NYC: Labor Day, 2024.
I’ve spent most of life learning about radical labor history.
Formal study began when I left Memphis and became the first person in my family to go to college.
I took a class with Jennifer Guglielmo –the preeminent historian of immigrant anarchist women who taught decolonized, radical labor history at Smith. She was, and continues to be, my favorite teacher. I met Jennifer outside the library one day after class. Opening up the trunk of her old Subaru, she unveiled an ad hoc archive and the chills ran wild all over my skin. Cardboard boxes filled to the brim with books on the International Workers of the World (the Wobblies!), Lucy Parsons, C.L.R. James (Every Cook Can Govern, y’all!) and many other anarchist activists who shaped radical subcultures of resistance in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century. It was a care package from Franklin Rosemont, the beloved poet and historian at the helm of the Chicago Surrealist Group and Charles H. Kerr, a small but mighty radical press offering “Subversive Literature for the Whole Family Since 1886.” In 2007, Rosemont alongside Archie Green, David Roediger, and Salvatore Salerno put together a luminous expanded collection of Wobbly songs in The Big Red Songbook. My very first piece of published writing was a review of the Songbook in the journal of International Labor and Working Class History. The whole experience brought me much joy. At that point, I was just beginning my second year of grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was the beginning of a long, complex experience of…anti-joy. Of course, I learned so much. And, yes, of course, there were triumphs. I mean, the sheer infiltration of it all! Re: it was more than one thing.
I’ve been revisiting a lot of this early work of mine, looking for that joy again, trying to get a better sense of the spirit that moved me as a young historian, the voice that I was coming into, and the politics that spurred my research, writing, and eventually teaching. Digging through my own archives, I came across two pieces of writing that would change my life forever. One was my “statement of purpose”—basically a cover letter—to explain why I wanted to become a historian. Here’s the beginning:
In January of my final semester at Smith College, I interned at AK Press in Oakland, CA; a worker-run, anarchist publishing house and distribution hub. I scoured the stacks, catalogues, and zine library for anything and everything on anarcho-feminist movements, and came out with only a handful of contemporary works and a few other slightly out-dated historical surveys. Within the amnesiac holes of indexes and tables of content, I saw footprints of the displaced and heard voices of the silenced; corroded as they were, yet imbued with a palpable vitality. My desire to map those footprints and project those voices across borders, bodies, and poetic landscapes crystallized my own commitment to the project of a redefined feminist history within a further resituated history of the United States.
Wooooweee! I didn’t come to play!
What I really want to share with you, though, is the essay that was the culmination of my early study of transnational anarchism and anti-colonial history called “Beyond Emma Goldman.” This was the writing sample that got me into grad school. I have flashes of memory working on it in San Francisco (where I lived for few years after college) and then back in Memphis (my sacred hometown that always says come on back when I need to heal most). While much of my writing style and my terminologies have shifted —for example, I have a more expansive approach to marking or not marking the gender of historical actors, not always saying “woman” or “women.” I try to destabilize those categories through a transfeminist lens. This big, breathless piece of writing feels like an open window into the earliest commitments I made to the movement; it doesn’t feel like dead letters to me. There’s a hefty portability to it. That’s my hope at least. Do with it what you will, comrade. Solidarity forever <3 <3 <3
BEYOND EMMA GOLDMAN
The Real & Imagined Movements of Transnational Anarchist Women
If we employed a diaspora framework to U. S. history, what would change? What might result?...we would be compelled to write the kind of history that follows people back and forth across the physical borders of the United States, a history in which the boundaries are determined not by geopolitics but by people and their movements— physical and mental, real and imagined.
- Robin D.G. Kelley-
How can we begin to chart both the real and imagined movements of anarchist women? Robin Kelley’s strategy of applying a diasporic framework to US history guides my attempt to unearth those women who have been pushed to the sidelines, or erased completely over the last two centuries. I also draw upon the recent work of scholars who have attempted to illuminate the embodied, lived experiences of radical women on a global scale. In order to re-imagine an extensive, transnational women’s anarchist movement, we must first recognize the diasporic identities which were deliberately crafted in opposition to the manufactured authority of imperialist domestic economies and racialized citizenship. With the existing scholarship on anarchist women typically focusing on 1870 to 1930, there are several well-established trends of historical documentation that just do not cut it anymore: the “best-known-as” approach, the lionization of talking heads, the memorializing/martyr vacuum, and the racialized monolithic im/migrant experience.
When working-class anarcho-feminists are not completely disregarded, they are scattered sparsely within the bounty of massive anthologies celebrating the founding fathers of anarchism and their contemporaries. Moreover, the few women who reach celebrity status within mainstream and easy-access resources on anarchist women come pre-packaged in doe-eyed biographies that mythologize women, as in the case of Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre. As a result, their participation in resistance struggles is coded as exceptional because they were so seemingly magnificent. The gaps in between such aggrandized women are in desperate need of being both re-considered and filled. Not to say that the duly popularized heroines were not important galvanizing symbols for others drawn to the movement. Regardless, we must keep in mind that the shadows created by their great presence should be shifted so that we can illuminate the multitudes of women who equally contributed to eradicating oppression and enacting the anarchist ideal.
