Anna Rochester

Anna Rochester
LOC ppmscd.00002. Group of ARC workers at a Red Cross canteen Left to right : Miss Anna L. Rochester, Miss Gladys Cromwell, Miss Elizabeth Strang, Miss Helen J. Day, Miss C. Wheller, Mrs. Mary Palmer Gardner, Miss Winifred Bryce, Miss Anna A. Ryan, Miss Julia Wells and Miss Dorothy Cromwell, ARC Hospitals Nos. 6 & 7, Souilly, Meuse, France, October 13, 1918
Born	March 30, 1880 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	May 11, 1966(1966-05-11) (aged 86) New York City, New York, U.S.
Resting place	Brookside Cemetery (Englewood, New Jersey)

Anna Rochester (March 30, 1880 — May 11, 1966) was an American labor reformer, journalist, political activist, and Communist. Although for several years an editor of the liberal monthly The World Tomorrow, Rochester is best remembered as a co-founder of the Labor Research Association, a bureau which collected and interpreted labor statistics in close coordination with the Communist Party USA.

In the 21st Century Rochester became the subject of academic interest for the duality of her public political activity with successful maintenance of a long-term same-sex affectionate relationship with fellow communist Grace Hutchins, a relationship considered taboo according to the social mores of the day. Although the pair lived as partners for over 40 years, Rochester never self-identified as a lesbian and the question of whether the pair were sexually intimate remains unresolved.

Anna Rochester was born March 30, 1880 in New York City. She 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 was the couple's only child. Unlike many of the participants in the American radical movement of her era, the Rochester family had long roots in the United States, with her father's paternal grandfather, Nathaniel Rochester, the namesake and founder of the city of Rochester, New York.

Anna spent her developmental years in privilege in the city of Englewood, New Jersey, a comfortable suburb of New York City. The 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 traveled extensively as a young girl, studied music in Germany, and received a first-class private school education at the Dwight School for Girls. She exhibited intelligence and a penchant for scholarship at a comparatively young age, and briefly aspired to the advanced study of mathematics.