There are many good reasons to go on strike: pay, safety, shorter hours, freedom from harassment, the simple joy of telling off the boss. For Hindl Pastor, a refugee from czarist Russia’s pogroms who was working in a London tailor shop sometime around 1890, it was windows. The boss had whitewashed the shop windows to stop the women working there from looking up from their sewing and out at the London streets. Hindl led a weeklong walkout. The boss took off the whitewash. In Rebel Cinderella, a biography of Pastor’s daughter, the socialist, writer, and labor militant Rose Pastor Stokes, historian Adam Hochschild notes that her mother’s strike “set an example she would never forget.”

Biographies of organizers — and labor militants in particular — are a tricky business. By the nature of their subjects, the author is writing about someone who believes in collective action as a driver of history while trying to tell an individual history. Stokes was, for a time, a media celebrity thanks to her improbable marriage, in 1903, to James Graham Phelps Stokes, heir to many overlapping fortunes in shipping, banking, real estate, textiles, and mining. She counted Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, John Reed, and many other left luminaries as friends and comrades. Her story serves as a way into the communities and organizations that nourish moments of radical ferment.

Hochschild, most well known for his searing histories of slavery and Belgian colonialism in the Congo, at times seems to delight in having a lighter story to tell. After arriving in the United States, Rose first landed in Cleveland, Ohio, where she worked in cigar factories starting at the age of eleven and trained herself to work while reading. Her first poems were shared with a group for single Jewish women called “the Friendly club”; her first publication was a letter to the Yidishes Tageblatt that recounted the prize of such expression to a worker: in the time it took her to write the letter, she made two hundred fewer cigars. Impressed with Stokes’s writing, the editor took her on as advice columnist and eventually reporter, prompting her to move to New York.