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Title: Women Pioneers Author: Albert Meltzer Date: 1991 Language: en Topics: revolutionary women, feminism Source: Retrieved on 19th May 2021 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/6m90q0 Notes: Published in KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library No. 2 [1991?]
Middle class feminists of our time have referred to the revolutionary
movement before them as “male dominated”. Conventional history always
ignores workers in general and women in particular unless they are
remarkable, or come into a particular historical recognition (e.g. a
queen). There were fewer women at mass meetings in the history of modern
anarchism because of various social Inhibitions strongest in the working
class but the generalisation taken from this ignores those who were
active.
For Instance, Keir Hardie, socialist and suffragist pioneer and founder
of the Independent Labour Party, was invited to speak at a meeting of
the Clarion League (pro-WWI). He was shocked to find it was held in a
pub — with ladies present! — and would not go in. Invited to debate in
an Anarchist meeting in London’s East End, he did go in, it having then
been carefully explained to him that pub halls were the only place
available. When he went in he found — horror of horrors — women smoking!
He fled thinking he was in a brothel. But he later apologised, having
been told they were Russian ladies (who could smoke and remain
respectable).
Even as late as 1937, the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union booked a basement
hall in Howland Street (London W.1), then a fairly slummy district. The
landlady, of an older generation, had no objections to the politics (if
she understood them) providing there was “no rowdyism”. At the first
meeting, at which Capt J.R. White was to speak, she burst in
dramatically and protested vigorously (There are women amongst you! You
can’t be up to any good!”) and called the police. How with that attitude
even at a meeting in one’s own hall, could working women, not sure of
their rights, attend mass demonstrations?
The Suffragists, largely coming from upper and middle class backgrounds
used to having and knowing rights, largely shattered this conception,
but it still lingered until WWII.
In the USA one of the foremost women fighters was ‘Mother Jones”, a
miners’ leader, who incidentally was opposed to Suffragism. (“I’ve
raised hell all over the west without a vote, and I wouldn’t give a damn
if I had one or not”, she said — though many women, opposed to
parliamentarism, saw the vote as a symbol). She also criticized as
middle-class the demand for job equality, saying that so far as working
woman were concerned it meant having two jobs, and being exploited
twice, and that working people’s pay would came down or prices double
once it was known knew there were two gainfully employed members per
household. However she fought vigorously for miners’ conditions, facing
lynch mobs with an army of women with brooms.
Another great fighter was Lucy Parsons. She was of mixed Negro and
Indian blood, but concealed it in her lifetime because Albert Parsons
would have been charged with ‘miscenegation’ in the South, and in her
work in the North she did not regard it as important. For years after
Albert Parsons was judicially murdered (Chicago Martyrs, 1886) until she
was old, impoverished and blind (when the CP manipulated her in the
struggle for union rights) she carried on Anarchist propaganda in her
own fight. She opposed vigilante and lynch squads against workers with
the counter-cry for the have-nots to arm. Like Mother Jones, she was a
co-founder of the IWW.
The Federal police were so frightened of her that even when she was on
her deathbed, they raided her apartment as she lay there barely cold,
and seized every document in the place. Albert Parsons had then been
dead seventy years, and long since rehabilitated by Governor Altgeld.
They were after Lucy, who had been a thorn in their flesh for years.
Even in death they feared her.
Another pioneer was Louise Michel, the French Anarchist who organised
bread riots in France, organised a woman’s militia in the French
Commune, was deported to New Caledonia afterwards (where as a prisoner
she taught the Kanakas). She lived for years in London (where she
founded a free school and far ahead of her time established squatting)
before being amnestied and returning to France to found an Anarchist
newspaper, “Le Libertaire’”. She ran an International School in Soho,
and the International Club (which ultimately became the Communist Club,
before the establishment of the CP). This club had its own theatre group
which — it may be of passing interest to note — introduced Elsa
Lanchester (daughter of a Suffragist well known in her day) and her
later husband Charles Laughton, to the acting profession.