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Sophie Melvin Gerson: The Brooklyn Years

In 1972 I applied to graduate school and wrote an application essay that indicated I would explore my mother’s (Sophie Melvin Gerson) move from labor organizer and activist, to wife and mother. Steeped in the very particular – and limited – consciousness of early women’s liberation, I accepted an all too simple narrative of Sophie’s life: a narrative of a gendered loss of agency and activity. Fortunately, I never wrote that Master’s thesis, but rather went on to research and write about The Families Committee of Smith Act Defendants. About 20 years later, I was sitting in a Kings County (Brooklyn) courthouse at a guardianship hearing for both my parents, who were in their nineties and increasingly frail in both mind and body. My father (Si Gerson) turned to the judge and asked him, “Do you know why we’re here?” The judge, quizzical and curious, awaited further elucidation. Si began a rambling, but very familiar to me, explanation. We were in Brooklyn because Pete Cacchione, New York’s first Communist councilman, had died while in office, and Simon W. Gerson was picked by the CPUSA to replace him. While Si never got to serve as City Councilman and the electoral reforms known as proportional representation that allowed left and minority party candidates to get elected were shortly eliminated, the Gerson family was in Brooklyn—for good. So the narrative centers on Si’s political trajectory and the story of Sophie – labor militant and youthful organizer – is subsumed. In 1948, when the family moved to Brooklyn, Sophie was wife, mother of two children, and homemaker for a household that included Si’s elderly and frail mother, Helen. While Si’s political and logistical trajectory were realized within the Communist Party, Sophie had to find and develop arenas for action feasible within the constraints of childrearing and homemaking, helpmate to her husband “in leadership,” and the political landscape of a Jewish and Italian Catholic neighborhood.