next entry onto the stage.

Authoritarian regimes have ascendancy in many regions and nations in the twenty-first century, spewing forth their messages of hate and fear. Yet a new politics of the many has also emerged. There is a new openness to egalitarian and social democratic ideas among a wide swath of Americans. Women, especially women of color and young women, are energized politically and are shifting the conversation about how the US government treats its own citizens and how it interacts with the rest of the world. An alternative politics, premised on social solidarity, inclusion, and equity, is vying to take back parliaments and presidencies. For the Many seeks to enrich our understandings of these lost egalitarian traditions and argues for their potential in navigating a way forward.

PART I

Citizens of the World

Delegates to the 1919 International Congress of Working Women. Mary Anderson stands at the end of the first row on the left. Britain’s Margaret Bondfield is fourth from the left next to Rose Schneiderman who holds a large black hat. Behind them is Pauline Newman (with bowler hat and tie). Japan’s Tanaka Taka, clutching papers, is fourth from the right. Margaret Dreier Robins is the last figure on the right. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC.

A democratic wind stirred across much of the world in the early twentieth century. Movements for the rights of women, workers, and other disenfranchised groups erupted in the United States as elsewhere. Far from being isolated or parochial, the social democratic branch of US feminism was transnational to its core. It shared ideas, people, and resources across national borders, and many of its leaders were first or second-generation immigrants, spoke multiple languages, and maintained strong cultural and family ties outside the United States.

The movement’s guiding political assumptions reinforced its cosmopolitan character. Full rights feminists created a politics dedicated to the common good and they sought to build a more inclusive women’s movement. They reached out to like-minded allies beyond America’s borders—convinced that through transnational alliances they could lift the world’s standard of living and secure women’s representation in the global governance structures emerging after World War I.

Part One tells the story of this close-knit community of feminist reformers and narrates the rise of US women’s social democratic internationalism in a world reeling from popular insurgencies, collapsing empires, and wartime atrocities. We follow US feminists as they organize at home and abroad to advance women’s rights, democracy, and social justice. Their efforts culminated in 1919. US women, in alliance with labor and social democratic women from around the world, demanded inclusion in the postwar global institutions emerging at Versailles, crystallized a transnational working women’s agenda, and left their mark on the world’s first set of labor standards.

1

Sitting at the Common Table

NO ORGANIZATION was more important to the rise of women’s social democratic internationalism in twentieth-century America than the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL).¹ Founded in 1903, its principles reflected the core ideals of full rights feminism—dedication to democracy and social equality—and its leaders strove to abide by those values in their own lives, as well as in the life of the organization. Neither the individual women at its helm nor the organization itself succeeded in realizing the quite radical democratic aspirations the WTUL embodied. Nonetheless, women like those who created and led the WTUL moved the United States away from elitism and helped undermine the prevailing social Darwinist disdain for working people. They cleared the way for a social politics that rejected laissez-faire economic ideologies and America First isolationism.

The mixed-class group of white women (and some men) who launched the WTUL in Boston wanted an organization that would prioritize the interests of low-income women. In their view, none of the elite-led women’s organizations or male-led trade unions paid adequate attention to working-class women.² WTUL founders included veteran labor leaders like Knights of Labor radical Leonora O’Reilly and Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, the first national female organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The group also included middle-class social reformers such as Wellesley Professor of Political Economy Emily Greene Balch, socialist labor advocate William English Walling, and the revered Jane Addams.³ Jane Addams and others close to her in the settlement house world were especially crucial in sustaining the early league and shaping its initial philosophy. Addams believed in social services and self-help for the urban poor—what journalist Walter Lippmann famously called compassion without condescension. Yet Addams also championed a new social ethic of democratic and inclusive group life. Increasing the participation and power of workers—the laboring men and women of all races and cultures—was part of the solution to the great problems of the day. She called on all with an aroused conscience to declare, as a matter of social justice, the complete participation of the working classes in the spiritual, intellectual and material inheritance of the human race. All must be welcome at the common table.⁴

The league’s attention to class equality and democratic governance was evident in its constitution. Any person who embraced the league’s goals could join, and to advance democratic decision-making and working women’s self-development, its constitution stipulated that a majority of the members of the national and local executive boards must be women who are or have been trade unionists in good standing.⁵ Such rules did not end class privilege in the league: elite white Protestant reformers continued to exert considerable influence. Nor was the organization free of racial, religious, and cultural tensions and exclusions.⁶ Even though the WTUL cooperated with Black-led organizations, for example, and some of its leaders were among those who founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), WTUL membership and leadership remained largely white before the 1920s. Still, the league was unusual among white women’s organizations of the day in the power wielded by working-class and immigrant women. Low-income women from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds comprised the majority of league members, held the majority of executive board seats, and led some of the most active league branches. Their notions of justice and fairness infused league activities and guided its priorities.

