Betsy Wade Papers

Betsy Wade (1929-2020) was a journalist and active member of the Newspaper Guild of New York, Local 3, as well as a founding member of New York Trade Union Women and of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW). Throughout her career, Wade was an active union organizer, serving as a shop steward, picket captain, and officer in the Newspaper Guild.

Wade joined The New York Times as a copy editor in 1956, making her the first woman to edit news for the publication. She was the first woman editor on the foreign copy desk, as well as the first woman deputy chief of the foreign copy desk, a position which she held during the Vietnam War.

In the fall of 1972, the Women's Studies Institute of Cornell University, in collaboration with the Region II Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, held a meeting of labor union staff meetings to discuss issues concerning the role of women in unions. This group, which became known as New York Trade Union Women, began to meet monthly for "brown bag" lunches, and called the first New York Trade Union Women's Conference in January 1974.

CLUW was founded in March 1974 in Chicago, adopting four basic goals of action: to promote affirmative action in the workplace; to strengthen the role of women in unions; to organize unorganized women workers; and to increase the involvement of women in the political and legislative process. In 1974, Wade was one of seven plaintiffs in a successful class action suit against the New York Times for gender discrimination. In 1975, New York Trade Union Women became the New York City chapter of CLUW.

Wade was an active member of the Newspaper Guild of New York, and was nominated by petition both times she ran for the presidency of Local 3 (as-opposed to the union's more usual procedure in which a candidate is nominated by the local's Representative Assembly by a quorum of member representing a certain number of shops). Her election to her second term (which began in 1980) was challenged by the losing candidates, who forced a re-run of the election (supervised by the Department of Labor) in September 1982. Wade did not run for president in this election re-run; instead she ran for membership on the Local's Executive Committee. She and all the members of her insurgent Membership Slate were defeated in this election. In December 1982 Wade also ran unsuccessfully for the office of Local Executive Vice President. Wade also served three times as a regional president of the Guild's International. She ran unopposed for her first term (as was usual in elections for this position), but the elections for her next two terms were contested.

Sources:

Coalition of Labor Women. "About CLUW." 11 August 2008. http://www.cluw.org/about.html

Roth, Silke. Building Movement Bridges: The Coalition of Labor Union Women. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.

Columbia Journalism Alumni Journal, Winter 2002.