During World War I, the employment of women in the U.S. increased to nearly ten million. The WTUL worked with the Women in Industry Division of the Department of Labor to improve working conditions for women, in order to promote more female employment. After the war, returning vets displaced women in many of the jobs they'd filled. AFL unions often moved to exclude women from the workplace and from unions, another strain in the AFL/WTUL alliance.
In the 1920s, the League began summer schools to train organizers and women workers at Bryn Mawr, Barnard and Vineyard Shore. Fannia Cohn, involved in the WTUL since she took a labor education class with the organization in 1914, became Director of the ILGWU Educational Department, beginning decades of service to working women's needs and decades of struggling within the union for understanding and support of women's needs.
Rose Schneiderman became president of the WTUL in 1926, and served in that role until 1950.
During the Depression, the AFL emphasized employment for men. Twenty-four states enacted legislation to prevent married women from working in public service, and in 1932, the federal government required one spouse to resign if both worked for the government. Private industry was no better: for instance, in 1931, New England Telephone and Telegraph and Northern Pacific laid off all women workers.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President, the new First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, a long-time WTUL member and fund-raiser, used her friendship and connections with the WTUL leaders to bring many of them into active support of New Deal Programs. Rose Schneiderman became a friend and frequent associate of Eleanor and Franklin, and helped advise on major legislation like Social Security and the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The WTUL continued its uneasy association mainly with the AFL, ignored the new industrial unions in the CIO, and focused more on legislation and investigation in its later years. The organization dissolved in 1950.
Text copyright 1999-2005 © Jone Johnson Lewis
