'Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman' with Robbin Légère Henderson

Immigrant, activist, and feminist Matilda Robbins (née Rabinowitz 1887-1963) was an important, though largely unrecognized, labor organizer and writer, committed to the improvement of workers’ lives and dedicated to personal freedom and social justice. She worked as an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World from 1912-1917, choosing to become a single mother in 1919.

Combining memory, history, and imagination — Robbins’s writing with Henderson’s black and white scratchboard drawings, and commentary offering historical, biographical, and social context — the talk briefly covers Robbins’s early life in the Pale of Settlement, the terrifying journey to America and the radicalizing experience of being a child worker in the sweatshops of the garment industry in New York in the 1910s and 20s.

The details of organizing a strike of immigrant garment industry workers in upstate New York when she was 25 are offered, and glimpses provided of subsequent strikes. Robbins’s affair with fellow organizer, Ben Légère is discussed, as is her decision to become a mother in spite of being unmarried in the early 20th century when such choices were unconventional and socially unacceptable.