Working Against Type: Typographical Union No. 6 and the Battle Over Women’s Night Work
By R.B. Tiven
Setting type or reading proof for a newspaper was a rare job where a woman could earn equal pay for equal work in 1913. So when a new state law cost the female members of the New York Typographical Union their jobs, they demanded that their union do something. Reluctantly, it tried to—and found itself caught between loyalty to its members and fidelity to the labor movement.
Lewis Hine's photographs of bookbinders subtly undermined reformers' insistence that women shouldn't work nights. "The midnight lunch hour, a group of night workers," The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library, New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-4e17-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.
After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, New York passed a law barring women from nighttime factory work. The definition of “factory” covered binderies and printing presses, including morning newspapers whose type was set overnight. As a result, bookbinders and the small number of women who worked as printers and proofreaders lost their prized night shifts, the shortest and best-paying positions. Two of the printers, Ada R. Wolff and Margaret Kerr-Firth, turned to their union to help salvage their jobs at the New York Times. Their advocacy triggered a fight that pitted the powerful New York Typographical Union against the New York State Federation of Labor, and generated bills vetoed by both Republican and Democratic governors. It also set the terms of a multi-decade dispute about who spoke for working-class women. The long tail of their activism is detailed in a forthcoming special issue of International Labor and Working Class History. [1] The roots of the conflict bear further examination.
New York Typographical Union No. 6 was known as “Big Six” because in the early twentieth century it was the largest, most powerful local in the country. Its members printed the books, newspapers, and magazines of the nation’s media capital, and No. 6 had won short hours, good wages, and a high degree of control over its members’ jobs. Given these successes, No. 6 guarded its independence: it was reluctant to submit its agenda to other craft unions, and aligned only grudgingly with locals in smaller cities and towns around the state. [2] Though just two hundred of No. 6’s seven thousand members were women, when New York passed a nine-hour day for factory women and a ban on night work, men and women in the union objected immediately. [3] Printing was a skilled, literate trade, and printers did not see themselves as factory workers. They also objected to the law as an intrusion on organizing. “[W]e believe that this same law is but an opening wedge to break up those organizations which have been formed for the purpose of benefiting those who labor for a living, whether male or female,” wrote one all-male local. [4] Nearly five hundred Typographical Union members signed a petition to the Factory Investigating Commission, which had recommended the restrictions. The petition asked the Commission to understand that their industry’s situation was different: “Women printers are not exploited by greedy employers, but compete with men in a time-honored art. Protecting women from undue hours of labor and depriving her of a situation of her own choosing are vastly different things.” [5] Calling the night work ban “unjust,” the printers suggested limiting women’s work to eight hours at any time of day, or simply exempting the printing trade.
There was precedent for an industry exemption, since canning companies had long enjoyed a seasonal carve-out from protective laws for women and children. Canning was one of the earliest industries to hire women in large numbers. Historian Barbara Wertheimer says women were a majority in canneries from their inception, often working twelve-hour shifts in wet, dangerous conditions. [6] In the 1910s, the canning companies effectively controlled the fate of all labor legislation in New York. In 1911, they derailed passage of a 54-hour week bill, which passed in 1912 only after the State Federation of Labor acquiesced to canners’ demand for an exemption from June 15 to October 15. [7] In subsequent years canneries sought to expand their exemption, which reform groups always opposed and the State Federation supported when politically expedient. [8]
Cannery owners won seasonal exemptions to protective laws for children and women. These Buffalo children ranged from 10-13 years old, and missed school to work husking corn and stringing beans. Lewis Hine, March 1910, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress, https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/nclc.00782/.
Women in canneries needed reformers’ assistance. Their wages were dismal, their working conditions dangerous, and their industry unorganized. Workers who complained were easily replaced by others willing to work punishingly long hours for low pay. Cannery women did not seek exemption from the maximum hour restrictions; cannery owners did. In contrast, the printers who objected to the labor laws were speaking for themselves. They already had a short work-week thanks to the power of the Typographical Union contract. What they most cared about was night work.
Margaret Kerr-Firth and Ada R. Wolff were both working nights at the Times when they were fired due to the new law. Kerr-Firth was a proofreader, a widow who had moved to New York City and left a ten-year-old daughter with her sister in Pittsburgh. Wolff was a linotype operator, skilled at the new technology of setting lines of hot type on a massive, molten typewriter. She had a five-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter and had been working in the printing trade since she was a child herself. Girls weren’t allowed union apprenticeships, so beginning at age eleven Wolff “stole the trade” at her uncle’s print shop in Troy, New York.
