Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman

Matilda Rabinowitz

ISBN 10: 1501709844 / ISBN 13: 9781501709845

Published by Cornell University Press, US, 2017

About this Item

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.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781501709845

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman
• Publisher: Cornell University Press, US
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501709844
• ISBN 13: 9781501709845
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Henderson, Robbin Légère
• Condition: New
• Weight: 28 grams

About this title

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 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.