Some Totally Radical Jewish Women

By TONY MICHELS

Adapted and reprinted electronically by permission of the publisher from A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York by Tony Michels, pp 87-88, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

At the dawn of the 1880s, few would have predicted the rise of a radical Jewish workers’ movement in New York City. And yet, between then and the 1920s, just such a movement arose, led by an energetic community of radical intellectuals.

Many had rebelled against religious tradition and achieved some level of secular education. Many had participated in (or at least sympathized with) one or another revolutionary party. And many possessed an acute awareness of themselves as historical actors, as if the entire fate of a people depended on what they said and did. Though previously marginal, these Yiddish-speaking socialist intellectuals emerged as leaders of New York’s burgeoning Jewish working class.

Although many were men, there existed a small but important cohort of women lecturers and intellectuals who believed it was their duty to provide leadership to “the masses,” however defined. Emma Goldman was the most famous of them. Before she achieved widespread renown in the United States, Goldman was a highly successful lecturer in Yiddish and would return to Jewish audiences throughout her life. Large crowds used to turn out to hear her speak on subjects such as birth control, anarchism, and the death penalty. Standing in Goldman’s shadow, meanwhile, were a number of lesser-known but highly talented women. Hutchins Hapgood offers the following ambivalent portrait of the East Side’s women intellectuals in his 1902 classic, The Sprit of the Ghetto:

Emotionally strong and attached by Russian tradition to a rebellious doctrine, they are deeply unconventional in theory and sometimes in practice; although the national morality of the Jewish race very differently limits the extent to which they realize some of their ideas. The passionate feeling at the bottom of most of their “tendency” beliefs is that a woman should stand on the same social basis for a man, and should be weighed in the same scales. This ruling creed is held by all classes of the educated women of the Ghetto, from the poor sweatshop worker, who has recently felt the influence of Socialism, to the thoroughly trained “new woman” with her developed literary taste.

Rarely, if ever, did these “strong,” “unconventional” women occupy the highest positions of leadership, edit the major publications, or share top billing with men at mass meetings. Nonetheless, they achieved considerable prominence in women’s socialist clubs that began appearing in the late 1880s. Within this separate women’s sphere—distinct from but still closely connected through personal and organizational ties to the rest of the Jewish labor movement—women intellectuals exercised as much influence as the male gedolim.

Mikhail Zametkin’s wife, Adella Kean Zametkin, was one of those women. Born into a prosperous, educated (but still religious) family, Kean was privileged enough to have been given private lessons from a tutor at an early age. As a young woman she herself tutored poor girls, presaging her future activities in the United States. In 1888, at the age of twenty-five, Kean immigrated to New York, where she quickly gravitated to the socialist movement and met Zametkin, who had already established himself as a leader. In addition to her participation in the SLP, Kean Zametkin frequently lectured to women’s groups and contributed to the leading socialist publications. In 1897 she helped found the daily Forverts and worked as its cashier. In later years Kean Zametkin wrote and lectured on nutrition, hygiene, birth control, child education, and other “women’s issues.” According to the Forverts, “She taught thousands of women simple things that are very necessary for the average working woman.”

Dr. Anna Anita Ingerman can be considered the most extraordinary of the labor movement’s women intellectuals. Born near the city of Gomel in White Russia in 1868, she was one of a growing number of women who attended gymnasium, the most prestigious form of secondary school in Russia. In the late 1880s Amitin moved to Berne, Switzerland, where she studied medicine and joined Georgy Plekhanov’s Group for the Emancipation of Labor (GEL), the first organization of Russian Marxists. In this group she met her fellow medical student and future husband, Sergei Ingerman. The couple immigrated to the United States in the early 1890s, where they established the Russian Social Democratic Society for the purpose of raising funds for the GEL and, later, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. For many decades the Ingermans served as ambassadors for the party’s Menshevik wing. At the same time Anna Ingerman was very active in the local socialist movement. She was known for “her tireless service as lecturer and teacher for numerous Russian, German, Jewish, and American study circles, women’s clubs, and workingmen’s societies.” With Adella Kean Zametkin and several other women, Ingerman helped found the Arbeterin Fareyn (Workingwomen’s Society) in December 1893, with its main goals the organization of “women’s trades,” achievement of “equal political rights,” and to “struggle hand in hand with the male proletariat for the liberation of humanity without the difference of sex.”

The Workingwomen’s Society grew; four thousand Jewish women marched under its banner in the 1895 May Day parade. Along with other women’s socialist groups, it forged a tradition of women’s activism, and became a powerful force in the Jewish labor movement—a force led, organized, and conceived by women.