A Jewish Lithuanian immigrant, Newman worked as a child in the garment sweatshops of New York’s
East Side and thrilled to the 1909 citywide garment uprising, when some twenty thousand Italian and
Jewish immigrants, nearly all young girls in their teens and early twenties, struck for better pay, safer
workplaces, and an end to the cutthroat competition of the “sweating system,” which debased everyone
involved, contractors, sellers, and producers. In 1918, on assignment as a labor organizer for the WTUL
in Philadelphia, she met Miller, a University of Chicago–trained economics professor at Bryn Mawr and
a league ally who shared her passions for women’s trade unionism, suffrage, and social reform. Both
were rooming at the College Club, and when Miller fell gravely ill during the rampaging flu epidemic,
Newman nursed her back to health. Except for a brief falling-out in the early 1960s, she and Miller
remained committed partners for the next fifty years, raising a daughter together after 1923.^7
In choosing a “Boston marriage,” where women lived together as committed partners in arrangements
that may or may not have involved sexual passion, Newman and Miller continued a practice common
among earlier feminists. Although neither felt comfortable speaking publicly about their intimate lives and
neither left a record of the distresses or joys their rejection of heterosexual marriage engendered, each
clearly found great solace and pleasure in the other’s company. Their partnership flourished, nestled
within a larger reform community of close female friends, some married, some not. Still, they lived
together in an era in which heterosexual eroticism and marriage were the new ideals and women whose
greatest passions appeared to be social service and political reform were no longer celebrated by the
culture as models of female achievement.
The 1920s shift toward a more gender-integrated heterosexual world and away from female
separatism continued into the 1950s, affecting the personal and organizational choices feminist activists
would make, even as other aspects of society changed dramatically. In the wake of the stock market crash
of 1929, unemployment, homelessness, and industrial conflict soared. The fear of social collapse
redirected the nation’s attention: social and economic issues once deemed irrelevant now became of
utmost urgency. Women, like men, turned to politics and labor organizing in large numbers, with the
majority forming mixed-sex organizations. A new era of activism had begun.
For some, of course, especially African Americans, the economic hardships of the 1930s were not
new: they were long-standing realities. In the early twentieth century, millions of African Americans had
fled the South, seeking escape from a wearying grind of tenant farming, sharecropping, and low-wage
work, escalating white vigilante violence and a state-sanctioned Jim Crow system of strict racial
segregation. They arrived in midwestern and northern cities in the 1920s and 1930s with high hopes,
many having fought in World War I. All too often, they found segregated housing and schooling, white
hostility, and intense competition for a limited number of jobs.
Such racial animosity among workers was fueled in part by economic inequality. In the 1920s, the vast
bulk of wealth generated by productivity gains and rising consumption ended up in the wallets and bank
accounts of a small percentage of the population, creating vast economic disparity. In 1929, before the
stock market collapse, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans held some 44 percent of the nation’s wealth;
their worth had quadrupled after World War I while the rest of the nation saw modest gains at best.^8
Depression and New Deal
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, the uneven distribution of wealth was not his most
pressing concern. His administration acted first to stave off a banking panic, end the home and farm
foreclosure epidemic, and put the unemployed—by 1933 one-fourth of the nation—back to work. But