HEDWIG (“HAIDEE”) KAMINSKY

Hedwig “Haidee” Kaminsky was still in high school when she served as the secretary of the Young Woman’s Political Club, an early women’s suffrage organization created by and for working women. Her portrait appeared in The Boston Globe, as one of the “Young Women Anxious to Vote” in 1902. Both her mother Emilie and her sister Mrs. Martha Prentke were also quite active in the club and later would serve as its presidents.

Haidee, her mother and sister immigrated to Boston from Germany in 1899, when she was 16. Her father must have arrived in Boston before them, settling in a Jewish neighborhood in the West End where he could retain strong religious and cultural traditions. There he established a shoe business with Harold Prentke with whom he shared German and Jewish cultural ties, and made plans for Prentke to wed his eldest daughter, Martha.   

Within two months of their arrival in America in 1899, Haidee’s sister Martha, a 20-year-old school teacher, was forced to enter into an arranged marriage with their father’s business partner who was twice her age. In this “loveless union,” he “constantly demanded that she stay at home and that she made no friends while she lived with him.” (The Boston Globe, Jan 24, 1908) The YWPC must have been a major source of marital strife. Not only was Martha out of the house building friendships with suffragists and labor activists, she was learning about her rights directly from the lawyer and women’s suffrage leader Ida Estelle Hall.

Haidee and her mother were naturalized in 1900, probably as a result of their participation in the YWPC. Although Haidee was reported to be “fitting for college” in 1902, higher education was not in her future. In 1904 at age 19, Haidee married 33-year-old Maurice Rosenblum, a German immigrant who was an importer of dental supplies. This too was likely a marriage arranged by her father who helped run the dental supply shop in Boston owned by her husband. Haidee and her family also occasionally lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, where their daughter was born in 1910.

Heidee’s father may have changed his occupation when he gained one son-in-law and lost another. Martha Prentke, Heidee’s sister, left her husband the shoe salesman to support herself by working as a governess, before suing for divorce due to “cruel and abusive treatment” in 1908. She left the country, remarried a man of her choice in London, and raised a family in Poland. With the rise of fascism in 1935, she fled Poland for America and immediately applied for and received U.S. citizenship, having already lived in this country for years.

REFERENCES

ancestry.com

Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association Records, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

“Young Women Anxious To Vote,” The Boston Globe, May 5, 1902.

“Was Loveless Marriage,” The Boston Globe, Jan 24, 1908, p. 2.

Stonehurst Curator Ann Clifford wrote this biography in conjunction with “Anxious to Vote: Students, Workers and the fight for Women’s Suffrage,” a curriculum and public education project developed in partnership by Stonehurst the Robert Treat Paine Estate and Waltham Public Schools in commemoration of the national suffrage centennial in 2020. STONEHURST is a National Historic Landmark owned by the City of Waltham. The once-private estate of generous social justice advocates whose ancestors helped establish the democratic foundations of this country is now appropriately owned by the people.

The Friends of Stonehurst received support for this program through “The Vote: A Statewide Conversation about Voting Rights,” a special initiative of Mass Humanities that includes organizations around the state.

This program is funded in part by Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.