Class, Gender and the Perils of Philanthropy: The Story of Life and Labor and Labor Reform In The Women's Trade Union League

Class, Gender and the Perils of Philanthropy: The Story of Life and Labor and Labor Reform In The Women's Trade Union League Diane Kirkby In January 1911 a new journal called Life and Labor joined the ranks of the political press in the United States. Modeled on its close cousins, the American Federation of Labor's American Federationist and the Charity Organization Society's Survey, it was a handsome and substantial-looking magazine that sought to reach the readership of both the labor press and the reformist press. As the official publication of the National Women's Trade Union League, Life and Labor expressed the "industrial feminist" goals of the WTUL by presenting "the woman's point of view in the pressing industrial problems of our day."1 Because it provided a forum for wage-earning women to "tell [their] own stories of a day's work," Life and Labor purported to represent "the working woman's own medium," communicating their discontentments at the workplace, their political aspirations , and their recreational interests.2 Designed as a unique working-woman's magazine to give publicity to the realities of women's position in the industrial labor force, it also provided wage-earning women a sense of solidarity with other women and information on the WTUL's activities on behalf of working women. Thus, the WTUL Executive Board hoped that, by bringing together the labor movement and the woman's movement, Life and Labor would stimulate a broadly based movement for social change. Its first editorial expressed this broader ambition by calling on "every intelligent person who has given attention to social and industrial conditions in America" to cooperate in the reform of industrial conditions which "are ... so wrong that a radical change in the industrial basis of our civilization is as imperative as it is inevitable."3 Life and Labor began with great optimism during the high point of the WTUL's existence—the rash of strikes in the garment industries of New York and Chicago—and it survived for eleven years before it conformed to the plight of other small socialist or radical papers that perished on the rock of financial difficulties.4 Those eleven years from 1911 through 1921 were a vital period in U.S. feminist activity, but it is difficult to gauge Life and Labor's direct influence at the time. Nonetheless, Life and Labor does provide excellent source material for a study of the history of that period. © 1992 Journal of Women-s History, Vol. 4 No. 2 (Fall) 1992 Diane Kirkby 37 As a result of the league's work during the garment workers' strikes, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—with more than 20,000 workers, 80 percent of them women— increased its membership through cooperation with the WTUL.5 But from 1913 onward the previous gains of the WTUL were consistently eroded and by the 1920s the WTUL had effectively passed its prime. U.S. women had gained the vote and there was increasing opposition to radical labor organizations. Although it survived until 1950, the WTUL was not able to recruit new members and its activities were increasingly concentrated on achieving more limited goals. The fortunes of Life and Labor mirrored this larger picture. Accordingly, in 1921, in the midst of a national recession, the National WTUL gave up the struggle to produce its own journal and Life and Labor ceased publication. From then on the WTUL published a four-page newsletter of local branch and national organization activities called Life and Labor Bulletin which continued publication until the WTUL itself disbanded. Using print media to advance the goals of movements has been a characteristic feature of U.S. political organizations. As Joseph Conlin has pointed out, "there have been few active radicals who have not directed a large share of their labor on behalf of the new society to journalism." Neither "strikes ... subversion ... demonstration ... terrorism [nor] oratory had claimed more attention or time" from U.S. political activists.6 However, the scrutiny of evidence provided by such sources, by their very nature highly political, shows that an understanding of the politics of the journal itself is important. Understanding a periodical's...