League of Women Shoppers

LEAGUE OF WOMEN SHOPPERS (1935-1948). A Popular Front organization, the League of Women Shoppers (LWS) brought together middle- and upper-class women to support workers and the labor movement and to campaign for affordable, durable, and safe consumer goods. Imploring women to “use your buying power for justice,” the LWS, unlike the Women’s Trade Union League, did not directly seek to recruit workers into unions or initiate protective legislation. Instead, the LWS offered support to workers engaged in disputes with their employers, most actively in incidences of strikes in consumer-oriented industries.

The LWS developed a broad range of agitational and educational programs. They invited trade unionists to their meetings, conducted surveys of working conditions, supported left-labor theatre. Representing the left-wing of consumer activism during the New Deal era, members also gave testimony to state legislatures and the U.S. Congress as well as the National Labor Relations Board after its creation by the Wagner Act. During War II, the LWS was active in price control and rationing programs and rent control campaigns. In southern states, the LWS they fought the poll-tax and joined anti-lynching campaigns.

The membership of celebrities and society women lent a distinct aura to the LWS as their “smartly clad” members joined the pickets lines, occasionally in fancy evening attire. Leaders and publicists exploited this aspect to draw attention to their activities. They held fund-raisers at country clubs, sponsored fashion shows, and even held a “mink-coat raffle.” The LWS also recruited old-time progressives, such as Cornelia Bryce Pinchot and many New Dealers. The Hollywood branch, which organized in 1941 to support striking cartoonists at the Disney studios, boasted many celebrities. Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Frances Farmer, Mrs. Ira Gershwin, and Mrs. Boris Karloff were listed as sponsors. The first national president was Aline Davis Hays, a noted textile designer and painter. Successful in building membership, the LWS grew from its first chapter in New York City to fourteen branches and 25,000 members scattered across the country.

The LWS traced its origins to strike support activities. In 1935, a group of women in New York City threw their weight behind department store workers at Orbach’s and helped them end a three-week strike with a five-day, forty-hour work week in hand. That same year, a delegation visited the offices of the Ansonia Bootery in New York to back the petition of the Retail Shoe Salesmen’s Union Local 1268. After the employer turned them back, league member joined the shoe salesmen and helped them organize picket lines during their strike. In Washington, D.C., in 1937, the LWS supported strikers at the National Pants Company; in 1939 they turned out in nearby Alexandria, Virginia, to aid waitresses at the George Mason Hotel. Eleanor Roosevelt, scheduled to attend a dinner at the hotel, refused to cross their picket line. In the late 1930s, the LWS advocated a boycott of Woolworth’s and endorsed a major union drive among dime-store employees.

The LWS took up several campaigns to advance the cause of African American working women. From March 1936 to March 1937, twenty league investigators visited the homes of industrial laundry workers to ask questions about their conditions of labor and livelihood. They also interviewed their employers. Analyzing and then publishing the results of this examination, the LWS concluded that collective bargaining and legislation, “with the help of informed consumers,” could lead to substantial improvements and allow these workers to achieve “an American standard of living.” The LWS took similar interest in the African American majority of domestic workers and supported the adoption of a standard contract for terms of employment.

The LWS fell victim to the post-war McCarthyism. In 1939, the House Un-American Activities Committee had already accused the LWS of having its roots in the Communist Party. In 1948, the U.S. Attorney General included the league on its blacklist list of “disloyal” or “subversive” organizations. At the same time, disagreements between Washington and the national office in New York contributed to the demise of the League of Women Shoppers.

Cain, Ellen. "We used to be patrons—now we are pickets!": The League of Women Shoppers, the Picket Line, and Identity Formation, 1935–1949.” Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 31, #3(Fall 2019), pp.35-56.

Filley, Jane and Therese Mitchell. “Consider the Laundry Workers.” New York: League of Women Shoppers, 1937. ULS Digital Collections. University of Pittsburgh.