Within a few years, the league settled on an intertwined agenda of women’s rights, democracy, and industrial justice. Its 1907 First Platform listed full citizenship for women, the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, a living wage and shorter hours, and equal pay for equal work. Genuine democracy and economic fairness were achievable but only if working people organized into independent trade unions. Worker organization was a necessary counterbalance to the organized power of capital, because it preserved democratic decision-making in industry and government. Democratic states could not thrive alongside despotic workshops, league president Margaret Dreier Robins thought. Self-government in industry, as in politics, was essential to a free society. Worker organization was also a route to developing the full moral, intellectual, and leadership capacities of wage earners. But the larger society had to change as well. America’s immigrant and working classes deserved greater social respect, sympathy, and communal feeling, as Jane Addams put it.⁷ A better world for the many rested on new cultural norms not just changed laws and workplace practices.

League women identified with a range of early twentieth-century political parties—Socialist, Progressive, Democratic, Republican, Farmer-Labor—and many changed party allegiances as the parties themselves evolved. Diverging political proclivities strained unity at times, especially when overlaid by temperamental differences, with members of a more radical, impatient wing frustrated with their politically moderate and socially conservative sisters. League women, for example, divided their vote in the bitterly contested four-way 1912 presidential election. Although Wilson’s New Freedom Democrats won the presidency, the political enthusiasms of league women often lay elsewhere. Some warmed to the Socialist Party’s long list of social reforms and its stirring condemnation of plutocratic rule and capitalist worship of profit. Others thrilled when Jane Addams seconded Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination to head the Progressive Party ticket, the first time a woman had done so, and the party approved a platform of equal suffrage to men and women alike; the 8-hour day and a living wage in all occupations; organization of workers, men and women; prohibition of child labor; a National Health Service; social insurance for the elderly, the ill, and the unemployed; and federal inheritance and income taxes.⁸ Yet despite the shifting array of party allegiances among members, the league’s overall principles of egalitarianism and representative democracy held firm, placing it in a long and capacious US tradition of social democratic politics.

The league shared with the AFL, the largest national trade union federation of the day, beliefs in constitutionalism and the rule of law, as well as commitments to making markets and corporations more democratic and equitable. The league cooperated with the AFL, believing the collective empowerment of working people crucial to democracy and economic fairness. Yet the league favored a greater role for the state and for regulatory laws in the economy than did the AFL. Unlike the AFL, it sought broad social welfare measures, including state income subsidies for poor families, and it pressed for fair labor standards laws for adult men, as well as for women and children. Its support for immigrant rights and for more inclusive unions also provoked conflict with the AFL. The league rejected the AFL’s nativist immigration policies, for example, and sought an American labor movement in which workers of all sexes and backgrounds would be welcome.⁹

Inspired by the expansive sense of community internationalism and world social citizenship popularized by Jane Addams, league women believed a more peaceful and just social order rested on ordinary citizens, including working women, becoming more involved in world affairs.¹⁰ Yet league internationalism also grew out of a shared set of beliefs about the economy and its relation to peace. Peace among nations depended on raising wages and ensuring fair labor standards for all. Like many liberal internationalists of the era, league women favored expanded trade and lower tariffs as a route to global economic growth and prosperity. The league differed markedly, however, from liberal internationalists who accepted unregulated global markets and capital mobility, tolerated autocratic enterprise, and reserved the right to limit self-determination to a select few nations and peoples. The WTUL embraced state- and union-regulated economies and political, economic, and social rights for all.¹¹

Crossing Boundaries

The women who led the league in its first decades were drawn from the rich as well as the poor. They also reflected the league’s mix of native born and immigrant and its religious and ethnic diversity. Margaret Dreier Robins and her younger sister Mary Dreier, two wealthy women of Protestant background, devoted their lives to the league and were among its most important leaders. Yet immigrant and working-class women like Leonora O’Reilly, Agnes Nestor, Mary Anderson, Rose Schneiderman, and Maud O’Farrell Swartz contributed just as much intellectually and otherwise. It was a jumbled world of class and cultural difference that at times marginalized some unfairly and produced hurt and misunderstanding. But it was also a world of cooperation, love, mutual learning, and affirmation.

