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In October of 1919, nearly 200 women from nineteen nations converged in Washington, D.C. to attend the International Congress of Working Women (ICWW). The organization represented a feminist response to women's marginalization within the newly established International Labor Organization (ILO). Women who participated in the ICWW, however, were far from united in deciding the proper basis for membership, or the best strategies for achieving workplace equality. At this formative moment, when women challenged the male bias of international labor policy, they wrestled with their own questions about race, who counted as a worker, and whether female workers should seek the same treatment as men or claim special protection due to their roles as mothers and caregivers. This article draws on the conference proceedings, contemporary news accounts, and memoirs of participants to analyze how the "working woman" took shape as a contested social category at this formative moment of transnational labor feminism.
In March of 1919, Mary Anderson and Rose Schneiderman sailed from New York City to the Paris Peace Conference.1 Both women had moved from jobs in manufacturing to become union organizers. Frustrated by women's lack of access to trade union leadership, they had shifted their energies to the cross-class, all female Women's Trade Union League (WTUL). Anderson and Schneiderman arrived in Paris too late to present the WTUL's proposals for industrial reconstruction. However, they came in time to meet women's labor leaders from around the world, all of whom felt marginalized by the creation of the International Labor Organization (ILO), a new body charged with implementing the labor provisions of the peace treaty.
Anderson, Schneiderman, and the female labor leaders they met in Paris applauded the ILO's mission of promoting "peace through social justice." They objected, however, to the fact that the ILO's founding documents called for "the protection of children, young persons and women," but made no provisions to include women as representatives.2 Emboldened by women's campaigns for suffrage and their growing presence in trade unions, they formulated a feminist response: the International Congress of Working Women (ICWW), an extraordinary ten-day meeting of about 200 women from nineteen nations that met in Washington, D.C. from October 28 to November 6, 1919. The timing and location of the ICWW corresponded with the first...