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72 4 “Women’s Biggest Battle Is Yet to Be Fought” Ethel M. Smith and the Women’s Trade Union League, 1921–1923 Alice Paul speci¤cally invited Ethel Smith to speak before the NWP’s 1921 convention to outline the WTUL’s legislative platform. Despite the controversy Paul stirred during the suffrage movement, Smith told her she would be happy to “tell the convention brie¶y the scope of our national program, especially with reference to legislation.” During her presentation, she clearly summarized the WTUL’s main objectives, explaining that the organization “stood for collective bargaining through trade unions; a maximum 8-hour day and 44-hour week; a just wage; a wage based on occupation and not on sex; full citizenship and equal economic rights for women.” At the convention’s end, Smith did not immediately see Paul as the threat she later considered her to be.1 In a letter to one of her colleagues, she wrote: “I doubt very much whether the Woman’s Party would undertake a program antagonistic to ours. They gave us rather special recognition in connection with the ceremonial Tuesday night, and there are one or two signs which suggest to me that they like us rather too well to want to ¤ght with us.” When reporting on the convention’s outcomes, she emphasized that the “unveiling of the Susan B. Anthony statue was most wonderful,” and that the WTUL’s banner “evoked the most applause of any.” The whole pageant, in Smith’s estimation, was wonderful.2 Though many who attended the convention criticized Paul’s leadership and her equal rights agenda, she hoped to build a working relationship with NWP members . As an expression of her faith in the importance of a cooperative effort among politically active women, she optimistically negotiated with Paul over the next year about how to phrase the NWP’s proposed equal rights legislation so that women’s labor laws would not be threatened. In the months following the convention, as Paul went public with the details of her legislative initiatives, she understood fully how extensively women such as Smith would oppose the NWP. She welcomed that opposition, not only for its publicity value but also because she believed the principles for which she advocated were essentially correct. Rather than admitting this outright, Paul concealed her true feelings about women’s labor laws. Publicly, she announced that the NWP would not move forward with a federal ERA until her legal researchers had completed their study of the remaining forms of legal discrimination in each of the states. Privately, Paul told her followers that she personally opposed all legislation premised on women’s differences from men. Within a year of the NWP’s February convention, Ethel M. Smith and the Women’s Trade Union League 73 Smith assumed a leadership role in combating the NWP’s agenda. She quickly demonstrated the leadership skills to challenge Paul while pursuing entirely different methods to achieve her goals. Through a direct and hard-hitting approach to equal rights, Smith generated sophisticated media and public education strategies that challenged men and women to reexamine their most basic assumptions about gender stereotypes. The debate that took shape over the NWP’s equal rights legislation forced Smith to increasingly challenge herself to de¤ne the layers of her political philosophy . As a self-proclaimed wage-earning woman and trade unionist, she maintained a ¤rm commitment to the importance of economic organization in the lives of wage-earning men and women. She argued that unionization promoted unity between men and women in the labor force and helped cut competition between organized and unorganized workers. In addition to union organization, Smith supported speci¤c legislative measures that promoted an active relationship between the labor movement and the state. Though she advocated laws passed through the lobbying efforts of the AFL and its af¤liates, she directed her attention to female-speci¤c measures, because women’s experiences substantially differed from working men’s. She argued that women who lacked union representation tended to work in low-paying, seasonal, highly exploitative, and unhealthful conditions . To protect these women’s rights, Smith supported cross-class alliances between wage-earning and professional participants of the labor and women’s movements. Such a cooperative effort, she argued, not only promoted the interests of women but also the interests of the community as a whole.3 Like Paul, Smith articulated a speci¤c political philosophy that omitted any reference to...

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