ABSTRACT
By the mid-century demise of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), the New Industrial Woman had in a sense come of age. According to the WTUL anthem written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “No more on earth shall be Women alone. The frequent tensions which plagued cross-class alliances at the start of the century remain formidable at the end of the century. The Great Depression and the New Deal only exacerbated the League’s inabilities to address the concerns of working women and, at the same time, encourage the support of allies. Since then, the historical record has tended to emphasize the inability of the WTUL to achieve its goal of organizing wage-earning women into viable trade unions and at the same time create an alliance between those women and their middle- and upper-class allies. Wage-earning women were organized into existing trade unions and real cooperation did occur between those women and their allies.
