2014/03/01 by Dorothy Sue Cobble · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Labor Movements and Unions #International Labor and Employment Law #Historical Gender and Feminism Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jau005
openalex publication_date 2014/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In 1919, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, women labor reformers from nineteen nations and three continents gathered in Washington, D.C., to hammer out a set of international labor standards and worker rights. The ten-day International Congress of Working Women (icww), called by the National Women's Trade Union League of America (nwtul), with the counsel and encouragement of British and French labor women, was timed to coincide with the inaugural meeting of the International Labor Organization (ilo), the body charged by the Treaty of Versailles with formulating international labor policies in the postwar world. The two hundred women who responded to the call demanded a voice for working women in shaping a new world order. Through international labor legislation and worker organization, they believed, “the standard of life of women workers throughout the world” could be raised. They met at a time of heady possibility. Women's suffrage in the United States and in much of Europe was imminent. The Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia in 1917; socialist movements and labor parties were on the rise across Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. The 1919 icww adjourned on a high note with plans for a permanent organization, the International Federation of Working Women (ifww).1