18 Facts About Anna Rochester

Anna Rochester was an American labor reformer, journalist, political activist, and Communist.

Anna Rochester was born March 30,1880, in New York City.

Anna Rochester was the daughter of Roswell Hart Rochester, an executive who worked as Treasurer of the Western Union Telegraph Company, and his wife, the former Louise Agatha Bauman, who had been a public school teacher before her marriage.

Anna Rochester spent her developmental years in privilege in the city of Englewood, New Jersey, a comfortable suburb of New York City.

The Anna Rochester family lived in a large and well equipped home, employing attendants to help raise the child and servants to keep the household running.

Anna Rochester traveled extensively as a young girl, studied music in Germany, and received a first-class private school education at the Dwight School for Girls.

Anna Rochester exhibited intelligence and a penchant for scholarship at a comparatively young age, and briefly aspired to the advanced study of mathematics.

The Rochesters were a religious family and Anna was raised as a Protestant in the Episcopal Church, attending her first church service when she was just 5 and undergoing confirmation as a member of the church in 1894, at the age of 14.

Anna Rochester was strongly imbued with the moral code of the church, which stressed simplicity, modesty, and service to others.

Anna Rochester was admitted to Bryn Mawr College, one of America's premier women's liberal arts universities, located ten miles west of Philadelphia.

Anna Rochester's coursework proceeded as well as could be expected, but she found her collegiate career cut short by family matters, with her father dying of a heart attack in the middle of her freshman year and her mother falling ill of "nervous collapse" near the end of her sophomore session.

From 1912 until 1915, Anna Rochester worked as a researcher and for the publicity department of the National Child Labor Committee, a private non-profit organization established in 1904 to help end child labor.

Anna Rochester continued in this same area in 1915 when she moved to the United States Children's Bureau, a government agency created in 1912, where she again worked on research and publications.

Anna Rochester would remain with the US Children's Bureau through 1921.

In 1922 Anna Rochester assumed the editorship of The World Tomorrow, a Christian socialist monthly magazine which had been founded in 1918 by the pacifism Fellowship of Reconciliation and which was formerly edited by future Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas.

Anna Rochester died of pneumonia on May 11,1966, in New York City.

Anna Rochester was 86 years old at the time of her death.

Anna Rochester is buried at Brookside Cemetery, Englewood, with her parents.