Malkiel, Theresa Serber

MALKIEL, THERESA SERBER (1874–1949). A Jewish immigrant from Bar, Russia, Theresa Serber Malkiel arrived in New York in 1891, went to work in the needle trades, and involved herself in the labor movement, socialism, and feminism. Her political activity in the socialist movement epitomizes the difficulties and contradictions encountered by socialists on gender and class issues. Confronting the dilemma of autonomy and integration, she generally opposed women’s separatism and, with other women militants, systematically denounced the sex discrimination prevalent among socialists.

Malkiel helped organize the Infant Cloak Makers Union of New York in 1894, led a well-publicized strike, and helped guide the local into the doomed Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance. Breaking with the Socialist Labor Party in 1899, she became the local leader of Socialist women in Yonkers, New York, in the new Socialist Party of America (created in 1901).

In 1908, Malkiel was elected a member of the Socialist Party-sponsored Woman’s National Committee, designed to facilitate national propaganda and support for women.

In those years, Malkiel crusaded primarily for the issues of woman’s suffrage and work. In 1907 the Second International had ordered all Socialist parties to support votes for women but banned cooperation with the autonomous “bourgeois suffragists.” Malkiel herself saw the vote as a crucial stepping stone toward gender equality but primarily as a weapon for the conquest of socialism.

Malkiel denounced the exploitation of women in the workplace and at home. Oppressed as workers, they also had to confront discrimination by workmates and union leaders. Women’s only hope, according to Malkiel, lay in collective action and organization. The 1909 shirtwaist workers’ strike gave Malkiel, a former shirtwaist worker and a member of a Socialist Party women’s support committee, the opportunity to involve herself fully with immigrant female workers.

Home was the other facet of women’s lives, and Malkiel identified domestic labor—unpaid and unrecognized—as the specific female oppression and warned working girls against the lures of marriage, doomed to bring a double working day and a more exhausting existence. More privileged in her personal life, Theresa Serber married Leon Malkiel, a socialist lawyer, in 1900. They had one daughter.

When Theresa Malkiel projected herself into an ideal future, freed from industrial and sexual exploitation, she left the family structure more or less unchanged. The decisive factor was the newly won gender equality that would enable wives to carry out their “mission” as mothers and educators with dignity. In Malkiel’s Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (1910), the young Jewish heroine experiences liberation from industrial exploitation as well as from patriarchal family relationships. In a new egalitarian context, the heroine fulfills the traditional female mission and guides her meek, male companion toward the Socialist Promised Land.

On the eve of World War I, the Socialist Party decided to retrench on women’s issues. Committed to pacifism, Malkiel fought on for suffrage and immigrant women. After the war, she became less politically active.

Basch, Françoise. Theresa Malkiel: Journal d’une gréviste. Paris: Editions Payot, 1981.

Basch, Françoise. “The Socialist Party of America, the Woman Question, and Theresa Serber Malkiel.” In Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change, edited by J. Friedlander et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Buhle, Mari Jo. Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Malkiel, Theresa Serber. The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker. Introductory essay by Françoise Basch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Miller, Sally M. “From Sweatshop Worker to Labor Leader: Theresa Malkiel, a Case Study.” American Jewish History. 68 (December 1978).