Editor’s Introduction

Powered by an uncommon collaboration between middle-class reformers and worker activists, the Chicago branch of the Women’s Trade Union League under Margaret Dreier Robins emerged as one of the brightest stars in the Progressive Era firmament. Drawing strength from an alliance with Chicago Federation of Labor President John Fitzpatrick, Robins, as the Chicago league’s president and chief financial angel—alongside other key players like Agnes Nestor, Rose Schneiderman, and Mary McDowell—laid justifiable claim to a host of industrial, legislative, and wartime administrative victories. Yet, almost exactly coterminous to Robin’s resignation from the presidency in 1922 (and subsequent retirement to Florida in 1924), the league, both in Chicago and nationally, suffered a severe and ultimately irreversible downward course. Historian Suellen Hoy, who previously tracked other aspects of the league’s dynamics, here links its existential denouement to a combination of factors: demographic changes in the workforce, the rise of the National Women’s Party,...