Women's Trade Union League
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| Full name | Women's Trade Union League |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1903 |
| Date dissolved | 1950 |
| Head union | American Federation of Labor |
| Key people | Margaret Dreier Robins, President |
| Country | United States |
The Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) was a U.S. organization of both working class and more well-off women formed in 1903 to support the efforts of women to organize labor unions and to eliminate sweatshop conditions. The WTUL played an important role in supporting the massive strikes in the first two decades of the twentieth century that established the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and in campaigning for women's suffrage among men and women workers.
The roots of the WTUL come from a British organization of the same name founded thirty years earlier. The British League had originally supported the creation of a separate women’s labor movement but, by the 1890s, merged its own aims with the mainstream British labor movement and functioned as an umbrella organization of women’s trade unions. Its first American supporter was the socialist William English Walling who met with British WTUL leaders in 1902. He returned to the United States and began to generate support for a similar American organization
Organized in 1903 at the American Federation of Labor convention, the WTUL spent much of its early years trying to cultivate ties with the AFL leadership. Its first president was Mary Morton Kehew, a labor and social reformer from Boston. By 1907, the WTUL saw its purpose as supporting the AFL and encouraging women’s membership in the organization. In its constitution that year, the WTUL defined its purpose in assisting “in organizing women into trade unions...such unions to be affiliated, where practicable, with the American Federation of Labor.” In response, the AFL leadership generally ignored the League. When the WTUL decided to hold its annual conference at a different location than the AFL in 1905, Samuel Gompers was furious and refused to attend. Still, the League did push the AFL towards a pro-suffrage position and did manage to organize more women into the Federation than at any previous time.
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