After the law took effect in July 1913, Wolff and Kerr-Firth got night shifts at the New York World, where the foreman was willing to flout the ban for a while. [9] Both women appealed to the Typographical Union for help keeping their jobs, or at least maintaining their seniority at the Times while they sought solutions. [10] For three years Wolff and Kerr-Firth asked their union to fight the ban, to get them their old jobs back, to instruct foremen to keep them on night shifts, and to pay any fines levied by state inspectors. At its elegant headquarters on West Sixteenth Street, the No. 6 executive committee promised the women they would keep their seniority, but otherwise refused to take action while a challenge to the night work ban made its way through the courts. [11]
Big Six Headquarters on W. 16th Street, Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library, "Broadway Central Hotel" New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/bd7d5fde-6ec4-a3eb-e040-e00a18060a8e.
When the Court of Appeals ruling came down in 1915, it did not spare printers’ and bookbinders’ night jobs. The court dismissed the testimony of women who said they were unscathed by night work, holding: “the state has such an interest in the welfare of its citizens that it may if necessary protect them against even their own indifference, error or recklessness.” [12]
Before the court ruling, Margaret Kerr-Firth had repeatedly introduced floor motions at No. 6’s enormous membership meetings, asking the union without success to seek a legislative exemption for printers. [13] After the litigation concluded, she tried again: “Since Section 93b, of the State Labor law, which prohibits women working in factories more than 54 hours per week and before 6 a.m. and after 10 p.m., has been interpreted to include women compositors and proofreaders, and has closed all morning newspapers against women and made it increasingly difficult to obtain employment in book and job offices on account of the occasional need of overtime, be it ‘Resolved, that Typographical Union No. 6 endeavor to have an amendment to this law passed exempting publishing houses and newspaper offices.’” [14] After “much discussion,” her resolution was adopted. [16] It bore fruit in April 1917 when Albert Ottinger, a Republican state senator from Manhattan, introduced a bill to exempt from the night work law “women employed in composing rooms of newspaper offices, printing offices or publishing houses.” The bill passed quickly and unanimously in the Senate and 124–4 in the Assembly. [17] Yet after its passage, opposition emerged: ironically, from other printers. The New York State Allied Printing Trades Council, a statewide association of printers and binderies, lobbied the Governor to veto the bill. The Council argued that while on its face the exemption affected a very small number of printers, it could be leveraged to allow large categories of women to return to “devitalizing night work.” [18] That rhetoric echoed the Consumers’ League, which also opposed the exemption. Writing in 1928, labor economist and Consumers’ League activist Clara Mortensen Beyer attributed the veto to both the State Federation of Labor and to pressure from the Consumers’ League of the City of New York. [19] No. 6’s leadership tried to defend the bill, traveling to Albany to urge the Governor to sign it. [20] He refused. Governor Charles S. Whitman killed the bill in his end-of-session omnibus veto, without explanation.
Why the veto, and the fierce opposition? Maybe printers outside of New York City were less influenced by their female members than No. 6, and wanted to prevent women from competing with men for night shifts. Maybe the Consumers’ League leaned on the Allied Printing Trades, or on the State Federation, in addition to lobbying the Governor directly. The State Federation may have opposed the exemption in an attempt to mend fences with the Consumers’ League, which it had angered the year before by supporting an expanded cannery exemption. [21] Regardless of motive, historian Irwin Yellowitz says the bill’s opponents benefitted from a power struggle between Gov. Whitman and upstate Senator Elon Brown. Both were Republicans: Brown was a labor antagonist who catered to business and manufacturing interests, while Whitman’s base was New York City moderates. “Had Brown and Whitman not been in conflict during these years,” writes Yellowitz, “the labor laws might have been seriously emasculated.” [22]
When Whitman vetoed the printers’ exemption bill, the women who needed it were not his constituents—but they would be soon. On November 6, 1917, New York women won the right to vote. The State Federation’s support for suffrage had always been tepid, and when the Executive Council convened the following month, it sounded startled and slightly concerned about these new voters. After sending a letter of congratulations to the Woman Suffrage Party, “A long discussion ensued as to the best method of pointing out to the wage-earning women the path which would bring her the best results in the exercise of her right to the use of the ballot.” [23] However the Federation thought women voters should exercise their new rights, it soon became clear that passing a printers’ exemption wasn’t among them.
In 1917, New York became the first state in the East where women won the vote. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "Why not in New York? Suffrage Rally Photograph" New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5ba6a480-df0b-0137-7186-007b91dce8ce.
