[4] Among the more affluent of their numbers were figures like Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Florence Kelly, Margaret Dreier Robins, and Mary Morton Kehew, while the working class members of the WTUL included figures like Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, Fannia Cohn, and Clara Lemlich.

Some observers made light of the upper-class women members of the WTUL who picketed alongside garment workers, calling them the "mink brigade".

Furthermore, Schneiderman's Socialist views and actions during the strike also highlighted the tenuous relationship between the wage earners and the middle-class women which made up the WTUL.

[citation needed] The strike was, however, less than wholly successful: Italian workers crossed the picket lines in large numbers and the strikers lacked the resources to hold out longer than the employers.

From 1910 to 1911, the Chicago branch of the WTUL helped organize the garment workers' strike against Hart, Schaffner and Marx (HSM).

Five years later, in 1920, the BWTUL followed up on this success by organizing a union for predominately marginalized service workers, mostly young women who worked at newsstands.

Engaging in long periods of protesting and picketing, the activists of the WTUL were subjected to brutalization by both police and strikebreakers, in addition to the harsh New York winter.

The WTUL trained women as labor leaders and organizers at its school founded in Chicago in 1914 and played a key role in bringing Italian garment workers into the union in New York.

Samuel Gompers and the conservative leadership of the AFL also viewed such legislation with hostility, but for a different reason: they believed by that point that legislation of this sort interfered with collective bargaining, both by usurping the role of unions in obtaining better wages and working conditions and in setting a precedent for governmental intrusion into the area.

The WTUL was also active in demanding safe working conditions, both before and after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 in which 146 workers were killed.

As Schneiderman said in her speech at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911: The WTUL also began to work actively for women's suffrage, in close coalition with the National American Woman Suffrage Association, in the years before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920.

The WTUL saw suffrage as a way to gain protective legislation for women and to provide them with the dignity and other less tangible benefits that followed from political equality.