Biographical Information
Sonia Baltrun Kaross was born in 1901 in Lithuania. She grew up in East Arlington, Vermont, and began working at a chair factory there at the age of twelve. Upon the death of her father, Rafael Baltrun, in 1915, Kaross moved to Philadelphia, where she worked for the Lithuanian socialist newspaper Kova as a bookkeeper. She was active in the Socialist Party, Communist Party, women's suffrage movement, and in Lithuanian literary circles in Philadelphia, eventually managing the Lithuanian newspaper Women's Voice . She married her husband, Joseph Kaross, in 1918. Their daughter, Eugenia, was born in 1921.
In the early 1920s, the Kaross family moved to Easthampton, Massachusetts. There and in Pennsylvania, Sonia Kaross organized workers for the United Textile Workers (UTW). In 1929, the Kaross family moved to California. Sonia Kaross' career as a labor organizer, Communist activist, and peace worker in California was long and fruitful. In the early 1930s, she joined forces with Anita Whitney and Gertrude Warwick, advocating for the rights of the unemployed, and made unsuccessful attempts to organize domestic and agricultural workers. In 1932, she attended the First World Congress Against War in Amsterdam as a representative of the Lithuanian Women of America. Upon her return, she renewed her organizing efforts, this time among women textile workers at the California Cotton Mill in Oakland, leading a successful strike that secured improved benefits and wages, including pregnancy leave, for the newly organized women. She continued to organize textile workers throughout the state. As a representative of the UTW, she served on the AFL-affiliated Central Labor Council in San Francisco; and on the California and San Francisco councils of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
Kaross was also active in the peace movement for most of the twentieth century. She was a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and Women for Peace, among other organizations, and attended several international peace conferences. Reflecting her socialist, feminist, and pacifist commitments, she wrote four books in Lithuanian: Women for Socialism (Lithuanian Language Press, 1935); Women and War (Chicago: Vilnic, 1944); International Women's Day and Women's Struggle for Emancipation (Chicago: Vilnic, 1946); and Around the World for Peace (U.S.S.R., 1958).
From the guide to the Sonia Baltrun Kaross oral history, 1977, (California Historical Society)