The Brooklyn-born Dreier sisters grew up in the 1870s and 1880s in a prosperous and civic-minded German immigrant family. Their father had left Bremen, Germany, for New York in 1849. Within a few years he became New York manager and partner in an English iron distribution firm and married his cousin, the daughter of a devout German pastor in Bremen. The couple settled in Brooklyn and educated their children in private schools and at home, making sure the four girls absorbed the teachings of the German Evangelical Church. Their father died unexpectedly in 1897, leaving each of his daughters a generous inheritance. Guided by religious values of social responsibility and redemptive possibility, Margaret and Mary initially chose to devote themselves to charity and welfare work. Their lives changed after meeting Leonora O’Reilly at Asacog House, the Brooklyn settlement house where she worked as head resident.¹²

O’Reilly had experienced the world quite differently than the two Dreier sisters. Born in 1870 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Irish immigrants, O’Reilly left school at age eleven to take a job in a collar factory when her father died. She soon began organizing worker cooperatives for the Knights of Labor, the populist labor federation then at its peak, and in 1886, at age sixteen, she set up a New York Working Women’s Society to advance the welfare and organization of wage-earning women and children. She also found intellectual mentors among her labor comrades. By the time she met the Dreier sisters, she was a sophisticated, well-read political thinker. She had absorbed political economy, history, and philosophy from her Lower East Side self-education group, the Comte Synthetic Circle, and learned French and radical labor theory from French-born anarchist, internationalist, and political refugee Victor S. Drury. In 1897, two New York City philanthropists, impressed by O’Reilly’s far-sighted leadership of the Working Women’s Society, financed her attendance at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. O’Reilly’s zealous advocacy, idealism and wide vision captivated the Dreier sisters. In 1904, following O’Reilly’s advice, they joined the New York league.¹³

Margaret Dreier worked alongside O’Reilly in New York only briefly. After a short stint as president of the New York league, she moved to Chicago and, at age 37, married Raymond Robins. A fierce urban crusader and devout proponent of Social Gospel Christianity, Raymond Robins was known for his histrionic personality and colorful past. Abandoned as a child by his once-illustrious family, he had struggled financially, working as a miner in Tennessee and the Rocky Mountains before making a fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush and turning to Christianity.¹⁴ The couple had no children, and Margaret Dreier Robins devoted her formidable energy and a substantial portion of her growing wealth to the league. Self-assured and commanding, she took naturally to organizational leadership and public speaking. She spoke with a slight German accent, one of her fellow reformers remembered, in a frank, open, sympathetic manner.¹⁵ By 1907, she was president of both the national WTUL, headquartered in Chicago, and the Chicago branch.

A staunch supporter of labor organization, she integrated the league into the vibrant Chicago community of progressive trade unionists, led by Irish-born Chicago Labor Federation president John Fitzpatrick. The Labor Federation, a powerful citywide organization, united thousands of Chicago’s diverse working classes and was busily organizing the rest. Its commitment to organizing all workers and its unorthodox open-door policy (it admitted social reformers, socialists, and other non-unionists sympathetic to labor) suited her perfectly. When the Labor Federation elected her to its executive board in 1908, she readily accepted and promptly moved league offices to the Federation’s labor hall.¹⁶

Margaret Dreier Robins was equally immersed in the dynamic female world of reform centered at the University of Chicago and Hull House, where the Chicago league held its first meetings. Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, pioneering industrial researchers, made the University of Chicago a world center for applied sociology and social work education and linked its programs to Hull House, the nation’s preeminent settlement house. Set up by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, Hull House exemplified the values of democracy, inclusion, and social betterment. The curious and the already committed flocked to it from around the world, looking for solutions to the poverty, social unrest, and inequality plaguing industrializing societies.¹⁷