With that task in mind, this essay seeks to challenge historical analysis on early 20th Century im/migrant activism that either lumps such patterns of resistance into a singular experience shared by all or erases the complexity of activism altogether through a deceptive narrative of victimization. The portrayal of im/migrant and working- class cultures in the dull hues of a black and white wretched existence has become iconic in American visual culture. However, this conventional representation of workers packed like sardines in tenements and covered in the muck of the street can perpetuate an equally oppressive trajectory of victim-hood and erase the thriving legacies of resistance, through both militancy and recreation, which stood face-to-face with the hardship and exploitation spawned by American industrialism. Paul Avrich observes,
Life was hard for these working class immigrants, but there were moments of happiness and laughter. They arranged concerts, picnics, dances, plays, and recitations, in which children as well as adults took part, imparting a new revolutionary content to customary social activities.
Within an oppositional history, the “revolutionary content” that Avrich attributes to everyday recreation and basic leisure activity, represents an important lens into the many faces of empowered struggle.
In a similar approach, historian Gabriela Gonzalez advocates tactically confronting the colonial legacy perpetuating victim-hood and erasing resistance through her survey of Chicana community politics in Depression-Era San Antonio, asserting that “the path from Chicana’s lived experience to historical inclusion has been arduous because traditional masculinist and Eurocentric histories either excluded these stories or included them only at a point of contact.” Subsequently, the limited history of dissent we inherit is bound in an essentialized white trajectory where women assume a position within the indexes only after they encounter the main characters of the story. Gonzalez calls on a diasporic approach for oppositional history and implements a thirdspace methodology, which is not based on any preconceived notion of what women’s activism should look like.
Gonzalez is one of many activist-scholars participating in an empowered, kinetic legacy of socio-historical upheaval which strives to throw a fabricated historical record on its head, a legacy which Chela Sandoval mobilized in the groundbreaking Methodology of the Oppressed. Sandoval crafts a theory of oppositional consciousness which encourages feminist scholars to “speak to, against, and through power” so as to dull the sharp edges of the theoretical apartheid that has plagued women’s history. Sandoval's theory of oppositional consciousness as a kind of thirdspace serves as an important theoretical framework: she argues for attention to the real and imagined movement within cultural resistance; calls for a “theory uprising through a rigorous rhetoric of resistance”; and “explores new vocabularies to decolonize the imagination.” Furthermore, Sandoval's insistence on mobility within the conflated domains of theory and everyday resistance works from a point of tactical, not strategic, social movement. She writes, “Differential consciousness can be thought of as mobile- not nomadic, but rather cinematographic: a kinetic motion that maneuvers, poetically transfigures, and orchestrates while demanding alienation, perversion, and reformation in both spectators and practitioners.”
Through my own historical maneuvering, this essay investigates how everyday-anarchists envisioned and embodied their own revolutionary movement. I also consider the role of the historian as spectator in relation to the diasporic radical woman as practitioner, and what is required to understand the relationship between both agents. In the first section of my argument, an analysis of primary and archival sources reveals several representations of what an anarcho-feminist ideal could look like and also considers the ideologies operating within anarchism. From there, the second section seeks to illustrate the production of a radical historiography and the exploding of paradigms within oppositional history. Essentially, my goal is to indicate the necessity of the two narratives to be in constant dialogue with one another.
For some women anarchists, activism stretched across the globe through lives filled with constant travel. Other women were not so privileged to go abroad because of financial impossibilities, familial responsibilities, and racial blockades. Though most of the activists I discuss did have the opportunity to travel, my intention is to depict a diasporic identity which is not dependent on passport stamps or miles accrued. Several questions frame this paper: how were anarcho-feminists situated in their world systems and how did they navigate within those physical and emotional geographies? In trying to unearth an erased legacy of embodied radicalism, how do I read a radical trajectory as anarchist? What constitutes evidence amidst an oppositional historiography? Furthermore, in collapsing the divide between real and imagined movement, this essay explores labor organizing, including strikes, as radical interstate commerce, home as something that you carry with you, free love and anarchist motherhood as different sides of the same coin, and performance and poetry as heady, foot-stomping revolt.
Lucy Parsons was deeply stirred by the discontent and obeisance she saw spreading like a virus within communities of workers at the onset of the 20th Century. Through incessant cross-country, and, occasionally, international, speaking tours, Parsons’ radicalism channeled a kinetic energy all its own. As a champion of women’s rights and an uncompromising anarchist, Parsons embodied the spirit of resistance and direct action that was evocative and vital at the time, but still largely unknown to this day. As an anarchist, writer, labor organizer, public speaker, and founding member of the Chicago Working Women’s Union in the 1880s and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905, Parsons adroitly assembled her own radical topography.
