“Quick! Into the boxes!”
The words sent 11-year-old Pauline Newman and the other children scrambling for cover inside the large cardboard boxes, already half filled with finished crisp, white shirtwaists. Newman, whose tongue still tripped over English words, clapped her hand over her mouth; she knew she was lucky to have a job. The floor supervisor piled more shirtwaists on top of the boxes as soon as she closed the flap. By the time the rubber-soled inspector from City Hall approached, there was nothing to see but men bent over swaths of fabric, shears in hand, and stiff-necked women silently threading needles. He saw fabric scraps flutter to the floor. He saw grime-streaked window sills. He saw signs warning workers not to bother returning to work if they missed a day. What he didn’t see were children. Thus, the myth that no child laborers worked at New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory lived for another day.
By the time she was 19, Newman no longer snipped stray threads from fashionable shirtwaists or sewed buttons on cuffs. She was a rising figure in the labor movement—sitting among scores of women and men inside Cooper Union demanding fair pay and safer working conditions. Newman understood their anger and frustration. She knew the indignity of having a supervisor wait outside the lavatory door and daily searches to make sure not so much as a stray button found its way home inside a pocket. So, when they marched out of the lecture hall onto the streets, she joined them. By the end of the strike, known as “The Uprising of the 20,000,” hundreds of men and women had been arrested and fined.
Born in the early 1890s in Kaunas, Lithuania, Newman’s propensity for activism took root at an early age. Barred from public school because she was from a poor, Yiddish-speaking Jewish family, she persuaded her father to let her sit in on his lessons. When her father died suddenly in 1901, her mother, Theresa, who sold fruit in the market to support her children, made the difficult decision to emigrate to the United States. Life in New York City was precarious—and would prove formative for young Pauline.
At nine years old, Newman began working in a hairbrush factory on the top floor of a five-story walk-up in the Lower East Side. Six days a week, she plucked debris from coarse bristles in air thick with dust. Knowing her mother depended on her wages, Newman soon found better-paying work at a cigar-rolling factory and eventually at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company where she earned $1.50 a week. By the time she was a teenager, Newman began to imagine a different kind of workplace—one where laborers were treated with fairness and dignity.
Indeed, at just 16, Newman organized what would become the largest rent strike in New York City’s history. She helped tenants resist eviction and demand better living conditions. Her ability to mobilize neighbors and articulate their grievances earned her the nickname “the East Side Joan of Arc.”
That was only the beginning. In 1909, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) appointed Newman as its first female paid organizer. Crisscrossing the country, she rallied workers, raised funds, and led strikes from Buffalo to Kalamazoo. Her energy and eloquence inspired thousands of workers to stand up for fair wages and humane working hours.
In 1923, Newman helped establish the ILGWU Union Health Center – which provided its members with access to comprehensive health care. The idea was that no one should go bankrupt to receive healthcare. Indeed Newman had seen first-hand how illness destroyed lives when people “could not meet the cost of needed medical care.”
She also served on the Joint Sanitation Board, advised Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and pushed for protective labor legislation. Her work extended far beyond the factory floor; she understood that workers’ rights were tied to public health, housing, and education.
Newman’s life reflected the contradictions of early 20th-century labor reform—equal parts idealism and pragmatism. A fierce and sometimes acerbic negotiator, she never shied away from confrontation, but also understood the power of persistence over perfection. “We dreamed of a society where there would be no exploitation, no child labor,” she later recalled. “We just kept dreaming of the good things of life.”
In her later years, Newman’s influence expanded beyond union halls. She served on several national and international bodies, including the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau advisory committee, and the New York State Commission enforcing equal pay laws. In 1974, the Coalition of Labor Union Women honored her as a foremother of the women’s liberation movement.
Her story, as told in my forthcoming book For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman, offers a window into the broader history of industrial America—the rise of organized labor, the pivotal role of immigrant women in reform movements, and the persistence required to turn protest into policy. Newman understood that improving the lives of women workers would elevate standards for all workers—a principle that continues to guide labor organizing today.
Nearly 40 years after Newman’s death in 1986, the principles she fought for—fair pay, safe working conditions, and collective power—are once again at the center of America’s labor conversation. Workers across industries are taking to the picket lines to demand change – and they’re winning. In October 2023, the United Auto Workers reached a tentative agreement with automakers after a nationwide strike that secured significant wage increases and other benefits for workers. Hollywood writers secured higher royalties, protections against artificial intelligence, and mandatory staffing levels following months on the picket line. At Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest health care systems, 75,000 workers won pay increases and higher staffing ratios after a three-day walkout.
These victories reflect a broader shift: public support for unions has surged to its highest level in decades. According to a 2025 Gallup poll, 68 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, up from just 48 percent in 2009. The gender gap in union membership has also narrowed. A 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that 10.2 percent of men and 9.5 percent of women now belong to unions. Women not only lead organizing drives but also head major national unions, continuing the legacy of pioneers like Newman, Rose Schneiderman, and Clara Lemlich.
The academic world, too, has advanced Newman’s cause. Scholars such as Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin have deepened understanding of how gender and work intersect, shaping modern debates on equity, pay transparency, and family leave.
Newman’s story, then, is not just one of triumph—it is one of endurance. She knew that progress would be incremental, hard-won, and collective. Her life bridged the sweatshops of the Lower East Side and the boardrooms of policy reform. She showed that real change begins when ordinary people demand dignity.
More than a century after Newman first climbed the stairs to that hairbrush factory, her message endures: labor rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights. Pauline Newman’s dream of “the good things of life” still challenges a nation to measure its progress not by wealth or power, but by the fairness it extends to those who make its prosperity possible.
For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman will be available in 2026 through the University of Illinois Press.