A complicated figure, Margaret Dreier Robins could be haughty and imperious in her interpersonal relations while at the same time acting—often courageously—to defend principles of democratic governance and equality. Robins honored the Chicago league’s commitment to working-class leadership and self-development and in 1913 requested a trade union woman replace her as Chicago branch president. There was no shortage of talent. The executive board chose Agnes Nestor, a veteran strike leader and political lobbyist, from among the many capable candidates. A Michigan-born Irish Catholic unionist, Nestor had led her shop of glove makers out on strike as a young girl and within a few years assumed a national vice presidency of the International Glove Workers’ Union, a union she and her coworker German-born Elisabeth Christman established. Nestor had been the primary force behind the 1909 legislative battle for a ten-hour working day in Illinois and, in 1911, fought to expand the law’s coverage to non-industrial women. Under Nestor’s leadership, the Chicago league flourished. It helped win partial voting rights for Illinois women in 1913, and in partnership with the Chicago Federation of Labor, it built on the massive 1910 walkout of Chicago garment workers—sparked by Russian immigrant and Hull House night school graduate Bessie Abramowitz—to expand unionism into other female trades. The garment strike led to the formation of the powerful, left-leaning Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a national union, and inspired optimism across the country about the possibilities of organizing immigrants and bringing joint decision-making by labor and management to industry.¹⁸

Robins also hired working-class women in staff positions at the national league. Factory worker and union official Mary Anderson, whom Robins brought on as a national league organizer in 1913, turned out to be an inspired choice. Anderson had left her family’s rural farm in Lidköping, Sweden, at age sixteen, traveling to America with an older sister, each carrying thirty dollars sent by a third sister already in the United States. Anderson washed dishes at a lumber camp and held other domestic jobs before landing work in a boot factory. She spent thirteen years there, organizing unions, leading strikes, and negotiating labor contracts. As a league organizer, she assisted in the great strikes that broke out in Chicago’s International Harvester Works and endured police violence and jail for peaceful picketing and speaking in public. What she lacked in charisma, she made up in courage, dogged determination, and pragmatic level-headedness.¹⁹

Robins added to Anderson’s responsibilities in 1914 by appointing her director of the league’s experimental educational program cosponsored with the University of Chicago. In it, industrial women, accepted without an exam by the university, studied labor problems and political economy side by side with college students for six months—with tuition and expenses paid by the league. Afterward, participants engaged in field work and hands-on learning for another six months. The pioneering program grew out of the league’s commitment to developing the whole person and its belief in the intellectual and leadership capacities of members of all classes. In addition to the University of Chicago program, the league sponsored lectures and held its own classes on art, music, and creative writing, as well as trade union fundamentals. The organized girl is the thinking girl, Anderson declared.²⁰

Mary Dreier, unlike her sister Margaret, stayed in New York for much of her adult life, nestled in a female reform community knit together by intimate friendships and love affairs, as well as shared political passions. Like a number of other league leaders, she chose a woman as her life partner. Somewhat introverted, Dreier did not relish being in the spotlight, especially when it meant defending an organization as controversial as the league. In 1906, however, she took on the presidency of the New York league, encouraged by Leonora O’Reilly and urban sociologist Frances Kellor, who became Dreier’s lifelong companion. Kellor had been raised in a poor household, but she shared Dreier’s dedication to realizing Social Gospel Christian ideals of ameliorating poverty. They had met in 1904 after Kellor chose New York for fieldwork on her second book, Out of Work, a study of joblessness and how employment agencies exploited immigrant and Black female migrants. Within a few years, the two were sharing the Dreier family mansion in Brooklyn. They remained together until Kellor’s death in 1952.²¹

Under Dreier’s presidency from 1906 to 1914, the New York league, like its sister Chicago branch, devoted energy to industrial organizing, labor legislation, and education. There were notable victories. Its unflinching support of the mostly young Italian and Jewish immigrant shirtwaist makers who sparked the 1909 citywide garment strike, later known as the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, won it respect and new members. The league rejected the class paternalism of supporters like Anne Morgan, J. P. Morgan’s daughter, and backed the strikers’ non-negotiable demand for independent unionism. The strike, a turning point in US history, helped reinvigorate industrial unionism and bolster the forces within organized labor dedicated to inclusion and state action. After the horrific tragedy of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in which 146 young immigrant women died, the league joined the broad-based push in New York for industrial reforms. Mary Dreier sat as the sole woman on the nine-member New York State Factory Investigating Commission. Chaired by State Senator Robert Wagner, with Assemblyman Al Smith as vice chair, the commission’s four years of hearings and investigations provoked a general awakening about the need for corporate social responsibility and regulatory oversight. Frances Perkins, former secretary of the New York Consumers’ League and chair of New York City’s Workplace Safety Committee, testified before the commission and was later hired as its director of investigation. Perkins insisted commissioners see firsthand the harrowing dangers of industrial workplaces, an experience they never forgot. The work of the commission and its final report, issued in 1915, resulted in dozens of new state and municipal laws, including limits on workplace hours and strict industrial health and safety codes.²²

