Schneiderman was also a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and served on the National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Her mother worked as a seamstress, trying to keep the family together, but the financial strain forced her to put her children in a Jewish orphanage for some time.

She went to work, starting as a cashier in a department store and then in 1898 as a lining stitcher in a cap factory in the Lower East Side.

In 1902 she and the rest of her family moved briefly to Montreal, where she developed an interest in both radical politics and trade unionism.

Elected secretary of her local and a delegate to the New York City Central Labor Union, she came into contact with the New York Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), an organization that lent moral and financial support to the organizing efforts of women workers.

The WTUL had documented similar unsafe conditions – factories without fire escapes or that had locked the exit doors to keep workers from stealing materials – at dozens of sweatshops in New York City and surrounding communities; twenty-five workers had died in a similar sweatshop fire in Newark, New Jersey, shortly before the Triangle disaster.

Schneiderman expressed her anger at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911, to an audience largely made up of the well-heeled members of the WTUL: I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship.

We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

[3]Despite her harsh words, Schneiderman continued working in the WTUL as an organizer, returning to it after a frustrating year on the staff of the male-dominated ILGWU.

[4] Her platform had called for the construction of nonprofit housing for workers, improved neighborhood schools, publicly owned power utilities and staple food markets, and state-funded health and unemployment insurance for all Americans.

Albert Einstein wrote to her: "It must be a source of deep gratification to you to be making so important a contribution to rescuing our persecuted fellow Jews from their calamitous peril and leading them toward a better future.

It was later used as the title of a song by James Oppenheim[12] and was set to music by Mimi Fariña and sung by various artists, among them Judy Collins and John Denver.

[13] In 1949, Schneiderman retired from public life, making occasional radio speeches and appearances for various labor unions, devoting her time to writing her memoirs, which she published under the title All for One, in 1967.

It is unknown whether this relationship was romantic or not, but Swartz and Schneiderman were indeed work and travel partners, and were invited to events together and gave gifts together.

According to Historian Annelise Orleck, "Schneiderman gives no more specific description of her feelings for Swartz than to say that 'she was a wonderful companion.'

"[16] In March 2011, almost 100 years to the day after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Maine's Republican governor Paul LePage, who was inaugurated in January of the same year, had a three-year-old 36 foot-wide mural with scenes of Maine workers on the Department of Labor's building in Augusta removed and brought to a secret location.

"[18] On April 1, 2011, it was disclosed that a federal lawsuit had been filed in US district court seeking "to confirm the mural's current location, insure that the artwork is adequately preserved, and ultimately to restore it to the Department of Labor's lobby in Augusta".