Theresa Serber Malkiel was born in 1874 in the Russian Empire, in an area now in western Ukraine. She came from a middle-class family and received a good education, but her Jewish family was increasingly persecuted and emigrated to the United States in 1891, when she was 17.
In New York City, her education mattered little, according to historian Sally M. Miller. Malkiel found herself in the same desperate position as so many other immigrant women, taking a job in a garment factory. Conditions were brutal: Shifts could last 18 hours, injuries were common and women earned half of what men did, barely enough to pay rent in crowded tenements and boardinghouses. So, like many Jewish and Italian immigrant women at the time, Malkiel soon joined the labor movement and then started a union for female cloak-makers.
Malkiel also became a socialist and, at 26, married fellow socialist and attorney Leon Malkiel. Her husband’s income allowed her to leave the sweatshop, but after moving to the suburb of Yonkers and having a child, Malkiel continued her activism, Miller wrote, providing aid to immigrant women, taking leadership positions in the Socialist Party of America and, with her husband, co-founding a socialist newspaper, the New York Call. (Side note: Their daughter, Henrietta, later co-founded another publication, Congressional Quarterly, with her husband, Nelson Poynter.)
Malkiel was a vocal proponent of women’s equality and the right to vote, though she was wary of the upper-class, nonimmigrant women who tended to lead women’s suffrage groups. In her pamphlets, columns and speeches, she argued that true equality — for women, African Americans, immigrants and child laborers — would only come through socialism.
It was in this context that she proposed the first National Woman’s Day in 1909. According to Rutgers University historian Temma Kaplan, events were held across New York, where thousands gathered to hear speeches and poems, sing socialist anthems and push for the right to vote.
Some websites claim that International Women’s Day marks the first known women-led labor strike on March 8, 1857, or that Malkiel sought to commemorate this strike, but there is no evidence such a strike ever happened. Newspapers from the time don’t mention it, though there was ample coverage of women-led labor strikes decades earlier in Pawtucket, R.I., and Dover, N.H. Additionally, Malkiel’s 1909 National Woman’s Day was held Feb. 23, not March 8. (More on that later.)