Pauline Newman was born in the late 1880s (likely 1887) near Kaunas, in modern day Lithuania. Raised Jewish, she grew up to be one of the most prominent labor organizers and unionists in the United States during the early 20th century. Nicknamed the “East Side Joan of Arc” when she was just a teenager, Newman revolutionized the garment industry through affiliations with both the Jewish socialist world and her queer connections, including Eleanor Roosevelt. The Jewish labor movement was a subset of the labor rights movement that revolutionized unions and working conditions in the United States; Newman was a key memberr. She devoted her life to the labor rights movement until her death in 1986.
Newman’s earliest fight was for an education. Growing up in the Pale of Settlement, the public schools did not allow Jewish children to attend. Newman’s father taught at the local cheder, or Jewish school, but girls were not able to attend. Still, Pauline convinced her father to let her attend classes, where she was the only girl. When Pauline was around nine years old her father passed away suddenly, leaving her mother to raise four children on the wages she made selling fruit at the local market. This, coupled with the reality of vicious pogroms sweeping the area, was the catalyst for the family’s move to New York City. They settled on the Lower East Side and Pauline immediately began looking for work in factories. By the age of eleven she was employed by the now infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Company, whose Washington Square factory burned in 1911, killing 146 workers. Most of the workers were 14-23 year old immigrant girls.
Pauline, however, worked in the factory some ten years before the tragedy. In a letter written in her adulthood she cataloged her time at the Triangle Shirtwaist. At the time, the company was a desirable place to work because the hours were steady and children were given opportunities to work consistently. Newman wrote, “the foreman told me that I was very lucky to have gotten a job with that concern because there is work all year round and that I will no longer have to look for another job. … During most of the year we youngsters worked overtime until 9 p.m. every night except Fridays and Saturdays. No, we did not get additional pay for overtime.” Reflecting on the poor working conditions, subpar pay/lack of overtime, and trouble with bosses, she wrote that there was no ability among factory workers to make change. “We were not organized and we knew that individual protest amounted to the loss of one’s job. No one in those days could afford the luxory (sic) of changing jobs — there was no unemployment insurance, there was nothing better than to look for another job which will not be better than the one we had. Therefore, we were, due to our ignorance and poverty, helpless against the power of the exploiters.”
As a young teenager, Pauline Newman found herself desperate to make change. Her formal education had stopped once her family left Lithuania, but she audited classes at the Socialist Literary Society and went on to found reading and study groups after work at the Triangle for her fellow workers. With this background, she wrote a piece about the monotony of work and the mistreatment she and other Jewish and Italian immigrants suffered, and this article led to her discovery by the Jewish Daily Forward, a prominent Yiddish language socialist newspaper. The publication propelled Newman into relative fame amongst the Jewish community on the Lower East Side, and as a teenager and young adult she went on to lead and organize further strikes. One such example was the renters’ strike of 1907-1908, in which 10,000 Manhattan families participated. This strike led to massive progress in the realm of tenants’ rights and rent control rules in New York City; her prominence from what became the largest rent strike in New York history allowed her to secure the Socialist Party nomination for Secretary of State at just twenty one years of age. She took on a prominent role in the Uprising of 20,000, and was soon promoted to the position of general organizer of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, or ILGWU. Newman was the first woman to hold this role.
She worked as a liaison between the union, laborers, and the government, spreading union ideals to those with the power to make political change. In 1911, Newman was stationed in Pennsylvania with the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) when she received word of the Triangle Factory Fire. She returned to Manhattan at once. The aftermath of the fire led to the founding of the Factory Investigation Committee, or FIC, which was created to keep factories up to code; Newman was offered a position with the FIC which put her in the circles of officials like Frances Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt. These connections, along with other relations to queer and lesbian women in the labor movement and government, were invaluable to Newman’s work.
Newman’s queerness is a prominent element of her legacy and archive. In her early twenties she was in a relationship with Rose Schneiderman, a peer and fellow Jewish labor activist. Both Rose and Pauline worked for a short time in leadership positions at the then male-dominated ILGWU, and exchanged letters regarding both their working and romantic relationship. The correspondence shows clear infatuation on both sides; Newman has a short relationship with a man around the same time, but breaks it off quickly and remains in close contact with Rose. These letters make it clear that they were in a relationship of some kind before each met their respective life partners; their breakup must have been fairly amiable, as they stayed closely affiliated through their working circles until death.
