Rose Schneiderman (April 6, 1882 – August 11, 1972) was a Polish-born American labor organizer, feminist, and one of the most prominent female labor union leaders. As a member of the New York Women's Trade Union League, she drew attention to unsafe workplace conditions, following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, and as a suffragist she helped to pass the New York state referendum of 1917 that gave women the right to vote. Schneiderman was also a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and served on the National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is credited with popularizing the phrase "Bread and Roses," to indicate a worker's right to something higher than subsistence living.

Rose Schneiderman was born Rachel Rose Schneiderman on April 6, 1882, the first of four children of a religious Jewish family, in the village of Sawin, 14 kilometers (9 miles) north of Chełm in Russian Poland. Her parents, Samuel and Deborah (Rothman) Schneiderman, worked in the sewing trades. Schneiderman first went to Hebrew school, normally reserved for boys, in Sawin, and then to a Russian public school in Chełm. In 1890 the family migrated to Manhattan's Lower East Side. Schneiderman's father died in the winter of 1892, leaving the family in poverty. Her mother worked as a seamstress, trying to keep the family together, but the financial strain forced her to put her children in a Jewish orphanage for some time. Schneiderman left school in 1895 after the sixth grade, although she would have liked to continue her education. She went to work, starting as a cashier in a department store and then in 1898 as a lining stitcher in a cap factory on the Lower East Side. In 1902 she and the rest of her family moved briefly to Montreal, where she developed an interest in both radical politics and trade unionism. Her brother was communal worker, writer, and editor Harry Schneiderman.

The main theme of many of her most impactful speeches was that it would not make that big of a difference if a woman got the ballot; however, women need to vote because they would be able to get protection through the laws. She knew that a woman physically being in office would not make a huge difference and chose to not hide that fact. Instead, she presented the idea of woman voting to change laws instead of making laws in the first place. This idea helped her gain traction and the number of people who supported her boomed. This gave her motivation and proved that she was doing something right.

She returned to New York in 1903, and with a partner worker started organizing and coordinating with the women in her clothing factory. When they applied for a charter to the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union, the union told them to come back after they had succeeded in organizing twenty-five women. The women already knew they wanted to join, so they got to work recruiting others. They did that within days and the union then chartered its first women's local.

Schneiderman obtained wider recognition during a citywide capmakers' strike in 1905. Elected secretary of her local and a delegate to the New York City Central Labor Union, she came into contact with the New York Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), an organization that lent moral and financial support to the organizing efforts of women workers. She quickly became one of the most prominent members and was elected the New York branch's vice president in 1908. She left the factory to work for the league, attending school with a stipend provided by one of the League's wealthy supporters. She was an active participant in the Uprising of the 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York City led by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in 1909. She also was a key member of the first International Congress of Working Women of 1919, which aimed to address women's working conditions at the first annual International Labour Organization Convention.

Schneiderman was born into a Jewish family. Her mother was very religiously oriented, but Schneiderman felt that the role of women within the religion was too restricting. She spent her life breaking barriers of what was expected of her being a woman of Jewish faith in the 1900s. Though her religion was not a major part of her career of activism, she still did many things to help the Jewish community. Through her speeches and acts Schneiderman managed to bring better economic standing and safety to the people of her community. In the 1930s and ‘40s Schneiderman helped to rescue European Jews, being commemorated by Albert Einstein for her work.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 146 garment workers were burned alive or died jumping from the ninth floor of a factory building, dramatized the conditions that Schneiderman, the WTUL and the union movement were fighting. The WTUL had documented similar unsafe conditions – factories without fire escapes or that had locked the exit doors to keep workers from stealing materials – at dozens of sweatshops in New York City and surrounding communities; twenty-five workers had died in a similar sweatshop fire in Newark, New Jersey, shortly before the Triangle disaster. Schneiderman expressed her anger at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911, to an audience largely made up of the well-heeled members of the WTUL:

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.