From the singular collection of Lucy Parsons’ oral and written history, Surrealist historian Gale Ahrens offers an assault on the disembodied historical analysis and methodology which continues to distort depictions of American radicalism:
Historians and journalists alike have long conspired, perhaps unwittingly, to reduce her important place in history. “Best known as wife-partner-defender-widow of Haymarket Martyr Albert Parsons” is the identification generally applied to her, but it simply isn’t enough. “Best-known as” does far too little to describe the range and power of this amazing force of nature whose life of struggle and defiance does far more to define the vital issues of her time (and ours) than any and all of the billionaire industrialists or their presidents, senators, generals, and other assorted yes-men of the day.
Nowhere is this conspiracy more evident than in the anachronistic notion of when a life of radicalism begins and ends. It is important to point out that much of Parsons’ radical work, ranging from speeches to writings, occurred before the Haymarket Square events in 1886, and the subsequent execution of her husband, Albert Parsons. Seven years before Haymarket, in a letter to The Socialist in 1879, titled “WORKINGWOMEN,” Parsons employed a pointed sense of humor in her discussion of the sheer aristocratic absurdity required to keep one’s servants in line for a respectable lady of the house. She addressed a few excerpts from an article titled “Hints to Young Housekeepers” in the January 1879 issue of Scribner’s Magazine, which detailed the various employer preferences in terms of appearance, age, educational level, independence, contractual agreements, dismissals, obedience, and social allowances. In one section of the Scribner’s article, there is a telling admonition to mistresses who would dare try and woo servants from their current place of employment through enticingly loftier wages: “it is a kind of burglary, and should be punished.” One can imagine the treasonous kind of person that would dare dismantle the illusion of dominance and entitlement which built these houses of privilege and filled them with their very own chattel. The article even goes so far as to catalog dietary provisions for the servants. At this juncture, Parsons pops in with a sense of irreverent hilarity, exclaiming: “Now, girls, you can judge of how you are to be fed while in the bondage of aristocracy, for the aforesaid magazine gets it down to a nicety…” One can assume without direct quote that the provisions that follow are insultingly meager and neurotically calculated. Again, Parsons brings in a sharp sense of humor and a call for a wider feminist response to such a telling piece of white, upper class pageantry, in her closing:
Now, Mr. Editor, I should much like to comment on the above audacious and gratuitous advice, but am afraid I have already gotten to the “boiling” space. I am in hopes the above items will draw from some of your many lady readers a far more pungent comment than I am capable of rendering.
Consider the wealth of information and sense of solidarity or, even, lack thereof, which could be rendered from a cross-referencing of any responses to Parsons’ call for other women’s thoughts within the subsequent editions of The Socialist. It is this kind of fluidity of primary sources and investigative tactics that constitute an oppositional history of transnational feminisms.
Joyce L. Kornbluh’s pioneering work on the history of the Industrial Workers of the World does just this. She weaves together an extensive documentary history, consisting of images, pamphlets, speeches, songs, and polemics. As I perused the outwardly exhaustive table of contents for the names of women included, I only came across a smattering of poetry and songs from the women of the IWW which seemed to illustrate the memorializing vacuum effect. Much of the writing from the likes of Anna Louise Strong, Viola Gilbert Snell, and Vera Moller pays tribute to one or all of the class-war prisoners and IWW martyrs Joe Hill, Frank Little, and Wesley Everest. The tragic fanfare which accompanied the men can be easily understood as a necessary tactic to actualize an emotional rally-cry moment. Unfortunately, it often seems that Haymarket, the Great Martyr trinity, and the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti have become a kind of historical vacuum, sealing all anarchist women’s activism within or around a few watershed moments in a limited history of labor. By taking a closer look, however, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn springs from the pages of Rebel Voices. Flynn’s involvement in the labor uprisings of the early 1900’s was extensive. After joining the IWW at the age of 16, Flynn was a leading organizer, soapboxer, and lecturer for the organization over the next ten years. Arrested in both the Missoula and Spokane free speech fights in 1908-1909, a strike leader in the Paterson and Lawrence textile strikes, as well as the 1912 New York City hotel workers strike, Flynn was quite the traveler. She was also active in the defense of Joe Hill, Ettor Giovannitti, Sacco andVanzetti, and other IWW prisoners arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917. With her 1913 speech, “Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of Workers’ Industrial Efficiency,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn immersed herself in the fight for social justice, joining Lucy Parsons, and the many other activists who remain nameless.
Flynn’s speech could not have been timelier. Engulfed in the 1913 Paterson silk strike, Flynn exhaustively detailed the many strategies of sabotage and direct action that would allow workers to disrupt the capitalist machine. Flynn goes on to insist that “Sabotage is to the class struggle what guerrilla warfare is to the battle. The strike is the open battle of the class struggle, sabotage is the guerrilla warfare, the day-by-day warfare between two opposing classes.” Within the speech, Flynn also makes a point to show that mill bosses and employers were already entangled in their own form of insidious sabotage, also known as “dynamiting silk,” which was the process of weighing down the silk with zinc, tin, lead, and salt, considerably cheapening and lessening the durability of the silk itself, but increasing profitability on all fronts. Flynn suggests that workers reverse the effects of dynamiting by ultimately making it more pure:
Instead of introducing these chemicals for adulteration, don’t introduce them at all. Take the lead, the zinc, and the tin and throw it down the sewer and weave the silk, beautiful, pure, durable silk just as it is. Dye it pound, for hundred pound for hundred pound.
