Women Who Built BPL: Elaine Leeder, Donor

The Boston Public Library's special collections are built in two ways: by purchasing material that support our collecting policies and by accepting donations. When donors choose to offer their collections to the library, they are both contributing to the materials available for research and are adding their own story and memory to the larger story of the library. These stories are both personal connections from the donor but also highlight unexpected connections between people or social movements in history. One of these donors is Elaine Leeder, whose research on Rose Pesotta highlighted the connections both between anarchist and labor movements in the 1920s and between those activists and the scholars who study them.

Elaine Leeder is a professor, author, activist, prisoner advocate, psychotherapist, and Dean Emerita of the School of Social Sciences at Sonoma State University in California. She’s from Lynn, Massachusetts, where she grew up in an immigrant working class family. Her first effort to make the world a better place was when she went against her mother‘s wishes and arranged to meet a Black classmate on the corner so they could walk to school together. Deeply involved in the women’s movement in the 1970s, she recognized the similarities of the organic processes, such as the lack of hierarchy and non-competitiveness, inherent in both women-led groups and Anarchism. Elaine called herself an anarcha-feminist and became a scholar on women anarchists in the 1920s and 1930s, especially Jewish women anarchists, and Rose Pesotta in particular. 

Rose Pesotta (1896-1965) was an anarchist, feminist, labor organizer, and an official of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. She was also a member of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee and agitated fervently on their behalf. Born in Derazhynia, Ukraine, she had some formal education and was home tutored. Her political education came from the village she grew up in where she was active in the local anarchist underground. In 1913, at the age of 17, Pesotta came to America because she did not want to marry a village boy. Her career as a seamstress, organizer, and union official with the International Ladies’ Garment Union began in 1914 and lasted until 1942 when she resigned because of sexism and the loss of her independence within the union. At that time Pesotta was one of the most successful labor organizers in the country. 

At an ILGWU meeting in Boston in the Fall of 1922 Rose Pesotta met Frank Lopez, the secretary of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. Already sympathetic to the cause of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two Italian anarchists who were accused, without evidence, of robbing and murdering two payroll guards in Braintree, Massachusetts, she became the liaison between the defense committee and the labor movement. During this time, she and Vanzetti became close friends and in one of his last letters to her he included “a pen holder he had carved out of the handle of a toothbrush. It was cylindrical in shape and made of ivory, executed in an exquisite design. Rose treasured the gift for the remainder of her life” (Leeder, 47.)  

Elaine Leeder became interested in Rose Pesotta in 1981 when she heard Clara Larsen, Rose’s best friend, an anarchist, and activist in the ILGWU, speak at a labor history workshop on immigrant anarchism at the Tamiment Library at New York University. Inspired by the lives and work of both women, Leeder read every letter to and from Pesotta in every repository in which they were located, interviewed her friends and colleagues, and wrote her dissertation on Pesotta. In 1987, Leeder paid a visit to the home of Rose’s niece where she saw even more letters and photographs and knew she had to turn her dissertation into a book. Before she left the house, Leeder asked if there was anything else she could see:

Dorothy handed me the pen, indicating that I should have it so that the anarchist connection would carry to yet another generation. I walked away from that day rededicated to my mission: to tell the story of Rose and her friends—their lives and trials as anarchists, as labor activists, and as keepers of the revolutionary tradition in which they had dedicated their lives
 (Leeder, xiv, The Gentle General.)

Elaine Leeder published The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer in 1993. One day in June 2011, she visited the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department on another mission: she was looking for the most appropriate home for the pen holder and knew that the Aldino Felicani Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee Papers were located at the BPL. After a brief conversation with a staff member, she left. The next day she returned and donated it to the library.  

To learn more:

• Elaine Leeder, The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer, New York, 1993.HD6509.P47L44, 1993. 
• Elaine Leeder
• Rose Peseotta
• Aldino Felicani Sacco-Vanzetti Collection, MS 2030
• S.H.M. Clinton Collection of Sacco-Vanzetti Material