In February 1918, Margaret Kerr-Firth again addressed one thousand of her No. 6 brothers at Saengerbund Hall in Brooklyn. She proposed that this year, women printers should go to Albany to lobby on their own behalf. The union’s lobbyist, Theodore Douglas, retorted that women should keep out of politics and stay in the kitchen—at which point Kerr-Firth suggested the two of them could step outside to settle the matter. She didn't actually slug him, but she convinced the membership to support sending the women of No. 6 to Albany to lobby for an exemption. According to a reporter, “Mr. Douglas asserted that since the enfranchisement of the women, they were uncontrollable.” [24]
The women’s assertiveness may have confounded some leaders of No. 6, but their support within the local was deep. Throughout early 1918, No. 6 officers tried to persuade the skeptical State Federation of Labor to support an exemption. Meanwhile, the union’s lawyer worked with Kerr-Firth and Ada Wolff to draft new bill language, which the Executive Committee endorsed as promised. [25] They also wrote a brief in support of the bill, signed by the Committee of Women Printers and the leadership of the local, including President Leon Rouse and Executive Committee Chairman Sigmund Oppenheimer. The ten-point brief described printers’ pride in their craft and the benefits of night shifts. It characterized the opposition as coming from two sources: “Women who do not understand our work or our capabilities and do not care whether we are driven from a skilled to an unskilled occupation; and male printers (a very small number of them, it is true), who claim that amending the law for us will break down labor safeguards.” The brief closed with a reference to women’s enfranchisement: “As fellow citizens with full responsibilities, no longer wards of the state, we ask your full co-operation in the securing of such amendments to the ‘night work’ and 54-hour laws as will permit women printers of this state to work at their trade.” [26]
When No. 6 went to Albany to lobby for the exemption, they found that they were completely alone. The State Federation of Labor, the Allied Printing Trades, and the Industrial Commission—led by James Lynch, a former president of No. 6—fulminated against the bill, insisting that though it was so narrowly drafted that only “a score” of women would be covered, its passage would open the floodgates to exemption requests. [27] Trying to salvage the printers’ exemption, the local sent the women to the Capitol repeatedly in February, March, and April, paying their travel costs and reimbursing lost shifts — Margaret Kerr-Firth spent the first two weeks of April in Albany at the union’s expense. [28] But opposed by state labor and reform groups, a bill that had sailed through the legislature a year before was defeated in the Assembly. [29]
No. 6’s refusal to stand down, despite the unified opposition, offended the rest of the labor movement. The State Federation’s legislative chair, Thomas Fitzgerald, was incensed that “President Rouse and his woman committee persisted to the end of the session.” In addition to opposing the printers’ exemption, Fitzgerald was aggrieved that Ada Wolff had testified against a proposed eight-hour-day for women. In his year-end report, Fitzgerald described No. 6’s lobbying in blistering terms: “Their statements to the members of the legislature and their appearances before committees on hearings of bills of which they knew nothing and cared less has been a scandal to the movement. I recommend that the committee on constitution amend the constitution in such a way that a repetition may never occur again, and in the meantime that No. 6 answer to this convention for the infringement of its laws.” [30]
The printers’ exemption failed—and so did reformers’ proposal to shorten women’s workday. For that, reformers blamed corporate interests and the women of the Typographical Union. Reform groups who backed the eight-hour-day included the Consumers’ League, the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the New York Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). The Consumers’ League represented consumers; the WTUL represented workers, and was irate at the presence of other women challenging their authority. The WTUL leadership—Rose Schneiderman, Mary Dreier, and Pauline Newman—resolved to investigate and take action against the Typographical Union women. [31] A few weeks later, in April 1918, a letter from WTUL was read at No. 6’s general meeting, charging Margaret Kerr-Firth, Ada Wolff, and another printer, Ella M. Sherwin, with exceeding their authority in Albany. Theodore Douglas, the lobbyist Kerr-Firth almost punched two months before, eagerly convened a committee to investigate their conduct. [32] After the investigation concluded, all three women remained Typographical Union members, but they were effectively blackballed. WTUL’s enmity had exacerbated a fractious situation—and offered No. 6 an escape hatch. The accusations gave the union a way out of an impossible conflict between loyalty to its members and fidelity to the labor movement. Having discredited the members who made the demand, No. 6 reversed its position, and opposed a printers’ exemption thereafter.
