Scope and Content Note
The records of the National Women’s Trade Union League of America (NWTUL) span the lifetime of the organization from its first meeting in Boston in 1903 to the last bulletin of its official organ, Life and Labor, announcing the termination of the league’s national character in 1950. The records consist of correspondence, minutes of meetings, convention proceedings, reports, memoranda, speeches, clippings, notes, printed matter, and miscellaneous other items. The collection is organized in Headquarters, Subject File, National Conventions, International Congress of Working Women, and Oversize series.
The NWTUL’s administrative operations are well documented in the Headquarters series. Its policies and activities are recorded in the minutes of the executive board meetings and in the correspondence. Most of the letters and memoranda are from national league secretaries, particularly Elisabeth Christman, who held the position from 1920 to 1950. There is also correspondence from members of both the national and local leagues, especially from the New York, Boston, and Chicago branches. Many of the local league members also served as officers or executive board members of the national league and are represented in the headquarters records. Included in this group are Margaret Dreier Robins, Mary Morton Kimball Kehew, Jane Addams, Rose Schneiderman, Mary Kenney O’ Sullivan, Melinda Scott, Agnes Nestor, and Mary E. Dreier. Interspersed with the materials documenting the activities of the league are financial statements enumerating sources of income and costs of operation.
The Subject File as well as the Headquarters records concern the league’s goal of organizing women wage workers into trade unions. There is considerable material on the early history of the league in the historical data file. Many of the files on individual members contain biographical information, and the file on the American Federation of Labor sheds light on the league’s relationship to that organization. In this file and in the headquarters records is correspondence with Samuel Gompers, Frank Morrison, Frank Duffy, and Florence Calvert Thorne.
Both the Headquarters records and Subject File document the league’s efforts to improve women’s working conditions through supporting strikes, particularly in the garment industry, through the use of a training school to develop leadership among women of the working class, and through lobbying for the enactment of protective labor legislation. Issues such as the eight-hour day, a minimum wage, and the establishment of sanitary work areas were the focus of the league’s early days. However, its interests broadened in later years to include federal aid to education, civil rights, price control, and social security. Correspondents include Ethel Marion Smith, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, Mary Anderson, Alice Henry, and Frances Perkins.
The records of the NWTUL also contain proceedings for ten of the thirteen national conventions and mimeographed corrected copies of the proceedings of the three international congresses that the league sponsored.