Rose Pesotta
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Rose Pesotta (1896-1965) was an anarchist, feminist labor organizer and vice president within the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.
Born Rakhel Peisoty in Derazhnia, 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, Pesotta 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 garment workers. Working hard to educate her fellow workers, Pesotta was elected to the all male executive board of ILGWU Local 25 in 1920. She spent two years at Brookwood Labor College in the 1920s.
The union sent her to Los Angeles in 1933 to organize garment workers, her success there leading to an appointment as vice-president of the union in 1934. One of her biggest accomplishments in Los Angeles, California was the leading role she would play in the garment industry wide strike of 1933, as strikes were a rarity in this notoriously "open shop" city.
Pesotta also contributed occasional articles to the anarchist newspaper Road to Freedom (the successor 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.
Pesotta played a key role, together with Lea Roback, in the unionization of Montreal's women's garment workers, in the ILGWU, in April 1937.
In 1944 Pesotta 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. Rose Pesotta died in 1965.
[edit] Works
- Bread Upon the Waters (1944)
- Days of Our Lives (1958)
[edit] References
Chapin, David A. and Weinstock, Ben, The Road from Letichev: The history and culture of a forgotten Jewish community in Eastern Europe, Volume 2. ISBN 0-595-00667-1 iUniverse, Lincoln, NE, 2000, p. 546.
Laslett, John and Tyler, Mary, The ILGWU in Los Angeles, 1907-1988. ISBN 0-923145-02-8 Ten Star Press, Inglewood, California, 1989.
Leeder, Elaine, The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer. ISBN 0-7914-1672-0 SUNY Series in American Labor History, 1993.
