Naomi Silverman Cohn

Naomi Silverman Cohn (April 15, 1888 – October 20, 1982) was an American social activist and government worker. She cofounded the Virginia Council on State Legislation which followed legislative bills dedicated to women's issues. Cohn directed the Division of Women and Children of the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry until 1942. Her activism resulted in posthumous recognition by the Women of Virginia Historic Trail and Virginia Women in History. Cohn's name was added to the Virginia Women's Monument in 2020.

Early life Cohn's parents, Harri and Sadie Silverman, had both emigrated from Poland to Bristol, Pennsylvania with their children; there, her father found work peddling crockery. Naomi, who for the first two decades of her life gave her name officially as "Mayme Silverman", was born two years after their emigration. She attended school locally while her older sisters spun yarn at a local mill and worked in a dry goods store; it is possible that she studied to become a teacher. On March 30, 1909, at the home of her parents, she married Jacob Saul Cohn, a 1904 University of Richmond graduate who worked as a lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, to which the couple soon moved. They went on to have three children, two daughters and a son, and took in Naomi's orphaned, twin nephews as well.

Career and activism Cohn quickly became heavily involved in the civic affairs of her adopted city. Around 1911, she joined the local chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women, She became the executive secretary of the Virginia Consumers' League not long after that organization's formation in 1936. In 1938 she lobbied the Virginia legislature to pass a law restricting a woman's work week to forty-eight hours, except for certain specially designated professions; she spent up to thirteen hours each day at the Virginia State Capitol as part of her efforts, which were ultimately successful. Cohn entered government service in 1939 when she became an inspector of factories and mercantile businesses for the Division of Women and Children of the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry; she also continued to direct the division until 1942, when she took a job with the Office of Price Administration in Richmond. Despite her loss, she continued to be active in public life, testifying before members of the Virginia legislature in 1954 in favor of the repeal of the poll tax.

Cohn once ascribed her interest in the plight of working women and children to the excesses she had witnessed as a young woman growing up in Bristol. Her husband died of heart failure on November 15, 1938 and was interred in the Hebrew Cemetery in Richmond. In her latter years she moved to Milwaukee to live with her elder daughter, Sarah A. Cohn Ettenheim; she died there in 1982. After her cremation her ashes were interred next to her husband in Richmond. In March 2016, she was one of four Richmond women honored by the Greater Richmond Transit Company by having their names placed on bus destination header signs and highlighted online to honor Women's History Month. In 2020, hers was included on the initial list of names added to the Virginia Women's Monument.