Rose Pesotta

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Rosa Pesotta was an anarchist and feminist labor organizer (and vice president) within the ILGWU.

Born in Derazhnya, Ukraine in 1896 to a family of grain merchants, Pesotta was well educated during her childhood, and, influenced by the Norodnaya Volya (People's Will), would eventually adopt anarchist views. In 1913, at the age of 17, Rosa emigrated to New York City and found employment in a shirtwaist factory, quickly joining the ILGWU, a union representing the mostly Jewish and Latina female garmet workers. Working hard to educate her fellow workers, Rosa was elected to the ILGWU's all male executive board in 1920. Also in 1920 she was sent to Los Angeles to organize garmet workers, her success there leading to an appointment as vice-president of the union in 1934. One of her biggiest accomplishments in Los Angeles was the leading role she would play in the Garment industry wide strike of 1933, as stirkes were a rarity in this notoriously "open shop" city.

Pesotta also contributed occasional articles to the anarchist newspaper Road to Freedom (the sucessor to Emma Goldman's Mother Earth), where she found herself on more than one occasion debating other anarchists on the merits of working within traditional union structures, and was heavily criticised for such activities by Marcus Graham.

In 1944 Rose resigned from the executive board of the union in protest of the fact that despite 85% of the union's membership were women, she was the sole female executive member. She had repeatedly complained to David Dubinsky, then president of the union, that she felt uncomfortable being the token women on the board but the union continued to not allow other women to rise to leadership positions, despite the fact that Dubinsky had voiced a similar protest years earlier about being the only Jew on the executive board. Rosa Pesotta died in 1965.