Wolfson, Theresa (1897–1972)

American labor economist and educator . Born on July 19, 1897, in Brooklyn, New York; died on May 14, 1972, in Brooklyn; daughter of Adolph Wolfson and Rebecca (Hochstein) Wolfson, Russian-Jewish radicals; Adelphi College, A.B., 1917; Columbia University, M.A., 1923; Brookings Institute, Ph.D., 1926; married Iago Galdston (a psychiatrist), in 1920 (divorced 1935); married Austin Bigelow Wood (a psychology professor), in 1938; children: (first marriage) Richard (b. 1926); Margaret Beatrice (b. 1930).

Selected writings:

The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions; (co-author) Labor and the N.R.A. (1934); (co-author) Frances Wright, Free Enquirer: The Study of a Temperament (1939).

Theresa Wolfson was born in 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, where her Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, who were radical socialists, ran a boardinghouse. After graduating from high school, she entered Adelphi College. There she became politically active in progressive causes, founding an Adelphi chapter of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, later known as the League for Industrial Democracy, and working for a time as an investigator of the women's clothing industry. Wolfson finished her A.B. degree in 1917 and took a job with the Meinhardt Settlement House in New York City. She then worked for two years (1918–20) as an investigator for the National Child Labor Committee, a position which involved heavy travel around the eastern United States. She published several magazine articles about her experiences with the problem of child labor.

In 1920, Wolfson married Iago Galdston, a medical student and later a psychiatrist. She returned to school, studying for a master's degree in economics at Columbia University. From 1920 to 1923, she worked for the New York Comsumers' League and the Joint Board of Factory Control in the women's clothing industry, gathering data for her master's thesis on women and labor economics. Graduating from Columbia in 1923, Wolfson continued to combine professional experience, trade-union activism, and academic work as a doctoral student at the Brookings Institute. She was convinced that progress for workers required education, so she became active as an educator, working with trade unions to arrange classes in economics and labor. Wolfson was motivated to educate workers, she later explained, because workers "cannot hope to solve the problems of their industry or of their economic world without specific information concerning both."

In 1925, she went to work for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) as education director of the Union Health Center. Her study on discrimination against women in trade unions formed the topic of her doctoral dissertation, later published as The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions, and, she received her Ph.D. in 1926, the same year that she gave birth to her first child, Richard. In 1928, Wolfson accepted teaching positions in economics at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers and at Brooklyn College; she would remain with Brooklyn College for the rest of her career.

Wolfson gave birth to her second child, Margaret Beatrice Galdston , in 1930 but divorced Galdston in 1935. In 1938, she married Austin Bigelow Wood, a Brooklyn College colleague and psychology professor. In addition to raising her family, teaching at Brooklyn College, and her union work, Wolfson published numerous articles on labor issues between 1919 and 1946. She co-authored two books, Labor and the N.R.A. (1934) and a biography of the American labor leader Frances Wright , Frances Wright, Free Enquirer: The Study of a Temperament (1939).

During World War II, Wolfson was appointed to the War Labor Board's public panel. In that capacity, she advised the federal government for the good of the economy not to force wartime female workers to leave their jobs after the war. Although the government largely ignored this advice in the late 1940s, Wolfson would continue to advocate expanded wage-earning roles for American women throughout the 1940s and 1950s. She also joined the American Arbitration Association, which provided conflict resolution services in union-management labor disputes. The League for Industrial Democracy, whose socialist labor organizing she had been involved with since college, honored her with the John Dewey Award in 1957. Wolfson retired from Brooklyn College in 1967, but taught part-time at Sarah Lawrence College's continuing education program for women. She died in Brooklyn in 1972, age 74.

sources:

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980.

Laura York , M.A. in History, University of California, Riverside, California