The Barrington Hills Observer

Theresa Malkiel, circa 1910, not long after she came up with the idea of National Woman’s Day.

International Women’s Day is here again, and with it the opportunity to highlight women’s contributions to history, society and politics — and, of course, to sell stuff.

But how did the day get started? Some point to Russian communist roots; others claim an American origin story. The truth is that it’s neither and both. International Women’s Day began with a Russian-born Jewish woman in New York City, before traveling to the Soviet Union and back again.

Theresa Serber Malkiel was born in 1874 in the Russian Empire, in an area now in western Ukraine. She came from a middle-class family and received a good education, but her Jewish family was increasingly persecuted and emigrated to the United States in 1891, when she was 17.

In New York City, her education mattered little, according to historian Sally M. Miller. Malkiel found herself in the same desperate position as so many other immigrant women, taking a job in a garment factory. Conditions were brutal: Shifts could last 18 hours, injuries were common and women earned half of what men did, barely enough to pay rent in crowded tenements and boardinghouses. So, like many Jewish and Italian immigrant women at the time, Malkiel soon joined the labor movement and then started a union for female cloak-makers.

Malkiel also became a socialist and, at 26, married fellow socialist and attorney Leon Malkiel. Her husband’s income allowed her to leave the sweatshop, but after moving to the suburb of Yonkers and having a child, Malkiel continued her activism, Miller wrote, providing aid to immigrant women, taking leadership positions in the Socialist Party of America and, with her husband, co-founding a socialist newspaper, the New York Call. (Side note: Their daughter, Henrietta, later co-founded another publication, Congressional Quarterly, with her husband, Nelson Poynter.)

Malkiel was a vocal proponent of women’s equality and the right to vote, though she was wary of the upper-class, nonimmigrant women who tended to lead women’s suffrage groups. In her pamphlets, columns and speeches, she argued that true equality — for women, African Americans, immigrants and child laborers — would only come through socialism.

Read more of the Washington Post article here.