The New York league also contributed to immigrant rights, interracial cooperation, and suffrage advocacy. In 1906, Kellor and Dreier formed the National League for the Protection of Colored Women to assist new migrants with jobs and housing (it later merged with the National Urban League). In 1909, Dreier set aside some of her inheritance and gave O’Reilly a lifetime annuity. O’Reilly was overjoyed. She wanted desperately to have more time for her newly adopted daughter and for political activism. She quit her job as a sewing instructor and combined serving as New York league vice president with work for the Socialist Party and the NAACP, which formed in 1909 to combat racial violence, Jim Crow, and the systematic denial of citizenship rights to African Americans. The NAACP’s early members included O’Reilly, Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and other white reformers as well as internationally renowned African American leaders, such as celebrated author and civil rights icon W.E.B. Du Bois and investigatory journalist and antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett.²³ O’Reilly also threw herself into the suffrage strugge. By 1912, she was the president of the New York Wage Earners’ Suffrage League, a group she helped found, and a nationally sought-after suffrage speaker. Her speaking fees allowed her to buy a home in Brooklyn, where she lived with her mother and cared for an aging Victor Drury, her childhood teacher.²⁴

O’Reilly was not the only working-class woman to hold a top office in the New York league. In New York, as in Chicago, a majority of the leaders came from the ranks of labor. Rose Schneiderman and her lifelong companion Maud O’Farrell Swartz were among the most prominent. Born in 1882 in Saven, a small Polish village on the western edge of the Russian Empire, Schneiderman migrated as a child to New York City’s Lower East Side. Her father, like many Eastern European Jewish immigrants, found work as a tailor. Tragically, he died a year later, and Rose and her siblings were separated from their mother and put into a Jewish orphanage until she could provide for them. At age thirteen, Schneiderman took a job as an errand girl in a department store. Against her mother’s wishes, she found a less respectable but higher paying factory job sewing linings into men’s caps. She and her coworkers organized the first female local of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers’ Union, a Jewish-led socialist organization, and Schneiderman won office in the national union. When the cap makers shut down the industry in 1907, league women joined Schneiderman on the picket line. League leaders recognized her abilities and offered her a stipend, which allowed her to quit her factory job and return to night school.

The grueling conditions of tenement labor stayed with her a lifetime, as did her experiences as a strike leader in the 1909 garment uprising and its aftermath. She never forgot the deep abiding fury aroused by the deaths of her fellow workers as fire swept through the locked rooms of the Triangle Company. Shortly after the fire, in New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, Schneiderman gave her most famous speech. Only four feet, nine inches tall, with flaming red hair, she spoke almost in a whisper to the thousands gathered there. Her words electrified the crowd. Working people did not need charity, she insisted; they needed political and economic rights, including the right to organize unions. Only then could they stop the system that burned them alive.²⁵

In 1911, Schneiderman accepted a job as the New York league’s lobbyist, where she devoted much of her time to state legislative campaigns for workplace safety and other labor protections. But like O’Reilly, she combined her league work with women’s suffrage advocacy and Socialist Party politics. At suffrage rallies and political equality clubs across the state, she drew on her industrial experience to demolish anti-suffrage claims that the vote would destroy women’s delicacy and charm. We have women working in the foundries, stripped to the waist, if you please, because of the heat, she responded to a state legislator’s challenge in 1912. Yet the Senator says nothing about these women losing their charm. Surely these women won’t lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to lose standing in foundries or laundries all year round. In 1914, frustrated by her failed bid for New York league president, Schneiderman left the league and organized for her union, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), for three years. But she returned and on her second try for the presidency, she won. Schneiderman was never fully comfortable in the predominantly Christian world of the league. But she felt more at home there than in the patriarchal milieu of male trade unionism. The league, she once noted, even with all its problems, at least shared her dual commitment to workers’ rights and women’s equality—and it encouraged, rather than feared, her leadership.²⁶

