1919 International Congress of Working Women
ICWW delegates agreed upon a list of resolutions, some of which were taken up by the ILC's Commission on the Employment of Women and resulted in the passage of the Maternity Protection Convention, 1919 (No.
The dawn of industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed methods of production and revolutionized social relations, beginning in northern Europe.
[1] [2] Female factory workers, like men, often faced long hours and horrible conditions in the workplace, but unique to their sex, women also suffered from lower wages, discriminatory hiring practices, and the double burden of household work.
[4] Concerns about general and sex-specific exploitation drove female workers in Europe and the United States to organize and strike for fair wages and work hours.
[5][6] By the second half of the nineteenth century, powerful national working-class federations and political parties began to form to demand changes to labor conditions, but almost uniformly, women were marginalized, if not outright excluded, from these such organizations, which championed the rights of the male breadwinner.
[7][8] By the early twentieth century, female labor activists and their upper-class allies came together in national organizations dedicated to the pursuit of industrial justice, democracy, and women's rights.
[9] The year 1919 marked the beginning of the Paris Peace Conference and the establishment of the Treaty of Versailles, which included a Labour Charter calling for the creation of an international body dedicated to regulating labor worldwide.
The ILO had the responsibility of addressing labor issues, setting international labour standards, and promoting peace through social justice.
Rose Schneiderman and Mary Anderson, both leading members of the WTUL, quickly ascended to France to address the newly established ILO.
[13] Schneiderman and Anderson, were not able to present the WTUL's document to the Conference, but met with Britain's Margaret Bondfield and many other women labor leaders from around the world.
Twenty eight delegates from Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, India, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Sweden attended the international women's congress.
While discussing the topic of maternity protection, American and British delegates agreed on their opinions surrounding motherhood free form wage labor.
The document addressed: an eight-hour day and a forty-four-hour week for all workers, limits on child labor, maternity benefits, prohibition of work at night for both men and women and in hazardous situations, new policies for the unemployed and emigration, an "equal distribution of raw materials existing in the world," an end to the Russian Blockade, and the establishment of a permanent bureau of the International Congress of Working Women with its office in the United States.
Jeanne Bouvier, Margaret Bonfield, Mary Macarthur, and Constance Smith all participated in the ICWW and were appointed as delegates to the Commission on the Employment of Women during the ILO conference.
