page_title: Margaret Dreier Robins
section_title: Social reform career
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret Dreier Robins / Social reform career
caption_attribution_description: English: Sketch by Marguerite Martyn of labor leader Margaret Dreier Robins, with a notation by Martyn about her impression of Mrs. Robins, 1910
context_page_description: Margaret Dreier Robins was an American labor leader.
context_section_description: At age nineteen, she began doing charity work at Brooklyn Hospital and soon became involved in other progressive causes. She met the reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell in 1902, and through Lowell joined in the Woman’s Municipal League, an organization that helped women avoid prostitution. Another collaborator was Frances Kellor, with whom she founded the New York Association for Household Research which provided lodging and placement for women domestic workers.
  In 1904, increasingly interested in workers’ rights, Dreier joined the Women's Trade Union League, then only a small, budding organization. She became the president of its New York chapter in 1905; president of the Chicago chapter 1907-1914; and treasurer of the national organization and rose quickly in its ranks. In 1907, she was elected president of the national organization and began a fifteen-year tenure as its leader. Meanwhile, she married the lawyer and social worker Raymond Robins in 1905.  The newlyweds split their time between running a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois and Chinsegut Hill in Brooksville, Florida.
  As president of the League, Robins helped organize women into unions, educate women workers, and advocate for progressive legislation. She created a Training School for Women to educate women workers about organizing and leadership skills. She supported and became active in a number of well publicized strikes, most notably the International Ladies Garment Workers’ strike in 1910. She pushed for protective legislation limiting the hours of women’s work, and she presided over the League during its most influential period.
  She served on the executive board of the Chicago Federation of Labor after 1908, and in 1915 was appointed to the unemployment commission by the governor of Illinois.
  In 1919, Robins played an important role in the creation of the first International Congress of Working Women. Robins agreed to send both Rose Schneiderman and Mary Anderson to the Paris Peace Conference, where with other female labor leaders they organized an international labor women’s conference to prepare for the upcoming International Labour Organization convention in October in Washington, D.C.
  In 1924, Robins retired from her activist work and moved full-time with her husband to Florida. She died in 1945.
caption: Sketch by journalist Marguerite Martyn, with her reaction to the interview, 1910
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