Theresa Wolfson (1987–1972)

Theresa Wolfson was born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents who had emigrated to the USA from Russia to escape anti-Semitism and political persecution. Her brother Martin Wolfson became an actor and her brother Victor Wolfson became a playwright and novelist. His book My Prince! My King! (1962) was a fictionalized account of the family. Theresa attended public school in Brooklyn and high school in Far Rockaway, Long Island. She graduated from Adelphi University in 1917. During the summer of her junior year, she began a long career in labor relations by investigating wage standards in the New York City garment industry. She served as an NYC health worker in 1917-1918. She went on to investigate child labor in North Carolina, Arkansas, Michigan, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. As executive secretary of the New York State Consumers League, Theresa Wolfson lobbied for legislation for a minimum wage and an 8-hour work day. She earned a master's and then a doctoral degree from Columbia University. The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions, her Ph.D. dissertation, was published in 1926 by the Brookings Institution. From 1925 to 1927, Theresa was the educational director at the Union Health Center of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. In 1920, she married Iago Galdston, a psychiatrist, and had two children; the couple were divorced in 1935. In 1938, she married Austin Bigelow Wood, a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College.
In 1928, she took a position at the Brooklyn branch of Hunter College, which later became Brooklyn College. She taught graduate and undergraduate courses in economics and labor relations until her retirement in 1967. She served on the public panel of the War Labor Board from 1942 to 1945, as well as on the national panel of arbitrators of the American Arbitration Association and on the New York State Board of Mediation of the Kings County Council Against Discrimination. She was named president of the New York chapter of the Industrial Relations Research Association.