Vera Shlakman

Vera Shlakman (July 15, 1909 – November 5, 2017) was a 20th-century American professor of Economics and Marxism and author of a 1935 book on women factory workers. She was best known in 1952 for her firing by Queens College for refusing to testify to the McCarran Committee whether she was a card-carrying Communist, as well as for apology and restitution she received in 1982.

Background

Vera Shlakman was born on July 15, 1909, in Montreal, Canada. Her parents, Louis Shlakman (tailor, garment foreman) and Lena Hendler, were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. They named their children for revolutionary heroes: Vera for Vera Zasulich, Eleanora for Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor Marx, and Victor for Victor Hugo. Anarchist Emma Goldman was a family friend.

Hearings, firing

On September 24, 1952, during testimony at a public hearing of the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, led by Senator Pat McCarran, Shlakman pled the First and Fifth amendments with regard to any membership in the Communist Party.

Later life

Shlakman's firing by Queens College "banished her to academic obscurity" at the time. She never taught Economics again at Queens College.

Restitution

In 1980, City University offered an apology to professors dismissed then, including Shlakman. "They were dismissed during and in the spirit of the shameful era of McCarthyism, during which the freedoms traditionally associated with academic institutions were quashed," the trustees of the City University of New York declared in a unanimous resolution.

Shlakman and Oscar Shaftel filed an appeal to New York City Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin over pensions or death benefits for former professors dismissed during the Second Red Scare. In April 1982, the City announced a $935,098 settlement with seven living and three deceased former professors: Dr. Shlakman received $114,599. Besides Shlakman and Shaftel, the other professors were: Richard Austin, Joseph Bressler, Dudley Straus, Sarah Reidman Gustafson, and Bernard F. Riess.

Legacy

Sam Roberts of The New York Times commented at her death, "A 42-year-old assistant professor when she was fired in 1952, Dr. Shlakman neither taught economics again nor wrote a sequel to her groundbreaking 1935 book on female factory workers."

Works

Shlakman published only one major book, of which historian Alice Kessler-Harris of Columbia University later wrote:

Vera Shlakman had an extraordinary effect on my work and on that of a generation of labor historians. Quietly, unobtrusively her interpretive insights and the methodological innovations she introduced paved the way to a more eclectic and integrated discipline. A full seventy years after its publication in 1935, her Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts still provides an intellectual and conceptual guide, not only to a changing field, but to the persistent questions it raises. because her book 'raised the question of how a transformation in the meaning of work for female workers could, and perhaps did, alter the workplace environment and the nature of family life.'

In 2017, Kessler-Harris added that Shlakman's study of Chicopee confirmed that fundamental problems between capital and labor and thus that labor protests were a reaction to capitalist excesses. In 2017, historian Joshua B. Freeman of Queens College praised Shlakman's 1935 book because it "extended the boundaries of American working-class history" and influenced a generation of historians."

Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (1935) (1969)