Women S Rights Activists

"During my tours for the war prisoners I went back to New York periodically to report to the organization and consult with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and others in this work. So began my long years of association with that fighting daughter of a long line of fighting Irish ancestors. At sixteen she was already active in the I.W.W., and Joe Hill put her in a Wobbly song, "The Rebel Girl." While she did not join with us in the early days of the Communist Party, she worked with us closely. Finally, after an interlude of ten years of illness in Portland, Oregon, she came back to New York and joined the Party, and is today one of our finest speakers, and one of the most honored and beloved members of our National Executive Committee. The story of Elizabeth's life is interwoven with many of the great labor struggles of this country. Workers everywhere know her lovely ringing voice and glowing spirit and great fighting heart. Calumet-Pas-saic-Paterson-Lawrence-all these places knew her on the picket line and the platform. Today, bearing a heavy burden of sorrow from the sudden death of her only son, Fred, she fights on for a world in which mothers will not have to lose their sons needlessly in battles for their masters."

"she joined the I.W.W., which was then in its golden age. Full of idealism, it swept the Northwest. They had free-speech fights everywhere. The authorities arrested them and more came. They crammed the jails to bursting. "In one town," said Elizabeth, "there were so many in jail that they let them out during the day. We outside had to feed them. Every night they went back to jail. At last the wobblies decided that when the jail opened they would not come out. People came from far and near to see the wobblies who wouldn't leave jail." This part of her life, organizing and fighting the fights of the migratory workers of the West, is the part of her life that she likes most."

"Defense work was no new thing to her, and from 1918 until recently her major activities have been getting political prisoners out of jail. And since 1921 she has concentrated on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. There has been constant work, there have been arrests, there has been her preoccupation with comrades in jail for their opinions. She comes out of her first twenty years in the labor movement undimmed and undiscouraged."

"According to traditional Marxist theory housewives were problematical as to their class consciousness; they often were unreliable allies of radical men. They were usually grouped with peasants and intellectuals as a potentially conservative drag line on the forward march of proletarian men. Women's equality was a stated goal of all Marxist movements, but the way women's issues were treated, one got the clear message that what women did was marginal to the struggle, unless they excelled at doing it the way men did. The great and celebrated heroines-La Pasionaria, Mother Bloor, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Clara Lemlich did not organize housewives; they organized female factory workers, women's auxiliaries or men."

"Flynn succeeded Gene as Party chairman. She was the first woman to be elected to that post. She had been a compromise candidate; Ben Davis was also campaigning for it and many people in the Party, including a good section of the Black leadership, were terrified by that prospect. Liz seemed the best alternative. Elizabeth enjoyed a very positive reputation in the Party. When she rejoined in the 1930s (she had been a member briefly and secretly in the 1920s), she moved directly into the top leadership. She didn't need to adopt that fierce demeanor that was required of other women who were battling their way up in the hierarchy. She was genuinely concerned about people in a way that most Party leaders were not. Whenever I went to New York I would try to visit her down in the Chelsea Hotel, where she lived. She was worth listening to for her political views and because she had very acute opinions of her coworkers in the national office and wasn't afraid to express them. She adored Gene Dennis but was always very critical of Foster. Evidently the antagonism went back many, many years. She wasn't taken in by all the glamour of his heroic past as a union organizer. After all, she had her own credentials which were at least as impressive as his. She was very effective in the role of a public face for the Party, as well as a link with the historic past of the Wobblies, the "Bread and Roses" strike in Lawrence, and the free speech fight in Spokane. She had a remarkable ability to speak in plain language before a large audience and establish immediate rapport. That was something that the old-time agitators in the Party had, people like Flynn and Foster, and Clarence Hathaway, much more than my own generation. But over time I developed very mixed feelings about Liz. In Party meetings she was always very careful not to say anything unacceptable to Gus or to the Soviet Union. She was worried about me and the bad end to which my politics would lead me."

"I share the faith of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Pettis Perry and all my co–defendants that America’s working people, Negro and white, will surely rise, not like sheep, but with vigilance towards their liberty, to assure that peace will win and that the decadent Smith Act, which contravenes the Bill of Rights, will be swept from the scene of history."

"The gap left by the arrest of Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti was immediately filled by Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Haywood's years of experience in the labour struggle, his determination and tact, made him a distinctive power in the Lawrence situation. On the other hand, Elizabeth's youth, charm, and eloquence easily won everybody's heart. The names of the two and their reputation gained for the strike country-wide publicity and support. I had known and admired Elizabeth since I had first heard her, years before, at an open-air gathering. She could not have been more than fourteen years of age at the time, with a beautiful face and figure and a voice vibrant with earnestness. She made a strong impression on me. Later I used to see her in the company of her father at my lectures. She was a fascinating picture with her black hair, large blue eyes, and lovely complexion...The splendid free-speech fight she had made in Spokane with other members of the I.W.W., and the persecution she had endured, brought Elizabeth Gurley Flynn very near to me. And when I heard she was ill, after the birth of her child, I felt great sympathy for this young rebel, one of the first American women revolutionists of proletarian background. My interest in her had served to increase my efforts in raising funds, not only for the Spokane fight, but for Elizabeth's own use during her first months of young motherhood. Since she had returned to New York we were often thrown together, in meetings and in more intimate ways. Elizabeth was not an anarchist, but neither was she fanatical or antagonistic, as were some of her comrades who had emerged from the Socialist Labor Party. She was accepted in our circles as one of our own, and I loved her as a friend."

"I'll see you in young shooting sprouts/That sneer at weeds - age-gnarled in doubt/Of users who defile in epithet,/A life well-lived in service, built from strife...I'll think of you forever/And how your spirit rings/Because your faith leaps as a flame/Sweet nurture to all things"

"have we made progress? Oh, we certainly have, we certainly have, in spite of all the difficulties, in spite of all the problems, the labor movement has made tremendous progress. There is a new role and a new outlook for youth today. One of the pamphlets that I read years ago, I don't know if any of you have ever heard of it, is Peter Kropotkin's Appeal to the Young and it was a beautiful appeal to the young to carry forward their responsibility to make this world a better world to live in. Now, I feel in our way we did our best but the time comes when you know, they say old age isn't a disease but I say it is. The time comes when you have to slow down and lay off and give the benefit of your experience to a younger generation, if they want it."

"Club member Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, famed organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, and later a leading member of the U.S. Communist party referred to her membership in Heterodoxy as "an experience of unbroken delight!" She added, "It has been a glimpse of the women of the future, big spirited, intellectually alert, devoid of the old 'femininity' which has been replaced by a wonderful freemasonry of women.""

"Dorothy Day regarded Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, for instance, who had joined the U.S. Communist Party in 1937, as "my sister in the deep sense of the word." Flynn, Day wrote, "always did what the laity is nowadays urged to do. She felt a responsibility to do all in her power in defense of the poor, to protect them gainst injustice and destitution" (Long Loneliness, 145-146)."

"During my days of solitary confinement, after Margaret had persuaded the warden that I should have access to reading material, I spent a few sessions alone in the library. Within a short time I had combed the entire place, turning up only a few books that held the slightest interest: A book on the Chinese Revolution by Edgar Snow, the autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, and a book on communism written by an astonishingly objective little-known author. After my discovery of these books, my thoughts kept wandering back to their enigmatic presence. And suddenly it hit me: they had probably been read by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Claudia Jones, or one of the other Communist leaders who had been persecuted under the Smith Act during the McCarthy era. I myself had been told that if I received any books during my time there, I would have to donate them to the library-which was a pleasure, considering the state of that so-called place of learning. As I turned the pages of those books, I felt honored to be following in the tradition of some of this country's most outstanding heroines: Communist women leaders, especially the Black Communist Claudia Jones."

"today the methods to have political auxiliaries to unions is a much better and a much more effective thing. But we tried to put everything in one pot and it simply didn't work. We were unable, and we were pretty arrogant. We were young and had the right answer to everything. We didn't want to work with the AFL, we didn't want to work with the Socialist Party, we didn't want to work with anybody else. And naturally, when the Communist Party came along, they considered that a real party because here was a much more revolutionary organization than the old Socialist Party, and they didn't agree either with the concept of the Russian Revolution although they were glad that it was a revolution that overthrew the Czar and they didn't stand with Kerensky but there was certain, you might almost call it, primitive concepts of a revolution. To the IWW a revolution meant that you take over the factories, and the shops and the mills, and the mines and the fields and you chase the bosses out, just chase them out, and that was the end of it. That was the revolution."

"the IWW's positive side, certainly it was militant, it was courageous, that it fitted the period, that it belonged to the pioneer days and that it fought for the interests of the poorest, the most lonely, the most despised, those that the AFL couldn't organize, the foreign born, the women, and as the Negroes began coming into industry, the Negroes."

"the hatred against the IWW was so great -that editorials in papers would say, "They should be arrested at dawn and shot before breakfast, without a trial.""

"we certainly never heard of such a thing and we never thought it would be possible, that there would be social security or unemployment insurance. Those were the results of the 30's. The great struggle hat came out after the decline of the IWW. Also, we never heard of vacations with pay. We never heard of vacations, let alone vacations with pay. We never heard of seniority as it is understood today. There were no pensions for retirement of workers. There were no welfare funds of unions. There were no health centers of unions, and there were no trade union schools such as there are today. All of these things have come with the unions that have come into existence since the period of the IWW."

"it almost seems to me that we lived in a kind of wilderness when I tell you what didn't exist. There were no radios, no TV, no movies, very little of advertising as we know it today, there were no plastics, no artificial fabrics, no airplanes."

"There is less violence against labor today, but there are more legal restrictions. There are more attempts to invade the rights of labor by repressive legislation and by all kinds of restrictions."

"One of my favorite historical labor figures, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the famed rebel girl whom Joe Hill sang about and a formidable union organizer in her own right, hit the nail on the head way back in the nineteenth century while discussing the need to keep political and social justice demands on the same level as so-called bread-and-butter economic issues. In her words: "What is a labour victory? I maintain that it is a twofold thing. Workers must gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory. For workers to gain a few cents more a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society, is to achieve a temporary gain and not a lasting victory.""

"I am talking about 1919, 1920, that Mr. J. Edgar Hoover first put in his appearance. He was put in charge of these raids and all reports of all over the country were to be made to him, and they were called "G" men. The FBI came into existence a little later - in 1924. So he has had this kingdom for 38 years now, regardless of administrations and it is not actually under Civil Service or under the control of the Department of Justice."

"The Greatest woman agitator of our time was Mother Jones. Arrested, deported, held in custody by the militia, hunted and threatened by police and gunmen-she carried on fearlessly for 60 years. I first saw her in the summer of 1908, speaking at a Bronx open-air meeting. She was giving the "city folks" hell. Why weren't we helping the miners of the West? Why weren't we backing up the Mexican people against Diaz? We were "white-livered rabbits who never put our feet on Mother Earth," she said. Her description of the bullpen, where the miners were herded by federal troops during a Western miners' strike, and of the bloodshed and suffering was so vivid that, being slightly dizzy from standing so long, I fainted. She stopped in the middle of a fiery appeal. "Get the poor child some water!" she said, and went on with her speech. I was terribly embarrassed."

"if there is really one thing that I am proud of in my long labor history, it is that while he was in prison, before he was executed, Joe Hill wrote a song for me dedicated to me, that was called, the "Rebel Girl" and that song, I hope you will do it here some time, it may not be the best of words or the best of music, but it came from the heart and it was certainly so treasured."

"I never met a man I admired more than Vincent St. John...He was damned as a dynamiter, a gunman, a dangerous agitator; he entered camps with a price on his head, used his mother's name-Magee-and organized hundreds of men, often single-handed. He was one of the greatest labor organizers this country ever produced...He was short and slight in build, though broad-shouldered, quick and graceful in his movements, quiet, self-contained, modest, but his keenness of mind and wit outmatched any opponent...In a real fight, Saint's mild blue eyes became steely and cold. He fought only on principle and then as mercilessly as the enemies of the workers did. His loyalty to the working class was boundless. For eight years, from 1907 to 1915, he struggled with lack of funds and the uneven development of the IWW, whose strength he never exaggerated."

"in the period of World War I a tremendous onslaught was made against the IWW, the Socialists, all Progressives in our country. There was a very strong peace movement at that time. It was not like World War II, which was an anti-Fascist war."

"In 1907, During the campaign to free Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone, I was invited to speak at a meeting, in Newark, New Jersey, arranged by the Socialist Labor Party...This meeting is an unforgettable event in my life because it was here I first met James Connolly, the Irish Socialist speaker, writer and labor organizer who gave his life for Irish freedom nine years later in the Easter Week Uprising of 1916 in Dublin...He was short, rather stout, a plain-looking man with a large black moustache, a very high forehead and dark sad eyes, a man who rarely smiled. A scholar and an excellent writer, his speech was marred for American audiences by his thick, North of Ireland accent, with a Scotch burr from his long residence in Glasgow...Connolly worked for the IWW and had an office at Cooper Square. He was a splendid organizer, as his later work for the Irish Transport Workers, with James Larkin, demonstrated...He felt keenly that not enough understanding and sympathy was shown by American Socialists for the cause of Ireland's national liberation, that the Irish workers here were too readily abandoned by the Socialists as "reactionaries" and that there was not sufficient effort made to bring the message of socialism to the Irish-American workers...He published a monthly magazine, The Harp. Many poems from his own pen appeared. It was a pathetic sight to see him standing, poorly clad, at the door of Cooper Union or some other East Side hall, selling his little paper. None of the prosperous professional Irish, who shouted their admiration for him after his death, lent him a helping hand at that time. Jim Connolly was anathema to them because he was a "So'-cialist." He had no false pride and encouraged others to do these Jimmy Higgins tasks by setting an example. At the street meetings he persuaded those who had no experience in speaking to "chair the meeting" as a method of training them. Connolly had a rare skill, born of vast knowledge, in approaching the Irish workers. He spoke the truth sharply and forcefully when necessary"

"Its (the IWW's) advent was an important event and it blazed a trail, like a great comet across the American labor scene, from 1905 to the early 1920s. It made labor history, and left an indelible impress on the labor movement. The IWW was a militant, fighting, working class union. The employing class soon recognized this and gave battle from its birth. The Iww identified itself with all the pressing immediate needs of the poorest, the most exploited, the most oppressed workers. It "fanned the flames" of their discontent. It led them in heroic struggles, some of which it organized. Others jumped in to give leadership after the strike had started. The memorable accusation against Jesus, "He stirreth up the people!" fitted the IWW. It set out to organize the unorganized, unskilled foreign-born workers in the mass production industries of the East and the unorganized migratory workers of the West, who were largely American born and employed in maritime, lumber, agriculture, mining and construction work. In the East and South, it reached workers in textile, rubber, coal maritime and lumber and in a variety of smaller industries. In New York City, for instance, there were IWW locals in clothing, textile, shoe, cigar, rattan, piano, brass and hotels. In the West there was a Cowboys' and Broncho Busters' local of the IWW. The entire working class of the fabulous town of Goldfield, Nevada, was organized in 1906 by Vincent St. John into the IWW. The Italian laborers at the U.S. Army's West Point were once organized in the IWW. I recall speaking to them there, about 1911. I joined in 1906…"

"I really should tell you something about where the IWW stood in relation to other organizations because the picture probably is not yet too clear. Well, it was not a craft union; it was an industrial union and it was opposed to the AFL, bitterly so. It did not stand for any of the things that the AFL stood for, a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, a brotherhood of capital and labor, none of those things. It was strong for fighting the boss every time we got a chance and so some of the things sound very strange, but it was the truth. They did not believe in making any contracts. They believed that as long as you were organized, you could hold the office to what it said it was going to do. But a contract, a piece of paper held you and so they didn't make any contracts. How, their attitudes towards what we call the white collar workers was not good. Not good at all, because they just considered that they didn't belong to the working class. You had to wear overalls, be muscular, you had to work. If you were a pen pusher, you were not a worker, according to the IWW. Now, this also applied to students. In other words, what they would call today a very sectarian organization. But to some extent the students of that day were responsible because the students had no sympathy with the labor movement. In fact, when there were strikes it was always possible, as I saw down in a hotel, at a strike in New York City, it was always possible to get students to go in and take the place of the workers. Well, times have changed, I am very glad to say."

"At this (IWW) convention I was thrilled to meet Mrs. Lucy Parsons, widow of Albert Parsons, who had been executed 20 years before in the yard of the Cook County Jail in the heart of Chicago. While he was hanged she was held a prisoner in the Clark Street Station House, not far from where we were then meeting... I remember Mrs. Parsons speaking warmly to the young people, warning us of the seriousness of the struggles ahead that could lead to jail and death before victory was won. For years she traveled from city to city, knocking on the doors of local unions and telling the story of the Chicago trial. Her husband had said: "Clear our names!" and she made this her lifelong mission."

"Suffragist speakers on streetcorners were invariably told: "Go home and wash your dishes," or, regardless of their age: "Who's taking care of your children?" Others said: "Imagine a pregnant woman running for office," or "How could women serve on juries and be locked up with men jurors?""

"There was a prevalent concept that "woman's work" was confined to the domestic scene. "Woman's place is in the home," was the cry. Women were constantly accused of taking "men's jobs.""

"The suffrage movement was growing more militant and figures like Maude Malone appeared. She organized the Harlem Equal Rights League in 1905. She interrupted Theodore Roosevelt at a meeting of 3,000 people to demand where he stood on woman suffrage. She walked up and down Broadway, at the same time we were holding our street meetings there, with signs front and back, like a sandwich man, demanding "Votes for Women," and lost her post as a librarian in consequence."

"I said then and am still convinced that the full opportunity for women to become free and equal citizens with access to all spheres of human endeavor cannot come under capitalism, although many demands have been won by organized struggle."

""Big" Bill Haywood came out of jail a hero-a fitting symbol of the solidarity of labor. He was described by one reporter as, "big in body, in brain, and in courage." He made a triumphal tour of the United States and Canada, under the auspices of the Socialist Party and the labor organizations which had defended him. He was an intensely down-to-earth dramatic speaker. I remember hearing him say: "I'm a two-gun man from the West, you know," and while the audience waited breathlessly, he pulled his union card from one pocket and his Socialist card from the other."

"the IWW also differed from the AFL in that it stood for Socialism. Although it differed from the Socialist Party in that it rejected political parties and political action, and this might have been a reflection of is composition...they had this very peculiar attitude that the real struggle was in the industries, in the shops, what they call at the point of production."

"In Flynn's words, it was "a day without parallel in American labor history... a reign of terror prevailed in Lawrence which literally shook America.""

"An unforgettable tragedy of our childhood was the burning of the excursion boat, the General Slocum, in 1904."

"The book (Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy) first popularized the idea of socialism in this country. It was a biting criticism of capitalism, which hit home to many Americans and with which they agreed in the days of rising monopolies."

"Force and violence come from the ruling class and not from the people."

"His (Peter Kropotkin's) appeal to the youth of the poor struck home to me personally, as if he were speaking to us there in our shabby poverty-stricken Bronx flat: "Must you drag on the same weary existence as your father and mother for thirty or forty years? Must you toil your life long to procure for others all the pleasures of well-being, of knowledge, of art, and keep for yourself only the eternal anxiety as to whether you can get a bit of bread?""

"I asked you a question on Friday, Your Honor, which I now repeat: If the Communist Party is not illegal, its membership and officership is not illegal, if advocating socialism is not illegal, if advocating a day-to-day program of "good deeds," as the government cynically calls it, is not illegal, what in all conscience is illegal here? Of what are we guilty?"

"In all my long life. ... I never expected that I would go to jail for books, and not even whole books but scraps and pieces, and if I return to my normal life of the last forty-seven years, of working and speaking on unionism, democratic rights, the rights of the Negro people and of women, on peace and against fascism and war, and on socialism, what happens then, Your Honor?"

"Another book I recall, which caused an immediate change in my life, was The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. After reading it I forthwith became a vegetarian!"

"Your Honor, all the material property I possess, as far as a fine is concerned, are books accumulated since I first bought a paper-covered copy of Tom Paine's Common Sense at the age of sixteen. They are good books-poetry, drama, history, political economy, fiction, philosophy, art, music, travel, literature. Marx and Engels are there beside Shakespeare, Shaw, Emerson, Hegel, Mark Twain; Lenin and Stalin are there beside Thoreau, Jefferson, the Beards, the Webbs, Hugo, Hardy and many others...There is force and violence on those shelves but not where the government looked for it. It is in Irish history-Connelly, O'Casey and others telling of the long and bloody struggle against British rule. It is in American labor history, in Colorado, West Virginia, Homestead, South Chicago and on the Embarcadero of San Francisco. It is in American history-the Revolution, the wars against the American Indians, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War. It is in the struggles of the Negro people. It is in the Bible, too-which is on my shelf, Your Honor-violence against the Jewish Tribes, and the old prophets, against Jesus and his Disciples, and the early Christian martyrs."

"It is from a small handful of frightened rich that this contagion has spread the men of the trusts, who never loved their country more than their stocks and bonds, whose patriotism is always on a percentage basis, who would rule and exploit and use violence against not only their fellow countrymen but the human race. They would plunge the world into a sea of blood by atomic warfare in order to maintain their own mean and mercenary rule, their way of life, and foist it upon other people who want none of it. Great as the danger looms, I have faith that fascism will never come to pass in our country. I am proud of the role that our Party has played in signalizing that danger since 1935."

"Somewhere and soon the Smith Act will go into the discard as did the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1800, the Fugitive Slave Laws of the sixties, the Criminal Syndicalist Laws of the 1920s."

"The political, industrial and social conditions under capitalism which created our ideas remain. They will produce similar ideas in the minds of countless others and further strengthen them in ours. Never did prison affect resolute people who live and work and die if necessary by their ideas. We Communists are such people. I have faith in the ultimate justice of the American people once the fog of lies, hysteria, prejudice and, worst of all, fear is swept away. It is a terrible thing to see one's country in the grip of fear-needless, stupid, foolish fear; fear of imaginary enemies, fear of our allies and friends; fear of the accusing fingers of stool pigeons, fear of losing one's job or one's citizenship or one's place in a community. The whole governmental bureaucracy, wasting billions of dollars, boasting, bragging, bullying, is whistling in the dark of fear, trying to make the whole world afraid of us."

"The fog engulfing courtrooms, middle class juries and the press will lift among the masses of plain people, the ones who never get on federal juries because their appearance and manner doesn't satisfy a hard-boiled political appointee who splits his infinitives, doubles his negatives and toadies to the prosperous."

"peace and socialism is in the hearts, in the minds, on the lips of millions around the world May First, 1941. The “sun of tomorrow” shines upon us. The future is ours."

"A people's movement is arising in our country like a strong, fresh prairie wind against repressive legislation, loyalty oaths, congressional investigations, witch-hunts, political trials and the like."

"During that period (around 1906) I had studied two more books, which helped to catapult me into socialist activities. One was the Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft; the other was Women and Socialism by August Bebel."