[2] Following the death of her father, Newman, her mother and sisters emigrated to New York City where her older brother had settled.

[3] Disturbed by the miserable conditions, Newman was drawn to the Socialist Party through the popular Yiddish newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward.

[2] At age fifteen, she joined a Socialist Literary Society, and organized after-work study groups at the Triangle factory.

[2] In 1907, with New York City in the grip of a depression and thousands facing eviction, the twenty-year-old Newman took a group of "self-supporting women" to camp for the summer on the Palisades above the Hudson River.

[2] In late 1907 - early 1908, on Newman and her band led a winter rent strike involving 10,000 families in lower Manhattan.

As the leader of the strike, Newman received a great deal of attention and was dubbed by New York Times as the East Side Joan of Arc.

For two years after the great rent strike, Newman and other garment workers went shop to shop in Lower Manhattan organizing young women who were growing increasingly discontented with the working conditions such as speedups in the production rate, being charged for thread and electricity, and with having their pay docked whenever they made mistakes.

Newman met with some of the city's most powerful and wealthy women, explaining the horrific conditions under which shirtwaist dresses were manufactured.

In addition, she stumped for the Socialist Party of America in the freezing, bleak coal-mining camps of southern Illinois and continued to campaign for woman suffrage for the Women's Trade Union League.

An investigative body with real powers of enforcement, the FIC brought government into the shops to guarantee worker safety.

[2] Through this job, she met Frances Perkins, who would later become Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor and the first woman to serve in the cabinet post.

[3] Miller, who was chafing at the constraints of academic life, gladly left academia to help Newman with her organizing.

Newman would carry out that position for sixty years, using it to promote worker health care, adult education, and greater visibility for women in the union.

In 1936, she received national news coverage when Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt invited her and a group of young women garment and textile workers to stay as guests for a week at the White House.

Moreover, during her seventy-plus years with the union, she waged a constant struggle to convince male leaders to acknowledge the needs and talents of women workers.

[1] In addition, she spoke regularly to historians and reporters and to groups of young women workers, her heavily wrinkled face telling as much as her words about her decades of struggle on behalf of the labor movement.

[3] Pauline Newman died on April 8, 1986, at the New York City home of her adopted daughter, Elisabeth Burger.

[1] Newman left an unpublished autobiography, the manuscript of which resides at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.