Schneiderman’s companion of twenty-five years, Irish-born Maud O’Farrell Swartz, arrived in New York in 1901, a twenty-three-year-old former governess in search of a different life. She too would occupy top league posts. Educated in German and French convent schools because her father, an Irish flour miller, could not provide for his large family, she was fluent in French, German, and Italian. In 1905, she signed on as a proofreader in a foreign-language printing firm and married a coworker, Lee Swartz, a typographical unionist. They soon separated, but never divorced because of Maud’s Catholic faith. Schneiderman heard Swartz deliver a pro-suffrage stump speech in Italian and recruited her to the league. After joining in 1912, Swartz took advantage of the league’s leadership training school and moved quickly into local and then national office. She succeeded Margaret Dreier Robins as WTUL national president in 1922, and four years later, she passed the reins to Schneiderman, who served as the league’s top national officer until its dissolution in 1950.²⁷

WTUL Allies

The league’s emphasis on union action and its inclusion of immigrant and low-income women in leadership distinguished it from many other Progressive Era women’s organizations. Still, other groups shared its goals of women’s rights and social justice, and as we have seen, league members often joined multiple reform organizations. Among women’s groups, the WTUL’s closest partners were the National Consumers’ League (NCL) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).

Propelled forward by the indomitable spirit of its socialist founder Florence Kelley, the NCL, formed in 1899, relied on public education, organized consumer power, and labor legislation to end industrial exploitation and create a fairer economy. As chief factory inspector in Illinois, Kelley found that few sweatshop employers raised workplace standards voluntarily. Organized consumer pressure and state regulation, she concluded, were necessary. Women may lack voting power, Kelley pointed out, but every person is a consumer and consumer choices matter. NCL provided the technical information and organization consumers needed to exert power in the market and moralize buying. It investigated worksites and urged consumers to patronize humane employers who made wholesome products under right conditions. Kelley defined right conditions in 1899 as fair living wages for all workers, equal pay for work of equal value, irrespective of sex, and limits on overtime and child labor.²⁸

NCL and its dozens of local affiliates agitated for decent labor standards for both sexes. But thwarted by conservative courts, which repeatedly ruled government regulations affecting adult male workers unconstitutional, NCL and other full rights feminists concentrated on fair standards for women and children, hoping such laws would serve as an opening wedge for universal regulations. In 1908, when the Supreme Court in Muller v. Oregon sustained the right of a state to limit women’s hours to ten and proclaimed public interest in women’s maternal function more important than women’s right to freedom of contract, the push for labor laws specific to women and children picked up speed. Over the next decade, a big-tent movement led by the NCL and the WTUL secured new and improved maximum-hour laws for women in forty-one states. Minimum-wage laws, especially those insisting on a living wage—defined by the league as a wage sufficient for self-support and support of a dependent—met more resistance. After Massachusetts passed the first minimum-wage law for women and children in 1912, a dozen other states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico followed suit. Although the minimum-wage laws proved disappointing, with wages set low and enforcement minimal, the lowest-paid women and children experienced modest pay gains. In addition to reducing hours and raising pay, fair labor standard laws mandated rest and lunch breaks and instituted workplace health and safety protections.²⁹

An even broader coalition of reform-minded women helped spread so-called mothers’ pension laws across the country. More properly termed children’s allowances, such laws provided cash subsidies to dependent children and their caregivers in poor single-headed families. States varied widely in determining which families were eligible. Widowed mothers were entitled to income support in all of the laws, but some states also deemed abandoned and never-married mothers, as well as fathers, eligible for income support. Nonwhite and immigrant caregivers often failed to qualify, however, and aid was rarely sufficient for a family. This same network established the US Children’s Bureau in 1912 to promote child welfare through expanding mothers’ pension benefits and abolishing child labor. Children were best cared for in their own homes, the bureau argued, not in state institutions. They were entitled to education and self-development rather than a childhood of sweated labor.³⁰

