Women in France and the United States similarly protested. They also began to organize.

With the negotiations underway in their own back yard, French feminists quickly convened an Inter-Allied Women’s Conference in Paris to champion women’s rights at the peace table. On Feb. 10, 1919, their first day together, Inter-Allied feminists met face-to-face with President Woodrow Wilson and requested representation in all diplomatic matters of particular interest to women, including those touching on suffrage, peace, international governance and labor legislation.

To prepare to intercede on the last of these issues, the Inter-Allied women turned to the French union leader Jeanne Bouvier. Bouvier had begun her working life at age 12 after phylloxera struck the grape vines of southern France and her father, a wine barrel maker, lost his livelihood overnight. Still a child, she was sent into the silk mills to provide for the family. Later, she moved to Paris, working first as a domestic servant and then as an underpaid dressmaker before finally committing herself to labor organizing. In 1919, Bouvier agreed to help head up a labor subcommittee of the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference and draw up a list of working women’s concerns.

Having caught word of women’s organizing in Paris, the National Women’s Trade Union League of America purchased berths for two of its chief organizers on the next ship crossing the Atlantic. Mary Anderson and Rose Schneiderman were both immigrants of working-class background. Anderson hailed from Sweden and was a longtime bootmaker. Schneiderman, born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, got her start as a capmaker in New York’s Lower East Side. In 1909-10, Schneiderman cut her teeth as a union organizer overseeing a hard-fought strike by thousands of impoverished female garment workers just before the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. In their bags, the two Americans carried a “working women’s charter,” laying out the economic and political rights that American labor women hoped would be included in the peace settlement.

While Anderson and Schneiderman slowly shivered their way across the Atlantic (their ship having been stripped of its heating elements during the war), Bouvier and her subcommittee of several dozen European feminists, union activists and social democrats got to work in Paris outlining women’s central demands. Fewer and flexible work hours, equal pay for equal work, a unified labor code for men and women and paid maternity leave were all on their agenda. So too were guarantees of a prescribed role for women in formulating national and international labor policy .

After a month of tirelessly lobbying, the Inter-Allied women were finally invited to “state their case” before the Labor Commission (as well as the League of Nations Commission) at the peace conference. On March 18, 1919, the commission president and head of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, ushered Bouvier and her colleagues into the French Ministry of Labor, where the women methodically laid out their vision of fair international labor standards for working women.

It is difficult to say how much the women accomplished. The charter the Labor Commission drafted — which the peacemakers adopted in whole and incorporated into the Versailles Treaty — created a new permanent body, the International Labor Organization, and charged it with establishing just and equitable labor standards to regulate work conditions around the world. In a nod to women’s demands, the charter endorsed the principle of equal pay for equal work, and it placed the question of maternity leave on the agenda of the first I.L.O. conference, to be held in Washington later that year.

On the central issue of whether women would be able to help shape policy decisions at the I.L.O. conference, however, the Labor Commission refused to take a stand. Rather than calling on women to serve as conference delegates, it offered only the tepid recommendation that women be appointed as nonvoting “advisers” to national delegations, on hand to offer advice when questions “specifically affecting women” arose. The end result is that not one of the 40 states that sent a delegation to the inaugural I.L.O. conference appointed a woman to serve as a voting delegate.