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

Rabinowitz, Matilda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501709844 ISBN 13: 9781501709845

Publisher: ILR Press, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Review:

"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, Chief Curator, Contemporary Jewish Museum)

"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, author of The Way to the Spring)

"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, author of The Rising of the Women)

About this edition

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501709844
• ISBN 13: 9781501709845
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296
• Illustrator: Henderson Robbin Légère