The YWCA and the WTUL combined forces after the YWCA Industrial Department, the division within the national association responsible for organizing Bible study groups and other wholesome activities for working girls, left behind its focus on individual salvation and embraced Social Gospel Christianity.³¹ The reorientation of YWCA philosophy and policy in the United States happened in tandem with changes in the World YWCA, the global body established in 1894 by national YWCA groups in Britain, the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Norway. In 1910, two years after the Federal Council of Churches in the United States endorsed a social creed urging Protestant churches to take responsibility for improving social conditions, the World YWCA adopted a similar Social Gospel perspective at its Berlin Conference. Florence Simms, the founder and first head of the YWCA Industrial Department in the United States, had chaired the World YWCA’s study commission on social problems and vowed to take the American YWCA in a daring new direction. As one of her co-conspirators Ernestine Friedmann explained, the American YWCA had begun as an organization of one class of women for another class of women, but those individualistic and autocratic days must come to an end. Under pressure from Simms and the YWCA Industrial Department, the association as a whole entered a social viewpoint period, and in 1911, the YWCA biennial convention endorsed living wages and the study of social problems as part of a refashioned industrial charter.³² Next, Simms declared, the association should back the right of women workers to bargain collectively. To encourage such a shift, the Industrial Department established closer cooperation with the league and in 1913 sent its first fraternal delegate to the league’s convention.³³

The Industrial Department also set up politically oriented self-governing industrial clubs for working women. Factory operatives, waitresses, laundry and other low-income women workers flocked to these new-style clubs. The national YWCA had long offered housing, food, and employment services to low-income women along with religious instruction; the new industrial clubs moved away from charity and toward a more social, movement-building focus. The clubs met in the neutral space of the YWCA, free of employer oversight. There, women workers shared common problems more freely and chose topics of study—economics, worker rights, trade union organizing—once out of bounds. By 1914, over 375 industrial clubs existed, with many networked into citywide and regional councils. The industrial club movement, however, remained largely white. The YWCA’s segregation policies and its underfunding of Black YWCAs meant few African American women had access to industrial programs. The situation would change as the YWCA hired more African American staff, and Black YWCA membership surged during World War I.³⁴

The women workers in the new industrial clubs insisted employers adopt Christian values of fair treatment and just wages and the YWCA back worker’s right to organize their own unions. The YWCA’s National Board, which included the wives of corporate anti-union titans such as John D. Rockefeller, blanched at the idea of collective bargaining. The leaders of the YWCA Industrial Department and the WTUL, however, believed the association would eventually support unions—and when it did, the league and the YWCA would comprise a formidable industrial women’s movement combining trade unionists and industrial clubwomen.³⁵

The WTUL’s principles of democracy and social justice overlapped as well with the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the foremost organization of African American women.³⁶ But divergent priorities, white racism, and the difficulties of interracial cooperation in an era of strict Jim Crow kept the two organizations on separate tracks. Since its founding in 1896, the NACW, led first by well-to-do writer, educator, and internationalist Mary Church Terrell, had engaged Black clubwomen, mostly elite women, in rescue work and social uplift. But it also took courageous public stands against lynching and called for full citizenship rights for women and men of color. The NACW had a long history of international activism and had sought—with and without white allies—to foster interracial cooperation at home and abroad. When the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in the United States refused to admit African American clubwomen, the NACW affiliated instead with the National Council of Women, the US branch of the International Council of Women, the large multi-issue global women’s organization founded in 1888.³⁷ (The NACW was the only nonwhite affiliate among the thirty-eight US women’s groups in the National Council of Women.) When the International Council of Women invited Terrell to address its 1904 Berlin Congress, she accepted, delivering a powerful speech in German on The Progress of Colored Women. Terrell later wrote of her conviction that she spoke for colored women in America and for all women of African descent.³⁸

Black membership in the WTUL remained quite small in the World War I era, as did its membership of Asian, Latinx, and other women of color. Even in cities like Chicago with a burgeoning African American working class, the league did not add its first local of mostly Black women until 1918. During wartime, the WTUL condemned job discrimination against Black women, calling a fair deal for the colored folks a test of our democracy, and initiated organizing drives among African Americans in the stockyards and other sectors—yet the league remained largely white until the 1930s.³⁹

Citizens of the World

In the years leading up to World War I, the league paid increasing attention to global affairs and to organizing across national borders. The world is more and more one great community, a WTUL report declared in 1909, and organization is no longer an American or a European question, but a world-wide one. The league’s monthly journal, Life and Labor, started in 1911, poured forth a stream of in-depth portraits of women and