Unlike many of the original colonies in North America, New York was not founded as a religious refuge. However, millions of immigrants escaping religious persecution found new homes in New York, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fannia Cohn’s brother was violently assaulted during one of the frequent anti-Jewish pogroms in Belarus, part of the Russian empire. In response, she fled and moved to New York City in 1905. Cohn, along with Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman, both Jewish immigrants from Russian Poland, were leaders in the women’s trade union movement. They were also active in the woman suffrage movement in New York and helped gain women the right to vote in the state in 1917, three years before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.