Existing comment:
Working women believed that votes would enable them to control and improve working conditions. They brought the confrontational tactics and public displays from labor actions to the suffrage movement. Class was as much an issue as gender. For some it blended with their own progressive, or radical, politics. In the 1890s Mary Elizabeth Lease spoke for woman suffrage through the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Knights of Labor, and the Populist Party to promote woman suffrage in Kansas. In the early 1900s Rose Schneiderman, a young immigrant factory worker, became a strike leader and union organizer with New York's garment workers. She worked closely with elite New York suffragists while championing the specific priorities of working-class women. |