Radical memory and maternal autonomy: re-reading Matilda Rabinowitz Robbins (1887–1963)

This article reinterprets the life and writings of Matilda Rabinowitz Robbins (1887–1963) – Industrial Workers of the World organizer, journalist, poet, and single mother – through archival research and feminist life-writing theory. Her posthumously published memoir, Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman (2017), edited by her granddaughter Robbin Légère Henderson, has not yet received sustained scholarly attention. Read alongside her unpublished poetry and radical journalism, however, it constitutes a form of autotheory. I argue that Rabinowitz's work enacts what I call “radical memory”: a critical practice that mobilizes marginalized experience, particularly maternal autonomy, affect, and the embodied realities of care, to challenge masculinist labor historiography. Her rejection of conventional marriage, experience of precarious wage labor, and commitment to single motherhood emerge not merely as personal choices but as ways of theorizing gender, labor, and political belonging. In dialogue with contemporaries such as Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons, as well as fictional labor heroines, Rabinowitz transforms the archive of everyday life into a site of feminist knowledge production. By situating her as both activist and theorist, the article expands labor history and feminist thought to recognize memory, affect, and maternal politics as sources of radical knowledge.