Flynn led an impressively active and passionate life in the name of justice and labor victory. Just as Parsons and Flynn delivered powerful, rabblerousing speeches, there were many anarcho-feminists in the early 20th century whose weapon of choice was poetry. Within the archives of the Sophia Smith Collection, I came across one such woman: Lola Ridge.
The “best-known as” approach and the canonization of women’s anarchist poetry reveal an unequivocal pattern. Much available, anthologized, and explicitly anarchist poetry is solely concerned with memorializing the martyred men who, like the mythologized women, have come to symbolize the movement. Was this the only way that women were active in the movement- as icons? Or, is it only what has been provided for future readers, thanks to a selective history?
In my own research at the Sophia Smith Collection, I came across a variety of illuminations and roadblocks when scouring the recently acquired and archived ephemera of a life lived: the manuscripts, letters, and drawings of Lola Ridge. Although she is relatively unknown to contemporary readers, Ridge was a well-known anarcho-feminist poet and immigrant activist during the early 20th century. The author of five books of poetry and editor for avant-garde magazines such as Others and Broom, Ridge was part of a vital community of radical writers, artists, and performers.
Ridge was born in Dublin in 1873, but grew up in New Zealand and Australia before moving to New York City in 1907, where she positioned herself in an acutely transnational topography. Emerging within a city of empowered exiles, diasporic radicalism at this moment occupied many different landscapes, both physically and imaginatively. Occasionally, Ridge would leave the urban sprawl of New York, yet would stay within close orbit while taking up residence at Yaddo, a radical cooperative living space for artists in Saratoga Springs, NY. The roster of artists in residence reads like a who’s who of 20th Century authors and artists, including Milton Avery, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Patricia Highsmith, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, Alfred Kazin, Ulysses Kay, Jacob Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Katherine Anne Porter, Mario Puzo, Clyfford Still, and Virgil Thomson. Of course, some of the lesser known poets like Lola Ridge still remain to be both seen and heard. During her time at Yaddo, however, Ridge was creatively prolific and seemed to be finding her own radical footing within this transnational activist community.
Her first long poem, "The Ghetto," was originally published in The New Republic in 1918 and later reprinted in The Ghetto and Other Poems that same year. "The Ghetto," "Manhattan Lights," and "Labor" are a trilogy of extended poems that call for immigrant rights and demand the annihilation of the systems of hyper-industrialism ravaging the country. With each section, Ridge describes the life of a different woman trapped in the cogs of the machine; women who endure so much and receive nothing in return. The harshness of poverty and constant work paints a picture of desperation. Yet, Ridge revitalizes and invigorates each woman with a sense of hope for life, for change, and for the sheer madness of it all. The vitality peaks in the last stanzas of “The Ghetto,” as Ridge asserts,
LIFE! Startling, vigorous life,
That squirms under my touch,
And baffles me when I try to examine it,
Or hurls me back without apology.
Leaving my ego ruffled and preening itself.
Long nights argued away In meeting halls
Back of interminable stairways—
In Roumanian wine-shops And little Russian tea-rooms...
Feet echoing through deserted streets
In the soft darkness before dawn...
Brows aching, throbbing, burning—
Life leaping in the shaken flesh Like flame at an asbestos curtain.
Life-- Pent, overflowing Stoops and façades,
Jostling, pushing, contriving,
Seething as in a great vat...
Bartering, changing, extorting,
Dreaming, debating, aspiring,
Astounding, indestructible Life of the Ghetto...
Strong flux of life,
Like a bitter wine Out of the bloody stills of the world...
Out of the Passion eternal.
In a letter written by Marion Strobel, the Chicago Tribune’s former associate editor of Poetry, to a friend of Lola’s, Louise Adams Floyd, we are given a sense of the power behind her work at this moment in history. Strobel writes,
This is major poetry. This has nothing to do with pretty song, or cleverness or cerebral gymnastics. We are, according to Lola Ridge, living in a dynasty of fire; we are in the midst of the fire-dance. It is the mind of glow that can equally light up a world or a dancing black speck of humanity.
