I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have foun… - Rose Schneiderman
" "I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the fire-proof structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 143 of us are burned to death. We have tried you, citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and daughters and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us. Public officials have only words of warning to us-warning that we must be intensely orderly and must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back when we rise into the conditions that make life bearable. I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.
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About Rose Schneiderman
Rose Schneiderman (April 6, 1882 – August 11, 1972) was a Polish-born American socialist and feminist, and one of the most prominent labor union leaders who was a woman. 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.
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Additional quotes by Rose Schneiderman
But today there is no hope for any woman who is forced to labor to have any respite even in her remotest old age. It is said, of course, that her children should take care of her; but what of the woman who does not marry, or who, having married, has lost her children and husband? Or of the old mother who is too proud to be a burden upon her young son who himself is supporting his family with difficulty?
the suffragists have a great opportunity to lay before a group of over worked women the power of their vote; in this way an intelligent electorate would be developed who knows before it has it, what it can do with the vote, and who will use it effectively. It is as we suffragists make ourselves intelligent upon the problems which we will have to solve that the vote will be of any use to us or to the community or nation.
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There are many factories and trades where women stand all day where there are even no chairs, though those are called for by the law. There are many kinds of work at which girls could sit instead of stand if the pressure of work were not so intense, if they were not speeded up to the highest point of endurance.
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