Imagine a huge, severe room, the walls wood-panelled, the heavy conference table, the deep chairs suggesting important board-meetings, the large desk with its green shaded lamp and its many telephones the very epitome of efficiency and you will have visualized the office of Mrs. Anna M. Rosenberg, the new State NRA Compliance Director. It is a room evidently dedicated to work, to constant, energetic, impersonal work. Yet there is one touch of beauty, one touch of femininity in all this uncompromising severity. On the dark, heavily carved mantel there stands a vase with fresh flowers, glowing in all the richest autumn hues.
Mrs. Rosenberg is just like the office she inhabits and imbues with her personality. Efficient, competent, engrossed in her work, she nevertheless possesses a distinctive feminine charm. Despite the pressure of her work, she is delightfully friendly even to those who come to interrupt her. In appearance she is petite, very pretty, brunette and hardly looking her thirty-three years. It is difficult to believe that she is the mother of a fourteen-year-old boy.
CLEVER POLITICIAN
From early youth Mrs. Rosenberg, who holds that sex makes no difference in doing work and that only personal competence ought to count, has proved herself a clever manager of political campaigns, an able reorganizer of ailing businesses. When still in school she organized the “Coming Voters’ League,” and even before she was actually a voter she did splendid political work in the old Seventh Assembly District. Her success as wife and mother (her husband is Julius Rosenberg of the American Rug & Carpet Co., her son a student at Horace Mann) was and is a matter of admiration and envy. She is well read, a music lover and a theatre enthusiast.
Mrs. Rosenberg is reluctant to speak of herself, but as soon as her work is mentioned, she radiates enthusiasm and speaks with compelling sincerity.
DISCUSSES HER WORK
“The success of the NRA,” she says, “depends not only on labor and industry, but also in a large measure on the ultimate consumer, the buyer, or in other words, the wife and mother who is usually the purchasing agent in the family. If women would only thoroughly understand for what the NRA label stands, if they would realize that the NRA has abolished child labor, has insured the worker a living wage and sanitary working conditions, they would be our most fervent supporters.
“Especially as far as the garment industry is concerned this support is needed and fully deserved. An NRA label in a coat or dress means that it can be safely bought, without fear of exposing oneself to any infection, without the feeling that the worker who fashioned it was exploited or starved. I often wonder how mothers, who are so careful with their little tots and try to guard them from every possible contamination, blithely go and buy garments which were perhaps made by a consumptive seamstress in dirt- and germ-laden rooms. An NRA label guarantees against such conditions, and if women will insist on this label and only patronize stores that comply with the NRA requirements they will help not only the New Deal but will protect themselves and their children.”
With all her various activities, with all her manifold interests, Mrs. Rosenberg yet finds time for work in Jewish causes. She is a member of the National Council of Jewish Women and was executive director of the women’s division of the United Palestine Appeal. She has associated in the work of the ORT Reconstruction Fund and has long been a member of the Joint Distribution Committee of Jewish Charities.
Her life is brimful of interest, well rounded, intensely active. In short, she represents the modern Jewish woman at her very best.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