Originally a lecture in 1919, "Woman and the Creative Will" forcefully asserted Ridge’s feminist ideology, as she argued for women's empowerment through art, rejected arguments of biological determinism, and illuminated the socially constructed nature of sex. Preceding Virginia Woolf’s mainstay, A Room of One’s Own, by ten years, Ridge’s contribution was groundbreaking to say the least. Despite her profuse writings on anarcho-feminism and immigrant activism, the fanfare surrounding Ridge relies on the poem in Dance of Fire, titled “Three Men Die,” which memorializes the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti with exquisite artistry, warmth, and outrage. However, it is important to note that Dance of Fire was the final collection of poems published by Ridge before her death in 1941. A lifetime of work precedes “Three Men Die,” yet because of the vacuum at work within history, it is the abridged version of an expansive, empowered existence. Just as Lucy Parson’s trajectory was bound to the legacy of her martyred husband, Lola Ridge’s voice has become muffled in the crowd.
Through a close reading of Lucy Parsons, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Lola Ridge, we see some examples of what women’s anarchism could look like. Moreover, by analyzing the conversation at work between archival resources and radical historians we can edge closer to the real and imagined movements of history. The following section of this essay attempts to shed light on symbiotic narratives between the actor and spectator and, from there, bring the voice of the radical historian into a dialogue with the articulations and embodiments of anarcho-feminism in the 20th Century.
For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt- of examining what these ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7am, after brunch, during wild love making, war, giving birth, mourning our dead-while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.
-Audre Lorde-
As one of the preeminent scholars on the evolution of American anarchism, Paul Avrich’s compelling methodology generated an expansive oral history of activism with the hope of liberating an anarchist tradition bound by the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Spanish Revolution of the 1930’s. Sweeping in scope and non-traditional through intergenerational oral histories, Anarchist Voices has come to a place of dominant stature in anarchist studies. Nevertheless, there are quite a few moments throughout the work where I was filled with a sense of hesitancy over some of the blanket statements championed by Avrich. In a chapter titled “Ethnic Anarchists,” Avrich claims that there were explicitly marked national and ethnic divisions between anarchist movements,
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when foreign-born artisans and laborers constituted the mass base of the anarchist movement, groups were organized largely on ethnic lines and their activities conducted in native languages. On occasion, it is true, different national groups took part in joint social and cultural events, and they invariably banded together in times of crisis (Haymarket, Sacco-Vanzetti, the Spanish Civil War). Generally, however, they tended to go their own way.
Communities and crisis situations do generally determine each other’s borders, but I wonder if we could strive to ground Avrich’s argument within a more complex understanding of the socio-historical dynamics of the im/migrant experience within US history. Moreover, what if everyday is a crisis situation? Instead of perpetuating the notion that people mingle with their own kind, and naturalizing racial myths, we could look to an expanded analysis of community through a more in depth consideration of the hesitancy of radical im/migrant activists to join specific labor uprisings. Not only were there compelling illustrations of inter-ethnic organizing through mutual aid societies, direct action, and print culture, but, conversely, there were also complicated moments of community policing sometimes stimulated from unwarranted fear, but just as frequently instigated through a concern for self-preservation and basic safety.
Caroline Waldron Merithew challenges the limited renderings of what women’s anarchism actually looked like for im/migrant activists from Italy, Belgium, and France leading to the turn of the century within the coal mining towns of Illinois. Merithew brings attention to the fact that there are many faces that make up an anarchist movement, and much scholarly work to this point has essentialized women’s activism within the movement as one unified, non-diverse experience. Merithew sites a handful of historians who make sweeping claims about the relationship between the limelight leaders of the movement, such as Emma Goldman, and the rank-and-file activists; specifically, presuming that the leaders of the movement and the everyday anarchist shared the same idea of what it means to enact an anarchist ideal and lifestyle. Merithew asserts,
This assumption is misleading…My research shows that French-speaking and Italian women anarchists in Illinois viewed their world and shaped their ideology differently than did Goldman and other female leaders, who preferred ‘sexuality’ to ‘domesticity’ and had little interest in motherhood as revolutionary practice. Indeed, anarchism as ideology was diffuse, and its adherents were widespread and varied in revolutionary word and deed.
Using non-traditional sources such as women’s correspondence with radical newspapers and government files on subversives, Merithew creates a realigned framework from which to illuminate the geography surrounding French and Italian-speaking, anarchist mothers’ radical, cross-ethnic landscape. Banding together to form Il Gruppo Femminile Luisa Michel, this community of anarchist women “challenged the patriarchal assumptions of both the anarchist movement and capitalism by redefining motherhood as a revolutionary activity- what I term ‘anarchist motherhood.’”
Through educating their children and enacting the anarchist ideal in a highly fragmented gender structure, the women of Luisa Michel remained distinctive from mainstream labor organizing and constructed a pointed revolutionary agenda. Rejecting the “conservative union ideology” of the United Mine Workers of America, the radical women of Luisa Michel used motherhood as a tool of transnational solidarity and established inter-ethnic ties, and mutual aid as essential in forming a cohesive resistance movement. Additionally, Merithew considers the markedly different experience of im/migration for men and women coming into a coal mining town. Replacing an agricultural lifestyle with the stark realities of 19th Century hyper-industrialism required an immediate stratification of gender roles within work and social circles, as Merithew suggests,
The demographic realities and gendered divisions of labour in the upper Illinois valley coal towns are important for understanding how gender relations, ethnic identity, and class consciousness affected immigrants’ histories. Moreover, the structural realities of female migration to the region lays the foundation for understanding the evolution of anarchist motherhood.
