Biography
Helen Schloss, known as "the Red Nurse," was a socialist public-health nurse who had worked among the poor on New York City's Lower East Side before being brought to Little Falls, New York, in May 1912 to treat a tuberculosis outbreak. Moved by the conditions of the mill workers, she resigned her post and threw herself into the IWW-led 1912 Little Falls textile strike, becoming one of its central figures alongside the organizer Matilda Rabinowitz. Considered a strike ringleader, she was arrested and charged with inciting to riot; the police brought in three doctors to "examine her sanity" before her lawyer secured her release. She was held about two weeks in the Herkimer County jail and freed on a $2,000 bond. She later became active in the women's suffrage movement.
