Rebel Cinderella: Rose Pastor Stokes: Sweatshop Immigrant, Aristocrat’s Wife, Socialist Crusader

Historian Hochschild (Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays) delivers a polished and accessible biography of early-20th-century radical Rose Pastor Stokes. A Russian-Jewish immigrant, Rose went to work in a Cleveland cigar factory in 1890 at age 11. The experience sparked her interest in writing about labor rights and socialist politics, and in 1903 she took a newspaper job in New York City, where she met and married James Graham Phelps Stokes, a millionaire involved in the progressive settlement house movement. The couple’s social circle included left-wing activists Eugene Debs, Margaret Sanger, and Upton Sinclair, and Hochschild provides captivating details about the 1909 N.Y.C. garment workers’ strike, the International Workers of the World, and the American Birth Control League. Though Graham stood by his wife when she was convicted in 1918 for violating the Espionage Act (she claimed the U.S. government served “profiteers” rather than “the people”), disagreements over the Soviet Union (Rose was a founding member of the Communist Party of America) and American involvement in WWI caused the marriage to unravel. The depth and richness of Hochschild’s portrait is somewhat compromised by his commitment to the reductive Cinderella trope, but few histories capture the era’s combustible mix of idealism and inequality better. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt. (Mar.)