Women were not allowed to work in the coal mines, so the “structural realities” that Merithew refers to affected the patterns of migration operating in Illinois; women mainly moved in groups and did so because of family networks. By enacting their “maternal rebellion,” the anarchist mothers’ organizing strategies of mutual exchange were easier to conceal from the authorities attempting to sniff them out. Recognizing their distinctive positioning in opposition to their male counterparts, the women workers could potentially move more freely and under the radar through a fluid understanding of their own social agency, but within an explicitly gendered work infrastructure.
In Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s, Nancy A. Hewitt acts as a remarkable lens into women’s multi-ethnic activism through locally based revolutionary clubs, mutual aid societies, and labor unions in the New South. Within Hewitt’s depiction of a radical South, we find Luisa Capetillo. In many ways, Capetillo fully embraced an unrestrained life infused with a sense of momentum, pushing herself from one intellectual and geographical plane to another: the embodied topography of real and imagined movement. Unlike the anarchist mothers in Illinois, she refused to stay under the radar and would choose free love over, what she considered, the prison of domesticity any day. Within the flurry of commentary marking the book jacket of the first English translations of her manifesto, an emboldened quote proclaims, “Luisa Capetillo is best known in popular culture as the first woman to wear trousers!” Echoing Gale Ahren’s examination of the “best-known-as” historical approach to radical women’s lives, pants-wearing seems like an unfortunate debasement to such a provocative activist. In any case, Capetillo’s seminal Mi Opinion Sobre las Libertades, Derechos de la Mujer significantly opens up the dialogue on diasporic women’s resistance, and the crafting of a radical, itinerant lifestyle. The urgency that possessed Capetillo’s life force permeates throughout Mi Opinion, as she affirms,
There is nothing more harmful to the success of an endeavor than timidity, pusillanimity, and doubt. I do not believe anything to be impossible…What is essential is that the idea be put into practice. Begin! The rest is weakness and an erroneous concept of human power. Wanting is doing!
Capetillo’s awareness of her own power to live the revolution was anything but erroneous. Within her organizing for women’s and worker’s rights, Capetillo wielded her power strategically.
After becoming involved with labor organizing as a reader in the cigar factories in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and writing extensively for Spanish-language presses, particularly La Mujer, she did more than make edgy fashion choices. Originally published in 1911, Mi opinion contests hyper-capitalism, calls for the legalization of divorce, and celebrates the emancipation of free love. Though considered the first Puerto Rican manifesto of women’s emancipation, Felix V. Matos Rodriguez has questioned why Capetillo was not visible in the feminist crusade for suffrage. Not only was she absent from the meetings held by both working-class and bourgeois feminists, but the issue of suffrage only appears once or twice in her massive canon of writing. Rodriguez writes,
For Capetillo, the key struggle was waged through the efforts of the labor movement and that is why female suffrage is underplayed in her writings. Capetillo, influenced by anarchist beliefs in the ineffectiveness of voting, concentrated her efforts on organizing strikes and disseminating propaganda.
Capetillo’s vision of liberation was her own; she thought suffrage to be an indulgent kowtow to an inherently flawed system of global oppression, a mechanism that she refused to be a part of. One year after the publication of Mi opinion, Capetillo set out to conquer the Eastern labor belt of the United States. First moving to New York, she immersed herself in the vibrant print culture of Spanish-language labor presses, such as Brazo y Cerebro and Fuerza Consciente. Due to the increased repression of anarchists in Puerto Rico between 1911 and 1912, Capetillo found herself in an expanding community of exiles interested in bringing together anarchist struggles and anti-colonial organizing. The use of Spanish combined with a displaced, exile identity allowed both Puerto Ricans and Cubans to come together to form a distinctive Antillean community, which afforded each a real and imagined mobility for redefining nation. A sense of community, however, does not necessarily indicate singularity of nationalistic visions, as we are reminded by radical historian Nancy Raquel Mirabal. In the essay, “No Country But the One We Must Fight For: The Emergence of an Antillean Nation and Community in New York City, 1860-1901,” Mirabal sheds light on the complexity at work in the city, asserting that the “competing ideas about nation as well as national identity engulfed the migrant community in New York and forced a rethinking of politics, nation, community, and identity on a number of levels.” Within this milieu of displaced identities and diasporic radicalism, we find a city with the stage set for revolution.
