Rose Pesotta (1896–1965)

Rose Pesotta was born Rakhel Peisoty to a middle-class Jewish family in Derazhnia, western Ukraine. As a young child, she went to school, and then was tutored at home. She joined her older sister Esther in the local anarchist underground group and adopted anarchist views.

Her parents’ plan for an arranged marriage precipitated her decision in 1913 to emigrate to the USA and settle in New York City. There she became a seamstress in various shirtwaist factories. The following year, she joined Local 25 of the ILGWU, and was elected in 1920 to its executive board.

She contributed articles to union and anarchist publications in Yiddish and English, and along with Anna Sosnovsky, Fanny Breslaw and Clara Rothberg Larsen, she published Der Yunyon Arbeter (The Union Worker) between 1923 and 1927. She continued her education by completing the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Workers in 1922, and attending Brookwood Labor College, a school for labor activists.

In the 1930s, she joined the ILGWU staff and regularly traveled to organize workers outside of New York, including in Puerto Rico, Detroit, Montreal, Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles. On loan from the ILGWU to the CIO, she joined the great labor upheavals of the 1930s in Akron, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan. She served as secretary of the anarchist paper The Road to Freedom and as a key member of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. She published two memoirs, Bread Upon the Waters (1944) and Days of Our Lives (1958).