National Women’s Trade Union League of America

Established this day in 1903: the National Women’s Trade Union League of America.

The Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) was a partnership between working women and middle-class women reformers. When the WUTL formed in 1903,  the U.S. work force included well over 6 million women. Labor leaders Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Leonora O’Reilly joined forces with settlement workers Lillian Wald and Jane Addams to form a labor organization to educate women workers and improve their working conditions. (The male-dominated American Federation of Labor did not welcome women and did little to support women’s labor actions.)

Among the WTUL’s goals were the eight-hour work day, a minimum wage, and an end to child labor. The WTUL supported various working women’s strikes, such as the garment industry strikes of 1909-1911 and the 1912 Bread and Roses textile workers strike. After the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire the WTUL investigated the factory conditions that led to the fire. The investigation played a role in the development of protective regulations. The WTUL also organized working women to support the suffrage movement.

The organization never recovered from the financial strains of the Great Depression, and it was dissolved in 1950.

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In Other News

On this day in 1946: A Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Emily Greene Balch (1867–1961), co-founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

On this day in 1889: Famed journalist Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) set out on a journey that would take her around the world in fewer than 80 days (72 days 6 hours 11 minutes 42 seconds, to be exact).

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