In early 20th Century New York City, Italian im/migrant garment workers maintained their autonomy from the mainstream working-class political culture during the 1913 shirtwaist strikes. There was widespread resistance to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union because of the transparent tokenization at work. Italian women workers felt they had the most to lose in the strike agreements, but no voice within the union itself. Consequently, Jennifer Guglielmo confronts the enduring mythology that Italian women were entirely non-militant beings, who were unorganized and apathetic. Through a vital multi-lingual historical approach, Guglielmo mines Italian-language radical newspapers, such as La Questione Sociale, to illustrate the historical erasure of Italian im/migrant worker’s radicalism. Italian im/migrant women brought home-brewed oppositional strategies of resistance such as collective direct action to their communities and committed themselves to “transnational anarcho-syndicalist and revolutionary socialist circles and to the militant industrial union movement embodied by the IWW.” Through the radical backdrop of women’s activist groups in New York, Guglielmo illustrates a thirdspace vision of human liberation; ideas of emancipation which have “historically been formulated by those on the margins, those excluded from formal political power: the stigmatized, semi-literate, and “illegal.” Furthermore, the established organizing network spanned the New York metropolitan area, which included northeast New Jersey, and, in this case, Paterson. The anarchist newspaper La Questione Sociale was initially based in Paterson up until 1908, but would eventually establish several home-bases in Weehawken, Brooklyn, and Tampa. Maria Roda and her husband, Pedro Esteve, were the editorial force behind La Questione Sociale , and consistently cultivated a feminist agenda within the publication. Maria Roda’s 1897 essay “Alle donne proletarie” (To the Women Workers) instigated the movement of gruppi femminili di propaganda (women’s propaganda groups), which served as a call-to-arms for militant organizing among Italian im/migrant women in the eastern United States. Roda calls her women comrades to action by interrogating patriarchy, capitalism, and the rise to freedom,
We also feel from birth the need to be free, to be equal. With this purpose in mind, we have organized a group of women comrades in Paterson, who plan on the spreading the sublime idea of Anarchist Socialism among women workers. We hope to see good results and we shall see how our numbers grow.
Indeed, the gruppi femminili di propaganda did grow exponentially within larger circoli politici (political circles) and circoli di studi sociali (social studies circles). By 1914, an expansive network of mutual aid and alternative revolutionary spaces would be established throughout the New York metro area. Different radical group’s attendance records might indicate only a handful of members, yet the organization’s community dances, festivals, and picnics would draw in thousands.
While New York stands tall as one of the most documented epicenters of 20th Century multi-ethnic labor radicalism, it was one of many cities making up an extensive, interlinking network of multi-sited resistance movements. Just as famed anarchists like Emma Goldman have been lionized to a point of excluding other voices, urban centers and geographic hotspots such as Chicago and New York also run the same the risk of limiting an expansive topography of 20th Century grassroots radicalism in America.
With the Finck Cigar Strike of 1933, we encounter a chaotic, feverpitch moment of racialized labor exploitation in San Antonio, Texas, as depicted by Gabriela Gonzalez in “Carolina Munguia and Emma Tenayuca: The Politics of Benevolence and Radical Reform.” The treatment of Mexican workers and the heightened political climate set Emma Tenayuca into motion, as she embraced a kamikaze activism of her own. At a very young age, Tenayuca was exposed to a network of radical reformers, such as the anarcho-syndicalist Magonistas, and inherited a well-established legacy of grassroots activism through her politically active family. In addition to her familial legacy, Spanish-language newspapers such as La Voz de la Mujer, (Women’s Voice) El Obrero, (The Worker) and Pluma Roja (The Red Pen) struck a cord with Tenayuca, as each aimed to establish a “transborder discourse” as an essential strategy in bringing about not only the Mexican Revolution, but also a revitalized anarchist movement with gender equality at its core.
Harnessing the momentum of revolutionary Texas, Tenayuca immersed herself into the labor uprisings of San Antonio workers. Joining the rank and file in the picket lines, Tenayuca saw multi-sited systems of oppression operating through mainstream unions, the Catholic Church, and white supremacy in the Finck Cigar Strike. Moreover, constant dealings with inconsistent and unpredictable national unions pushed Mexican workers in San Antonio to craft a system of resistance that was completely independent of organized and racially ordered mainstream unions. Withholding their labor, flooding the market with workers, and bargaining within work crews constituted the “ad-hoc organizing strategy” that would empower im/migrant workers outside of the larger union structure. The swirl of white Texans and Mexican-Americans in San Antonio was a cauldron of both racist tactics and working-class resistance.
After the strike, Tenayuca joined the leadership positions of the Workers Alliance of America, which ultimately led to her involvement in organizing the pecan shellers’ strikes in 1938. As a Mexican-born radical woman, Tenayuca’s visibility through her leadership position brought quite a bit of heat in her direction from the post-Red Scare frenzied citizens, factory owners, and other unions. The anti-radical hysteria of this time period coalesced with the dominant union’s racist infrastructure and leadership. Rebecca Taylor, who was the president of the San Antonio International Ladies Garment Worker’s Union, refused to help the pecan strikers and even went so far as to drive around with the cops to hunt down suspected anti-American, or, more specifically, non-white radicals. The flimsy grasping for power of the white supremacist, in this case Rebecca Taylor, speaks to the ways in which the illusion of race, and a claim to the power inherent in that illusion steers the dominant story of labor in America. Beyond that, the production of race and nationalistic identity also contributed to the further sidelining of transnational, working-class feminisms flourishing at the time. Yet again, Jennifer Guglielmo confronts the legacy of historical amnesia, asserting that
The erasure of this history has allowed for an understanding of feminism that not only overlooks these more radical women, but that leads to the impression that feminism originated with upper-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women, once again positioning them as the “civilizers” of their more “primitive” sisters.”