After Rose Schneiderman, Newman was in a fifty year relationship with her partner Frieda Miller. Miller taught Economics at Bryn Mawr College before joining the WTUL with Newman. Their relationship was unconventional in many ways— for one, when they met, Frieda was pregnant. The two women traveled to Vienna so that she could give birth and, upon their return to the United States, maintained that the baby was a World War I orphan they’d adopted. Thus, Pauline and Frieda raised their daughter, Elisabeth, together in Greenwich Village. Though lesbian relationships and motherhood were not commonly recognized at the time, the family was accepted by their labor movement colleagues and became well established in the field.
Newman’s relationship to her queerness is compelling to analyze from a modern perspective, and her actions should be considered with grace considering the era in which she was raised. In 1962, her former partner and lifelong friend, Rose Schneiderman, donated her papers to the NYU libraries, including a collection of her letters with Pauline from their twenties. After Rose died in 1972, Pauline went to the library to manually censor in her own archive— she brought a pair of scissors and cut out parts of her letters, particularly the parts in which she expressed her desire for Rose. This is a very literal gap in her archive. However, she also cut her numerous critiques of her male labor organizer colleagues from the letters. There is an argument to be made that this censorship was informed by Newman’s desire to leave a particular kind of legacy, more than a desire not to be connected to her queerness. She showed no sign of changing her mind on the critiques of the organizers she removed, and it was clear that her sexuality hadn’t changed; likely, this censorship was informed by the historical context of the period in which it happened.
The relationship between Newman and her partner’s daughter, Elisabeth, is further evidence of her relationship with queerness. She and Elisabeth were close; although Elisabeth did not grow up considering Pauline her mother they lived together for her entire childhood. The complicated nature of the relationship was more to do with the circumstances of the time than the interpersonal dynamics. Scholar Cathryn J. Prince notes that, “when [Elisabeth ] gets married, Pauline's name is not on that wedding invitation. She's in the wedding photos [though ]... right next to Frieda.” She goes on to explain that, in adulthood, Elisabeth began to better understand and appreciate who Pauline was to her and her mother and all that Pauline had done for her. Elisabeth cared for Pauline when she was aging, and Pauline became a grandmother in name to Elisabeth’s children. A child raised by lesbian mothers was quite uncommon in this period; this, combined with Newman and Miller’s devotion to both their activism and their child, made them exceptional.
Newman’s activism was in large part informed and influenced by her Jewish and queer identities. Like many of the activists in her circles (Rose Schneiderman, Clara Lemlich, Emma Goldman), Newman saw Judaism as a flawed and patriarchal structure but still framed her activism within the context of their Jewishness. She and her peers made reference to biblical metaphors in their speeches and understood antisemitism as an avenue through which labor activism was discouraged. Their Jewishness was inseparable from their labor activism; the written culture through which they got their starts (like Newman’s big break in the Forward) and the communities they advocated for maintained their religious identity on a larger scale.
Queer identity was much the same. Due to her androgynous dress and partnership with Frieda Miller, Newman was seen openly as lesbian within her circles. A major part of what made her able to enact such feminist labor movement change was her connections to lesbian networks. The Val-Kill group was one such example; Newman and Miller, along with Schneiderman and her partner Maud Swartz, became close friends of Eleanor Roosevelt’s and were integrated into her personal circles, allowing them to have significant mobility within the government and activist spheres. Newman was even invited to spend a week at the White House, solidifying her ability to liaise across parties and unions. The Val-Kill group was made up of primarily lesbians. The queer networks of the era also gave access to money, sometimes funding organizing and activism altogether. Rose Schneiderman was able to be promoted to the role of a paid organizer in the Women’s Labor Union Movement because of a donation from a self-described “anonymous lesbian.” Newman likely benefited from the same intergroup culture.
Pauline Newman died in the home of her daughter Elisabeth. She was 98 years old. She was mourned by the Jewish community and the labor movement equally, and was remembered for her fierce activism, mentorship, and her ability to move between worlds, negotiating with the wealthy, the government, and most significantly the male-centric labor movement to make space for Jews, women, and queer women in the trade unionist world.
(This biographical statement written by Malena Glover from the sources below.)
Biography Date: June 2026