LaborFest 2018 Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman, a Memoir from the Early 20th Century

Presented by Robbin Henderson, Matilda Rabinowitz’s 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 herself to the notion that women should be entitled to independence, equal rights, equal pay, and sexual and personal autonomy. After immigrating from the Ukraine to the US, she was radicalized by her experience in sweatshops and became an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World from 1912 to 1917 before choosing single motherhood in 1918.