There is no better time than now to learn about the heroic women of the past. I was delighted recently to learn that Cornell University Press had published the memoir of IWW organizer Matilda Robbinson, with beautiful illustrations by her granddaughter Robbin Legere Henderson. Here’s the description from the Cornell site:

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.

Immigrant Girl Radical Woman can be obtained directly from the Cornell U Press.

Matilda at work during the Little Falls strike— illustration from the book

I learned about Matilda Rabinwitz in researching my novel on the 1912 Little Falls textile strike and subsequently emailed with her granddaughter, Robbin. The striking workers were nearly all female and were led by two women, Matilda and a socialist nurse, Helen Schloss. After a victory at Little Falls, both women went on to other labor battles. Matilda lived a long and active life, sharing her stories with her grandchildren in the 1960s. Helen disappeared after going to Soviet Russia as part of a Quaker medical mission in 1919.

For more on Matilda, including photographs from the Reuther library. see my site:

New glimpses of the Little Falls strike leader Matilda Rabinowitz, aka Matilda Robbins

The Red Nurse also includes, with Robbin’s permission, a chapter from Matilda’s memoir.