Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (Smith College Studies in History Vol. XX, Nos. 1-4, October 1934-July 1935)

Northampton, MA: Department of History of Smith College, 1935. First edition. First edition. Signed by Vera Shlakman on front free endpaper, association copy inscribed to Smith College colleague Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, "To K.D.L. - (a) with thanks, and (b) in memory of the preface that could never be written [initialed] V.S." Undated but contemporary with publication. Scarce thus. 264 pp. Bound in publisher's wrappers. Very Good with light edge wear to wraps and faint creasing to spine.

First printing and major association copy of Shlakman's only published full-length work, a landmark historical, sociological and economic study of women workers in the industrial town of Chicopee, MA from the 18th century to the onset of the Great Depression. Economic History of a Factory Town remained an important and highly influential work well into the post-WW2 era, cited by one scholar as "an intellectual and
conceptual guide, not only to a changing field,
but to the persistent questions it raises."

Shlakman (1909-2017) was born in Montreal to radical Jewish immigrant parents who counted Emma Goldman among their inner circle. Shlakman pursued a scholarly path in economics and sociology that spanned eight full decades of the 20th century, but her academic career was interrupted for more than a decade in the Fifties when she became one of the first victims of the Red Scare, following her refusal to testify before HUAC-- this despite being a socialist-anarchist and not a communist or member of the Communist Party. She returned to teaching in 1966, eventually retiring as professor emerita from Columbia University in 1978. Shlakman's inscription in this volume, to her colleague and mentor Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, hints at something more than an academic friendship, though what extracurricular relationship these two pioneers of American sociology may have shared does not appear to be a matter of record.