Woman Worker and the Trade Unions, The.
[Labor.] Wolfson, Theresa, Ph.D. The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions. New York: International Publishers, 1926.
8vo.; green cloth.
First edition of Wolfson’s first book, her doctoral thesis written for the Brookings Institution investigating women’s exclusion from leadership roles in trade unions. Although Wolfson had this published by the leading New York Socialist and Trotskyite firm of the period, her political affiliation with socialist ideals had dissolved after the Bolshevik Revolution. In addition to numerous articles, Wolfson co-authored Labor And The N.R.A. (1934) and Frances Wright, Free Enquirer: The Study Of A Temperament (1939). NAW, pp. 742-44.
Theresa Wolfson (1897-1972), the daughter of radical Russian-Jewish immigrants, began her career as a social activist early on, helping to organize a chapter of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (later the League of Industrial Democracy) at her Brooklyn high school. (After the Bolshevik Revolution, “her socialism was of the heart and her belief in industrial democracy transcended party politics.”) Her work and research in various health organizations, in the National Child Labor Committee, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union led her to write and speak out on the problems of working women, all the while compiling research for her master’s thesis at Columbia. In 1925 she became education director of the Union Health Center of the ILGWU.
From then on Wolfson’s energy found outlets in various educational endeavors, including teaching leadership skills in the works’ education movement; and teaching labor history and economics to workers in union-sponsored schools, summer schools for office workers, and white-collar workshops sponsored by the American Labor Education Service. From 1942-45 she was a member of the public panel of the War Labor Board, and in 1957 she received the John Dewey award of the League of Industrial Democracy. And from the late 1920s on, Wolfson taught in more formal programs such as the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, and the Brooklyn branch of Hunter College, which became Brooklyn College, from which she retired in 1967. After that, she taught women in the continuing education program at Sarah Lawrence College.
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