Lemlich, for reasons that are not entirely clear, less than a year after hiring her to campaign for suffrage in 1911. Lemlich continued her suffrage activities, founding the Wage Earner’s Suffrage League, a working class alternative to middle class suffrage organizations, along with Schneiderman, Leonora O'Reilly, and two other women garment workers. Yet while the League admitted only working class women to membership, it was dependent on non-working class women for support and, in deference to its supporters' wishes, affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association — the organization to which it saw itself as an alternative — rather than with the Socialist Party Women's Committee. The Wage Earner’s Suffrage League passed out of existence, however, after organizing a successful rally at Cooper Union at which Lemlich, Schneiderman, and others spoke. Lemlich continued her suffrage activities for the Women's Trade Union League, while Schneiderman, who quit the WTUL at that time, went to work for the ILGWU before returning to the WTUL several years later. Other activists, such as Pauline Newman, worked under the aegis of the Socialist Party, which supported suffrage even though many in the leadership considered it a distraction from the more urgent business of class struggle. Consumer advocacy Lemlich married Joe Shavelson in 1913. The couple had three children: Irving Charles Velson, Martha Shavelson Schaffer, and Rita Shavelson Margules. Moving to the solidly working-class neighborhood of East New York, then later to Brighton Beach, she did not return to work, other than on an occasional part-time basis, for the next thirty years. Instead she devoted herself to raising a family and organizing housewives. Others had organized in this area before Lemlich: Jewish housewives in New York had boycotted kosher butchers to protest high prices in the first decade of the twentieth century and the Brooklyn Tenants Union led rent strikes and fought evictions. After joining the Communist Party, which largely disdained the notion of consumer organizing, Lemlich and Kate Gitlow, mother of Benjamin Gitlow, attempted to organize a union of housewives that would address not only consumers' issues, but housing and education as well. The United Council of Working Class Housewives also raised money and organized relief for strikers in Passaic, New Jersey during the bitter 1926 strike. In 1929, after the Communist Party created a Women's Commission, Lemlich launched the United Council of Working-Class Women (UCWW), which eventually had nearly fifty branches in New