Up until recently, we would have known only one character in this story: Rebecca Taylor. Now, however, we are uncovering the story of Emma Tenayuca and many other radical voices. Very much a survivor, Tenayuca managed to stay within range, yet protect herself, and continued to lend her voice to the cause and live her life as an avid supporter of grassroots activism and “toda la gente.”
So, we perceive, there are actual, material barriers blockading the way. These must be removed…But they are like great frowning rocks towering between us and a land of freedom, while the dark chasms of a hard-fought past yawn behind us. Crumbling they may be with their own weight and the decay of time, but to quietly stand under until they fall is to be buried in the crash…still we are willing to work for peace at any price, except at the price of liberty.
-Lucy Parsons-
Im/migrant rights’ activists and anti-imperialist, feminist movements have arrived at another volatile moment in American history. Now, as the devastations of war, oppression, and globalization have become almost unimaginable, a re-aligned historical analysis is imperative. Unraveling the complex workings of power and resistance clamoring within US history can make a seemingly impossible task possible. However, with that in mind, analyzing the emergence of diasporic radicalism is definitively an inconclusive process; new modes of resistance and stifled narratives are constantly rising to the surface. It is this vital cycle of renewal and regeneration which lends itself to our contemporary historical moment.
Through the categorical analysis of transnational, working-class anarchisms, I tried to catalogue a handful of historical synergisms which I see at work, predominantly focusing on the symbiosis between the radical historian and the radical voices which emerge under their care. It is within that relationship where we can unearth another example of the real and imagined movements at work within an oppositional history. Surveying the illuminations of a partial history served as a guide for the crafting of my own burgeoning methodology. Throughout my analysis of anarcho-feminist embodiments from the late 19th Century to the mid-20th Century, the best-known-approach, the memorializing vacuum, the lionization of luminary leaders, and the hegemonic lumping together of the im/migrant experience in America were some of the problems of inquiry that I used to shed light on the questionable realities of an injudicious vision of American radicalism.
The best-known-as approach and the mythologizing of highly visible spokespersons inform the process of analyzing the mechanism of historical erasure. It was often assumed that women like Emma Goldman represented all voices amongst the rank and file. On the contrary, it seems that just as many women were interested in radicalizing the cult of domesticity as were interested in exploding the confines of marriage and heteronormativity through free love. Many anarchist women also chose to express multi-faceted subjectivities through poetry, addressing im/migrant rights, transnational feminisms, patriarchy, poverty, and the daily toll of an embodied revolution. However, the nascent canon of anarchist poetry is typically limited within a three part history; Haymarket, the Great Martyrs, and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. As Lola Ridge has shown us, the extent to which anarcho-feminist poets broke new boundaries remains to be seen. Moreover, as we take a deeper look at the role of poetry, we can open the door to other underscored modes of resistance such as performance, art, and music.
In another strategy, we find a racialized coding of im/migrant women’s activism. Generally, if women rejected the dominant union structures that were purportedly “available” to them, then they would be naturalized as inactive, apathetic, and subject to the wills of their domineering male counterparts. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the racial ordering of Italian im/migrant women in early 20th Century New York and Mexican-American activists of San Antonio in the 1930s. Within the mainstream, white union structures at this time, the congratulatory white civilizing-mission and the tokenization at work was glaringly obvious and practically publicized. Many im/migrant activists opted to organize according to their own vision of liberation; what followed was the marginalization and ultimate erasure of that narrative from a white-washed history.
Gale Ahrens, Salvatore Salerno, Clara Lomas, Gabriela Gonzalez, Caroline Waldron Merithew, Nancy A. Hewitt, Joyce L. Kornbluh, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and Jennifer Guglielmo are just a few radical historians who have established the alternate routes and detours that make up the topography of an oppositional history; what Gloria Anzaldúa has described as the “survival strategies- maps, blueprints, guidebooks that we need to exchange in order to feel sane, in order to make sense of our lives.” Lucy Parsons, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Lola Ridge, the women of Luisa Michel and gruppi femminili di propaganda, Luisa Capetillo, Emma Tenayuca, and countless other transnational feminists continue to lend their enduring vitality to the reinvigorated account of embodied revolutions, what Ridge herself described as “Electric currents of life/ Throwing off thoughts like sparks/ Glittering, disappearing/ Making unknown circuits/ Or out of spent particles stirring/ Feeble contortions in old faiths/ Passing before the new.”
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WOW! This is so amazing!! Thank you for sharing this research with us, incredible radical archival praxis here. Have you read Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments? It has some parallels to the work you do here, I think you'd love it.