As skilled craft unionists, the women printers were in an unwinnable situation. When they protested the night work law, the law’s proponents insisted that women in their position were an anomalous few. When they sought an exemption to address their unique situation, the bills were attacked as overbroad no matter how narrowly they were written. Even existing exemptions were a target for the Consumers’ League, which upended a 1914 exemption for female pharmacists for fear it created a loophole to exploit retail drugstore clerks. [33] Local reform groups did not distinguish between exemptions that unionized craft women sought on their own behalf and exemptions won by cannery owners allowing them to hire thousands of women to work twelve-hour days for months on end. The reformers fought all exemptions, even when it meant steamrolling small cohorts of skilled women. That consistency was absent from the State Federation and the Industrial Commission, which fought the women printers by invoking the specter of the cannery exemption, without acknowledging that they flip-flopped on canneries when politically necessary.
So why did No. 6 support the exemption for two years? Because it was uniquely committed to heeding its members’ demands. The International Typographical Union as a whole, and No. 6 in particular, were citadels of union democracy. The Typographical Union’s encouragement of ideological heterogeneity was unusual in the American labor movement. Additionally, No. 6 elected its officers and decided resolutions by direct member vote, not through representative delegates. [34] No. 6 lobbied the legislature for an exemption in 1917 and 1918 because its members directed it to do so.
Linotype operators in the composing room of the New York Times, 1942. Photo by Marjory Collins. https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsa.8d22721/.
It would take women printers three more years, approval by two different legislatures, and another gubernatorial veto—in 1920, by Democrat Al Smith—before they won the right to work at night. [35] In 1921, the legislature amended the factory law so that it did not apply to “women over twenty-one as proofreaders at certain hours [in] newspaper publishing establishments, linotypists and montypists.” [36] The bill was introduced by Assembly Member Marguerite L. Smith, the only woman in the New York legislature. Typographical Union No. 6 opposed it. [37] Al Smith had been defeated by Republican Nathan Miller, who signed the bill into law. The women printers won their exemption through an organization they founded, the Women’s Equal Opportunity League, which fought all sex-specific protective labor legislation. [38]
Night shift opportunities restored, Ada Wolff went to work at the Herald Tribune. Margaret Kerr-Firth returned to the Times. She sued No. 6 for the priority rights they had promised to protect eight years before. She lost. [39] Still, she remained at the Times until her death. Her one-inch obituary credits the full length of her service, but not the effort she put into reclaiming her job. It describes her simply as the paper’s longest-serving proofreader, who “began reading proof for this newspaper on September 5, 1912.” [40]
R.B. Tiven is a PhD candidate in history at CUNY Graduate Center. Prior to becoming a historian she ran the national non-profit organizations Lambda Legal, Immigration Equality, and Immigrant Justice Corps. She created the social media project @DailySuffragist, and her dissertation is a political history of the Nineteenth Amendment.
[1] R.B. Tiven, “We were put out of good jobs”: Women Night Workers in New York and the Origins of the Women’s Equal Opportunity League," International Labor and Working-Class History (forthcoming 2025).
[2] George A. Stevens, New York Typographical Union No. 6: Study of a Modern Trade Union and its Predecessors (Albany: State Department of Labor, 1912), 583-84; Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin A. Trow, James S. Coleman, Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (New York: Free Press, 1956).
[3] The story of women printers’ efforts to organize is told in Stevens, Typographical Union No. 6, 421–40; Ellen DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 105–61; Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 18–20, 166–69; Eleanor Flexner, “Augusta Lewis Troup,” Notable American Women 1607–1950 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), 3:478–79. For women’s membership circa 1913: “‘Big Six’ Names Scott,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1914, Timesmachine.
[4] “Resolutions Adopted by The Tabard Press Chapel,” General meeting minutes, June 26, 1913, International Typographical Union Papers, New York Public Library (hereafter cited as ITU Papers).
[5] Petition to Factory Investigating Commission, Minutes of Staff Planning Meetings, Lists of Labor & Business Representatives, New York State Archives, A3011, folder 3. The petition was likely drafted by Margaret Kerr-Firth, whose signature appears in the first block, alongside men who are her colleagues at the Morning World. The tone and content of the petition matches writing attributed to her, and she is the only woman I have identified actively lobbying her No. 6 brethren at this point.
[6] Wertheimer, We Were There, 217-20. For detail of children in cannery work, see Martin Brown, Jens Christiansen, and Peter Philips. “The Decline of Child Labor in the U.S. Fruit and Vegetable Canning Industry: Law or Economics?” The Business History Review 66, no. 4 (1992): 723–70.
[7] Irwin Yellowitz, Labor and the Progressive Movement in New York State, 1897-1916 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), 104.
