Pauline Newman

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.

Biography

Early years

Pauline M. Newman was born in the late 1880s, near Kaunas, a city in the then Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement. Today that city is in present-day Lithuania. She was the youngest of four children. Her father was a teacher and her mother sold produce in the local market.

Newman fought for her early education. The local public school refused Jews, and Jewish schools refused women. She convinced her father to let her sit in on his classes. She learned to read and write in Hebrew and Yiddish. She also challenged the custom of the mechitza, dividing the congregation along gender lines. Following the death of her father, Newman, her mother and sisters emigrated to New York City where her older brother had settled. At age nine, Newman went to work in a brush factory. At 11 she took a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Disturbed by the miserable conditions, Newman was drawn to the Socialist Party through the popular Yiddish newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward.