The rebel girl an autobiography frank
The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My First Life
March 29, 2011
THE REBEL GIRL
An autobiography – My first life 1906 – 1926
By Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
I’ve always had a soft spot for romantic, idealistic, revolutionaries, not the bomb-throwers or advocates of assassination and other forms of violence but those that devoted their lives to fighting for a better life for the working people of the world. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was one of those indomitable thorns in the side of the Robber Barons during that turbulent period of the labor movement in the early part of the Twentieth Century.
She was born into a family of Irish rebels and socialists in Concord Massachusetts in 1890. Her father, a self-educated quarry worker gained entrance to Dartmouth but was unable to finish because he had to support his mother and siblings after the untimely death of his brother. He took a job as a mapmaker and the family traveled with him from job to job until 1900 when they landed in the South Bronx of New York City and her mother, tired of traveling decided to stay there.
While attending grammar school PS she won a silver medal for, “merit in an Essay on the City’s History” from the New York Times and a gold medal on graduation in 1904 in English and one for proficiency in debate. She continued with debating after grammar school and was invited to speak at the Harlem Socialist Club in 1906 where she spoke on, “What Socialism Will do for Women.” This brought her invitations to speak on the street where she learned technique and success can lead to arrest.
While speaking in the theater district of Broadway she attracted the attention of producer David Belasco who invited her to his office and asked if she would like to be an actress in a new production on labor to which she replied; “…I’m in the labor movement and I speak my own piece.” During that same time a young unknown editor of Broadway Magazine named Theodore Dreiser heard her and wrote about her as “…an ardent Socialist orator,” in an article he entitled, “An Eastside Joan of Arc.”
That same year she left school and joined mixed local #179 of the IWW in New York. She spoke on the Russian workers slaughtered and imprisoned after the 1905 Revolution by the Tsar and at fundraisers in defense of Big Bill Haywood, George Pettibone and Christopher Moyer, leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, accused of murdering Idaho Governor Steunenberg. All three were acquitted.
She married Jack Jones, a miner and IWW organizer in 1908 while speaking in favor of the strikers on the Mesabi Range in Minnesota. She became pregnant, they moved to Chicago but the baby died shortly after a premature birth. She threw herself back into activity. She did a national tour through the Northwest and Canada then rejoined her husband and they worked the free speech fight in Missoula Montana until she went to Spokane as a speaker in another free speech fight where she was put in charge of the paper The Industrial Worker and spoke only in IWW halls because she was again pregnant. In April of 1909 she determined that she was no longer in love with her husband who had not come the days travel from Missoula to see her and wanted her to give up speaking and “settle down.” She went home to New York and to have her baby. Fred, who later bragged he had been in jail twice in defense of free speech before he was born, arrived the day before Haley’s Comet traversed the firmament May 19, 1910.
E. Gurley Flynn continued speaking and advocating for Socialism and the IWW in fights for free speech, defense organizations for framed labor leaders, strikes and the improvement of life for working people across the country. The final chapter of her first life, which ends in 1926 is the struggle to save Sacco and Vanzetti a year before they were executed in August 1927.
The book is a travelogue through the labor struggles that took place before and during a period more often referred to as the “Roaring twenties” and associated with the flappers in short skirts and rolled down stockings and prohibition than the Ludlow Massacre Where a Rockefeller owned mining company hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to supplement the Colorado National Guard in murdering 19 women and children living in a tent city and the fire in Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 146 textile workers in New York. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Autobiography takes you through all of the struggles and battles that get short shrift in textbooks on U.S. history.
The second half of her Autobiography was never completed. She died shortly after beginning it in 1964 at 74. She had intended it to be a book on the life of an active communist as opposed to the life of an ex-communist of which there several. Her statement was, after being released from Alderman Prison after serving time for “… for attempting to overthrow the government,” “I will never move from where I stand.” She went back to work defending workers and others from the ravages of McCarthyism. We could use more like her.
An autobiography – My first life 1906 – 1926
By Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
I’ve always had a soft spot for romantic, idealistic, revolutionaries, not the bomb-throwers or advocates of assassination and other forms of violence but those that devoted their lives to fighting for a better life for the working people of the world. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was one of those indomitable thorns in the side of the Robber Barons during that turbulent period of the labor movement in the early part of the Twentieth Century.
She was born into a family of Irish rebels and socialists in Concord Massachusetts in 1890. Her father, a self-educated quarry worker gained entrance to Dartmouth but was unable to finish because he had to support his mother and siblings after the untimely death of his brother. He took a job as a mapmaker and the family traveled with him from job to job until 1900 when they landed in the South Bronx of New York City and her mother, tired of traveling decided to stay there.
While attending grammar school PS she won a silver medal for, “merit in an Essay on the City’s History” from the New York Times and a gold medal on graduation in 1904 in English and one for proficiency in debate. She continued with debating after grammar school and was invited to speak at the Harlem Socialist Club in 1906 where she spoke on, “What Socialism Will do for Women.” This brought her invitations to speak on the street where she learned technique and success can lead to arrest.
While speaking in the theater district of Broadway she attracted the attention of producer David Belasco who invited her to his office and asked if she would like to be an actress in a new production on labor to which she replied; “…I’m in the labor movement and I speak my own piece.” During that same time a young unknown editor of Broadway Magazine named Theodore Dreiser heard her and wrote about her as “…an ardent Socialist orator,” in an article he entitled, “An Eastside Joan of Arc.”
That same year she left school and joined mixed local #179 of the IWW in New York. She spoke on the Russian workers slaughtered and imprisoned after the 1905 Revolution by the Tsar and at fundraisers in defense of Big Bill Haywood, George Pettibone and Christopher Moyer, leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, accused of murdering Idaho Governor Steunenberg. All three were acquitted.
She married Jack Jones, a miner and IWW organizer in 1908 while speaking in favor of the strikers on the Mesabi Range in Minnesota. She became pregnant, they moved to Chicago but the baby died shortly after a premature birth. She threw herself back into activity. She did a national tour through the Northwest and Canada then rejoined her husband and they worked the free speech fight in Missoula Montana until she went to Spokane as a speaker in another free speech fight where she was put in charge of the paper The Industrial Worker and spoke only in IWW halls because she was again pregnant. In April of 1909 she determined that she was no longer in love with her husband who had not come the days travel from Missoula to see her and wanted her to give up speaking and “settle down.” She went home to New York and to have her baby. Fred, who later bragged he had been in jail twice in defense of free speech before he was born, arrived the day before Haley’s Comet traversed the firmament May 19, 1910.
E. Gurley Flynn continued speaking and advocating for Socialism and the IWW in fights for free speech, defense organizations for framed labor leaders, strikes and the improvement of life for working people across the country. The final chapter of her first life, which ends in 1926 is the struggle to save Sacco and Vanzetti a year before they were executed in August 1927.
The book is a travelogue through the labor struggles that took place before and during a period more often referred to as the “Roaring twenties” and associated with the flappers in short skirts and rolled down stockings and prohibition than the Ludlow Massacre Where a Rockefeller owned mining company hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to supplement the Colorado National Guard in murdering 19 women and children living in a tent city and the fire in Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 146 textile workers in New York. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Autobiography takes you through all of the struggles and battles that get short shrift in textbooks on U.S. history.
The second half of her Autobiography was never completed. She died shortly after beginning it in 1964 at 74. She had intended it to be a book on the life of an active communist as opposed to the life of an ex-communist of which there several. Her statement was, after being released from Alderman Prison after serving time for “… for attempting to overthrow the government,” “I will never move from where I stand.” She went back to work defending workers and others from the ravages of McCarthyism. We could use more like her.