Vera Shlakman

Vera Shlakman (July 15, 1909 – November 5, 2017) was a 20th-century American professor of Economics and Marxism and author of a 1935 book on women factory workers.

[1] Anti-Semitism provides background to Shlakman's career as the New York City Board of Education, state officials, and courts specifically targeted left-wing Jewish teachers and professors to fire as part of their Communist purge.

The first (the Feinberg Law, authorized in 1949) barred subversive organization ties and, the other (New York City Charter Section 903) against corruption, provided that refusing testimony on official conduct, because of self-incrimination, was evidence for dismissal (by the late 1960s, both provisions were declared unconstitutional).

"They were dismissed during and in the spirit of the shameful era of McCarthyism, during which the freedoms traditionally associated with academic institutions were quashed," the trustees of the City University of New York declared in a unanimous resolution.

[1][6] Shlakman and Oscar Shaftel filed an appeal to New York City Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin over pensions or death benefits for former professors dismissed during the Second Red Scare.

Besides Shlakman and Shaftel, the other professors were: Richard Austin, Joseph Bressler, Dudley Straus, Sarah Reidman Gustafson, and Bernard F.

[1][7] Sam Roberts of The New York Times commented at her death, "A 42-year-old assistant professor when she was fired in 1952, Dr. Shlakman neither taught economics again nor wrote a sequel to her groundbreaking 1935 book on female factory workers.

"[1] In the introduction to her 2013 book Priests of Our Democracy, Marjorie Heins asks the question "Why did Vera Shlakman, Oscar Shaftel, and hundreds of others refuse to cooperate in the political inquisitions of the witch-hunt era?"

A full seventy years after its publication in 1935, her Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts still provides an intellectual and conceptual guide, not only to a changing field, but to the persistent questions it raises.

because her book 'raised the question of how a transformation in the meaning of work for female workers could, and perhaps did, alter the workplace environment and the nature of family life.