woman business manager a few years later, responsible for settling pay and other disputes for workers of
all races in sixty New York shops.^10
The 1930s activism of these young feminists shaped them in lasting ways. Many forged enduring
personal and political ties with an older generation of women reformers whose social justice politics they
absorbed. Esther Peterson met Pauline Newman and Frieda Miller—all aligned with the WTUL and all
staunch opponents of the ERA—through the garment workers union and the Bryn Mawr Summer School.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, an ally of the New York branch of the WTUL since 1923, was associated
with this circle of women reformers as well. She had chaired the New York league’s finance and
education committee in the 1920s when her husband was governor and maintained close ties with league
leaders after her move to the White House. Friendships across the generations solidified as the women
cooperated on organizing and legislative campaigns and, for a couple of weeks each summer, lived
together on the Bryn Mawr campus. In 1938, when Bryn Mawr College severed its ties with the program
—piqued that, among other headaches for the elite college, the working-class summer school students had
encouraged maids at the college to organize—the gatherings shifted to Bryn Mawr dean Hilda Smith’s
fifty-acre family estate in upstate New York.
The older women’s networks that attracted young feminists in the 1930s crossed racial as well as
class and ethnic lines. The Bryn Mawr Summer School, for example, honored its declared 1926 policy of
admitting students “without distinction of race, creed, or color.”^11 It admitted an African American
student in 1926, the first black woman to attend Bryn Mawr College, and typical summer classes in the
years that followed included women of all races, religions, and cultural backgrounds. Maida Springer,
just beginning her career in the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union as one of its pioneering black leaders,
participated in the 1930s summer schools, and like Peterson she looked to the female elders in the
garment unions and the WTUL for intellectual guidance. On occasion, Springer and her close friend Pauli
Murray—who would later gain renown as a civil rights lawyer, feminist legal theorist and popular
memoirist and was one of the first African American women ordained as an Episcopal priest—also
frequented the celebrated weekend retreats of New Dealers hosted by historian and social welfare expert
Caroline Ware and her husband, institutional economist Gardiner Means, on “the Farm,” their Northern
Virginia home.
Working in a coed labor movement shaped this generation of young feminists just as deeply as did
their alliances with older women reformers. On the one hand, women active in the labor movement
recognized the many injustices men and women shared, and they valued men’s support and the power of
worker solidarity. At the same time, as they confronted the difficulties of creating solidarities between
men and women, their feminism as well as their commitment to combating sex discrimination deepened.
In the 1930s, the men leading the labor movement held a range of views on women’s “proper role.” Some
recognized the right of women, like men, to jobs and job security. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers,
for example, opposed the widespread efforts in the 1930s to fire married women as a solution to the
economic crisis. Others sought (in vain) to preserve an older gender order in which women’s first and
only priority was caring for their families.
Yet despite its sexism and ambivalence about women’s rights, the labor movement’s commitment to
economic and social equality, as well as its consciousness of worker rights, inspired women to organize
and, in the end, to seek their own rights as women. Indeed, the labor movement spurred feminism in ways
not dissimilar from the stirrings of women in the 1960s New Left: in both movements women ended up
demanding that a male-led, coed movement live up to its own ideals and extend its principles of justice
and equality to women. The labor movement gave feminists a vocabulary and an ideological framework