Goldmark, Josephine (1877–1950)

American social reformer. Born Josephine Clara Goldmark in Brooklyn, New York, on October 13, 1877; died in Hartsdale, New York, on December 15, 1950; sister of Pauline Dorothea Goldmark , a welfare worker, and Alice Goldmark who married Louis D. Brandeis; graduated from Bryn Mawr College, 1898; studied English at Barnard College.

While tutoring at Barnard College in 1903, Josephine Goldmark volunteered to assist Florence Kelley at the National Consumer's League, becoming publication secretary. Goldmark also chaired the League's committee on legal defense of labor laws, resulting in the publication of Child Labor Legislation Handbook in 1907. Along with Kelley, Goldmark gathered data for the 1908 Brandeis brief Muller v. Oregon. The following year, still content to work behind the scenes, she assisted Felix Frankfurter, then a lawyer, in preparing briefs to support the Illinois ten-hour law. Teaming with her brother-in-law Louis Brandeis, Josephine Goldmark then began a study of fatigue in factory work for the Russell Sage Foundation. Their findings, published as Fatigue and Efficiency (1912), were instrumental in reducing excessive labor hours in manufacturing. From 1912 to 1914, Goldmark joined Alfred E. Smith, Frances Perkins , and Robert Wagner on a committee to investigate the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire which had killed 146 workers. Retiring from public life, Goldmark published Nursing and Nursing Education in the United States (1923), Pilgrims of '48: One Man's Part in the Austrian Revolution of 1848, and a Family's Migration to America (1930), Democracy in Denmark (1936), as well as a biography of her friend Florence Kelley, Impatient Crusader (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1953).