[8] Yellowitz, Labor and the Progressive Movement, 123-24; 140-42; Clara M. Beyer, History of Labor Legislation for Women in Three States, 80-82; Florence P. Smith, Chronological Development of Labor Legislation for Women in the United States, 210; published together as Bulletin of the Women’s Bureau, No. 66 (Washington: U.S. Department of Labor, 1929).
[9] Executive Committee minutes, Nov. 28, 1916, ITU Papers.
[10] Executive Committee minutes, Aug. 26, 1913, Sept. 23, 1913, Nov. 11, 1913, Apr. 27, 1914; General meeting minutes, Dec. 21, 1913, ITU Papers.
[11] General meeting minutes, Aug. 10, 1913, Jan. 11, 1914, Feb. 15, 1914; Executive Committee minutes, Aug. 26, 1913, Nov. 13, 1913, Apr. 27, 1914, ITU Papers.
[12] People v. Schweinler Press, 214 N.Y. 395, 407 (1915).
[13] General meeting minutes, Dec. 21, 1913; Jan. 11, 1914; Feb. 15, 1914, ITU Papers.
[14] General meeting minutes, Jan. 14, 1917, ITU Papers.
[15] International Typographical Union, The Typographical Journal, February 1917, p. 157.
[16] Bill No. 1404, Bills of the Senate of the State of New York, vol. IX (Albany: J.B. Lyon, 1917); Journal of the Assembly of the State of New York, vol. III (Albany: J.B. Lyon, 1917); New York Legislative Record and Index (Albany: J.B. Lyon, 1917).
[17] New York State Federation of Labor, Official Proceedings of the Fifty-Fourth Annual Convention, (Utica, NY: 1917), 89.
[18] Beyer, History of Labor Legislation, 107, citing unpublished Consumers League of New York City executive committee report, May 18, 1917.
[19] I Edward Rybicki, No. 6 delegate to the Central Federated Union, argued for the bill at a May 23 meeting with Gov. Whitman. State Federation, Fifty-Fourth Convention, (1917), 89. Rybicki and W. Lincoln Phillips, another elected officer, were both reimbursed for time lost and travel to Albany regarding Women’s Night Work. Typographical Union No. Six, Monthly Bulletin, June & July 1917.
[20] Public Papers of Charles Seymour Whitman (Albany: J.B. Lyon, 1917), 210.
[21] Yellowitz, Labor and the Progressive Movement, 32-33, 124-25.
[22] Yellowitz, Labor and the Progressive Movement, 122.
[23] State Federation Executive Committee meeting, December 13, 1917, in New York State Federation of Labor, Official Proceedings of the Fifty-Fifth Annual Convention, (Utica, NY: 1918), 80.
[24] “‘You’re a Liar,’ Cries Mrs. Firth,” Brooklyn Times Union, Feb. 18, 1918; “Women of ‘Big Six’ Will Go to Albany,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 18, 1918; “Women Printers Win in Heated Session,” Standard Union (Brooklyn), Feb. 18, 1918.
[25] Executive Committee minutes, Feb. 26, 1918, ITU Papers; State Federation, Fifty-Fifth Convention (1918), 93-94.
[26] Elizabeth Faulkner Baker, Protective Labor Legislation: With Special Reference to Women in the State of New York (New York: Columbia University, 1925), 242-44.
[27] State Federation, Fifty-Fifth Convention (1918), 127.
[28] Typographical Union No. Six, Monthly Bulletin, April & May 1918.
[29] State Federation, Fifty-Fifth Convention (1918), 126-28.
[30] State Federation, Fifty-Fifth Convention (1918), 148-49.
[31] Executive Board minutes, April 3, 1918, MS Women's Trade Union League and Its Leaders: Records of the New York Women's Trade Union League. Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. Women’s Studies Archive, Gale 19th Century Collection. The Typographical Union’s delegate to the WTUL, Jo Coffin, was present at the nine-person meeting, but the minutes do not record her having spoken.
[32] General Meeting minutes, April 21, 1918, ITU Papers.
[33] Beyer, History of Labor Legislation, 83-84. The pharmacists fought back, eventually regaining their exemption in 1928.
[34] Stevens, Typographical Union No. 6, 451; Lipset, Union Democracy, 3-66.
[35] Beyer, History of Labor Legislation, 108.
[36] 1921 Bill Jacket Collection, New York State Library.
[37] New York State Federation of Labor, Official Proceedings of the Fifty-Eighth Annual Convention, (Utica, NY: 1921), 18-19.
[38] See R.B. Tiven, “We were put out of good jobs,” ILWCH (forthcoming).
[39] Typographical Union No. Six, Monthly Bulletin, December 1921.
[40] New York Times, November 22, 1950.