Women & international trade, circa 1909

Conventional wisdom about the early 20th century has it that women's involvement in international affairs, if any, focused on suffrage and pacificism. But the serendipity of archival research (on a different issue altogether) revealed unexpected activism on an issue of international trade. Page 1 of the April 1, 1909, Chicago Tribune blared:

CALL ALLIED HOST TO TARIFF FIGHT.
Cook County Clubwomen, with Aid of Merchants, Urge

500,000 Chicagoans to Sign Protest.

START WAVE OF ALARM.

Petitions, to Left and Right, Await Huge Roll to

Impress Capital in Hosiery War.

Hosiery War?
That's right; it was a congressional proposal to increase tariffs on that essential undergarment that spurred the "volcano of public indignation" and this petition:

To the Congress of the United States, Washington, D.C.: We the undersigned, emphatically protest against the duties to be assessed under the new tariff bill (H.R. 1438), known as the Payne bill, on articles of wearing apparel, particularly leather gloves and cotton hosiery. The burdens these increases will place upon the women of the country, especially those who can least afford to bear them, are unjust and unwise. We therefore ask you to enact, by amendment, rates at least not higher than those prevailing under the Dingley bill.

Alas, this excerpt (p. 37) from Carolyn Rhodes' Reciprocity, U.S. Trade Policy, and the GATT Regime indicates that the "clubwomen" -- whom the Tribune identified only as "Mrs. [Husband's Name]" -- campaigned in vain, for the Payne-Aldrich tariff became law the same year.