Partner
Frieda S. Miller
Queer Places:
Triangle Shirt Waist Factory, Washington Pl, New York, NY 10003, Stati Uniti
299 W 12th St, New York, NY 10014
Pauline
M. Newman (October 18, 1887 – April 8, 1986) was an American labor activist.
She is best remembered as the first female general organizer of the
International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) and for six decades of
work as the education director of the ILGWU Health Center. A labor organizer,
union official, and socialist, Newman (ca.1890-1986) was an immigrant from
Lithuania and a factory worker at a very young age. She was the first woman
organizer for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, Director of
Health Education at its Union Health Center, and an active member of the
National and New York Women's Trade Union League. She represented the ILGWU
and the WTUL at numerous committees and conferences on the state, national,
and international levels. After 1924 she usually lived with Frieda S. Miller;
together they raised Miller's adopted daughter.
In 1917, the Women’s Trade Union League dispatched Newman to Philadelphia,
to build a new branch of the league. There she met a young Bryn Mawr economics
instructor named
Frieda S. Miller.[3]
Miller, who was chafing at the constraints of academic life, gladly left
academia to help Newman with her organizing. Within the year, the two were
living together. It was the beginning of a turbulent but mutually satisfying
relationship that would last until Miller’s death in 1974. In 1923, the two
women moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, where they raised Miller’s
daughter together. Though lesbian families were not openly discussed in the
1920s, their family seems to have been accepted by government and union
friends and colleagues.[3]
299 W 12th St
Pauline Newman died on April 8, 1986 at the New York City home of her
adopted daughter, Elisabeth Burger. She was 98 years old at the time of her
death.[1]
Newman’s death aroused grief and sadness among the ILGWU and women trade
unionists. She had created a space for herself as a negotiator- standing with
one foot in the male-dominated labor movement and one foot in the cross-class
world of women reformers. She influenced many people during her time. Her
contributions as an organizer, a legislative expert, a writer, and a mentor to
younger women activists were significant and wide-ranging.[1]
Newman left an unpublished autobiography, the manuscript of which resides
at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York.[4]
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