Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman: A Memoir from the Early Twentieth Century

by Matilda Rabinowitz, Robbin Légère Henderson (Illustrator), Ileen A. DeVault (Afterword)

Overview

Matilda Rabinowitz’s illustrated memoir challenges assumptions about the lives of early twentieth-century women. In Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman, Rabinowitz describes the ways in which she and her contemporaries rejected the intellectual and social restrictions imposed on women as they sought political and economic equality in the first half of the twentieth century. Rabinowitz devoted her labor and commitment to the notion that women should feel entitled to independence, equal rights, equal pay, and sexual and personal autonomy.

Rabinowitz (1887–1963) immigrated to the United States from Ukraine at the age of thirteen. Radicalized by her experience in sweatshops, she became an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World from 1912 to 1917 before choosing single motherhood in 1918. "Big Bill" Haywood once wrote, "a book could be written about Matilda," but her memoir was intended as a private story for her grandchildren, Robbin Légère Henderson among them. Henderson’s black-and white-scratchboard drawings illustrate Rabinowitz’s life in the Pale of Settlement, the journey to America, political awakening and work as an organizer for the IWW, a turbulent romance, and her struggle to support herself and her child.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501709845
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2017
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Matilda Rabinowitz wrote a regular column, "On the Left," for the Socialist Newsletter, a Los Angeles publication of the Socialist Party. Robbin Légère Henderson is an artist and a freelance curator and exhibition consultant. Ileen deVault is Professor of Labor History at Cornell University's ILR School. She is the author of United Apart, also from Cornell.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. These Were Pioneers, Too
2. The Journey to America
3. The Wretched Refuse of Your Teeming Shores
4. A New Career
5. Bridgeport and Socialism
6. I Fell in Love with Him
7. Little Falls
8. A Gallery of Radicals
9. After Little Falls
10. Greenville, South Carolina, "The Toughest Job"
11. New York, Greenwich, World War I
12. A New Life (Vita)
13. Ben Returns
14. Washington
15. Ballardvale, Greenwich Village, Cos Cob, St. Louis
Matilda’s Life Following the Events Described in Her Memoir
Afterword
Appendix
Index

What People are Saying About This

Ben Ehrenreich

Immigrant, socialist, labor organizer, feminist, Matilda Rabinowitz lived an extraordinary life, and this is an extraordinary document. Her memoirs, vivid and precise, are a vital contribution to the history of American radicalism, and more urgently relevant than ever. Robbin Légère Henderson’s illustrations are nothing less than a marvel.

Renny Pritikin

This amazing project is a simultaneous reinvigoration of many cultural forms. It is a detective mystery, as Henderson travels around the Northeast discovering clues to her grandmother’s past, and a story of family separation and reunion not over great distances, but across a gulf of time. This book is a precious history of an American, and Jewish, immigration experience. It is a partnership between a writer and a visual artist, and ultimately it is a collaboration between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Meredith Tax

Matilda Rabinowitz, early twentieth-century socialist and traveling IWW organizer, had a hard immigrant life, moving from one job to another, dedicated to the struggle but dragged down by love for the wrong man. Her unpublished memoir has been resurrected by her granddaughter, and the result has enough social and economic detail for any labor historian and enough heartache for any lover of romance.

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating, educational and engaging personal story written like a great novel rather than a typical memoir.... Matilda’s story strengthens the resolve of women to find their own place in society in their own time and be inspired. I will recommend Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman to my college students as a must read.

Israel National News

A fascinating interplay between past and present and help us to read between the lines of Matilda's words...Robbins' memoir is recommended to anyone interested in labour organization and women workers in the early years of the 20th century. The ease of reading, illustrations, and Henderson's additions make it an ideal book for assigning to undergraduates

Labour/Le Travail

Offers a sustained focus on labor in the early twentieth century, including factory conditions for women and men, intra-union dynamics, and the challenges facing working mothers.... Scholars will find much to love in this engaging, touching, and timely memoir that may not have been written for this wider audience but, happily, has found us.

Legacy 35.2

"This amazing project is a simultaneous reinvigoration of many cultural forms. It is a detective mystery, as Henderson travels around the Northeast discovering clues to her grandmother’s past, and a story of family separation and reunion not over great distances, but across a gulf of time. This book is a precious history of an American, and Jewish, immigration experience. It is a partnership between a writer and a visual artist, and ultimately it is a collaboration between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."

Renny Pritikin

"Matilda Rabinowitz, early twentieth-century socialist and traveling IWW organizer, had a hard immigrant life, moving from one job to another, dedicated to the struggle but dragged down by love for the wrong man. Her unpublished memoir has been resurrected by her granddaughter, and the result has enough social and economic detail for any labor historian and enough heartache for any lover of romance."

Meredith Tax

"Immigrant, socialist, labor organizer, feminist, Matilda Rabinowitz lived an extraordinary life, and this is an extraordinary document. Her memoirs, vivid and precise, are a vital contribution to the history of American radicalism, and more urgently relevant than ever. Robbin Légère Henderson’s illustrations are nothing less than a marvel."

Ben Ehrenreich