An Unusual Education

“My education was fairly conventional until I went to work in a textile mill in Passaic, New Jersey when I finished college.”

Polier's "fairly conventional" college education included transfers from Bryn Mawr to Radcliffe to Barnard. She was continually in search of more advanced economic courses and "fed up on dried-up old maids studying problems of people about whom they knew nothing."

At Radcliffe, sensing that she "wasn't close enough to people," she moved out of "that blue-stocking world" to live in a settlement house and teach English. At Barnard, she did research on women's workplace injuries and the inadequacy of their workmen's compensation.

"After that, to experience labor conditions at first hand," Polier worked nights at textile factories in Passaic, New Jersey. "Those were the days of the battles for the right to organize, and the conditions of workers were abominable." The women she worked with spent their days on housework and tending their children in terrible slums, and their nights in the factory for starvation wages.

source | full image

source | full image

source | full image

Because Rabbi Wise's pro-labor stance was well known, Polier used her mother's maiden name, Waterman, at the mills. But anti-union spies soon discovered her true identity. "We know who you are, you are Rabbi Wise's daughter," she was told- and promptly blacklisted from all Passaic's factories.

Notes

Next -Workers' Rights