(graphic from panel of series by Carol Moisewich, 1992, Vancouver, Canada)

"Marie was a delegate of the International Ladies Garment Workers, (ILGW)-The fine embroiderers were an affiliated union...I had heard of her...I looked forward to meeting her again at Communist gatherings, perhaps even at an English branch of the young communist league.

This, however, was not to be, for Marie Tiboldo was not...any kind of Communist at all...she was a philosophical anarchist, a follower of Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, and nearer to home, one who found anarchist resoundings in the writings of Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau. She was a disciple (sic) of Emma Goldman's and never walked the line over to communists. Contraception at that time wsa a contraversial subject, and distributing birth control was a criminal offence. The husband of Margaret Sanger had been jailed in the United States for distributing a copy of his wife's brochure, entitle, "What Every Woman Should Know," which was considered pornographic."

In 1919, Angela Weld Grimke, a a prolific writer and talented Black woman poet who left behind a score of explicitely woman-identified poems in her wake, published a piece in Sanger's publication called, "The Closing Door." Grimke's less-famous friend, Mamie Burrill, who left behind among other things the following steamy letter, fired off to Angela Grimke in February of 1896 , "Could I just come to meet thee once more, in the old sweet way, just coming at your callling, and like an angel bending o'er you breathe into your ear, 'I love you,'" had a way with words herself. Her play, "They that sit in the darkness," was published first in the same issue of "The Birth Control Review," as Grimke's piece. Burrill went on to be a schoolteacher and continued playwrighting in Washington, DC.

Marie Tiboldo's Anarchist group had been following Emma Goldman's activities in the united snakes, and decided there was sufficient interest in Toronto to warrant inviting her to come to Canada for a series of lectures. Marie Tiboldo was appointed to find a hall for the first lecture on birth control..." from The Wretched of the Earth and Me- Minerva Davis.

In Canada, Toronto's Jewish community contained a strong and highly varied component of Socialist fraternal and political organizations. The Bundists, for example, were non-zionists that believed in a decentralized form of socialism, which they felt would preserve their own culture within multi-ethnic socialist federations. Together with Jewish Anarchists and some other socialists, they formed a group known as the Arbeiter Ring.

A highly active member of Toronto's Arbeiter Ring for years, Molly Fineberg had come to Canada from Poland in the mid-twenties, at the age of twenty. Like many Jewish women of that period, Fineberg looked after the household tasks while her husband toiled in a needle trades sweatshop. When his income was inadequate to meet all her family's needs, she obtained a job in a dress shop as a salesperson, where she worked long hours for low pay...Fineberg thrived on the sharp political differences in the Arbeiter Ring. When asked if the different groups got along inside the organization, she replied, "No, they didn't. That's why it was so interesting. They weren't personal insults, they were political discussions, and they were very interesting..."

Within the Arbeiter Ring, Fineberg held a number of leadership positions over the thirty years during which she belonged to the organization...Fineberg said it was not common for women to hold executive positions.When the author asked if people felt it was not lady-like for a woman to be on a picket line or speak up at a political rally (in the 1930's) she said, 'No, this is 'farshimilt' (old-fashioned.) This is a very old idea. Not lady-like? I never heard of that.' She dismissed the idea of Jewish women being held back by notions of feminine docility...when asked specifically if the Arbeiter Ring talked about equal rights for women, she replied that they did. She did recall hearing Emma Goldman lecture on this topic.

Despite expressing a general belief in women's rights, Fineberg did not portray this issue as a dynamic part of the movement to which she was so committee...instead, she stressed the Socialist slant of Yiddish literature, with its themes placed on the injustices faced by the impoverished. For Fineberg, the main themes were class and ethnicity..." from Sweatshop Strife, by Ruth A. Frager.