Rose Schneiderman Quotes
The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.
Schneiderman, Rose. Speech in Cleveland, Ohio, 1912. Quoted in Eisenstein, Sarah. Give Us Bread but Give Us Roses: Working Women's Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First World War. Routledge, 1983, p. 32.
Woodrow Wilson had just finished speaking to the convention – see {638532}. This statement was thought be some to be insulting to the President who said he favored the right of women to vote, but did very little if anything to make that happen. Although Shaw was an ordained Methodist Minister, the Methodist Episcopal Church refused to allow her to preach because of her suffrage views.
She was then an invalid trying to recover from the toll of all her work at the front lines of wars had taken. The men she had so helped, did not return the gesture when it came to voting, She did not live to see women get the vote in America.
Although born and educated in the United States, she lived mostly in England and was politically active there.
Some men in the audience hissed as she took the podium.
Rose Schneiderman was a Polish-born American socialist and feminist, and one of the most prominent female labor union leaders. As a member of the New York Women's Trade Union League, she drew attention to unsafe workplace conditions, following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, and as a suffragist she helped to pass the New York state referendum of 1917 that gave women the right to vote. Schneiderman was also a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and served on the National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is credited with coining the phrase "Bread and Roses," to indicate a worker's right to something higher than subsistence living.
