Biographies on Lucy Parsons
Challenging the blatant sexism of her time, Lucy Parsons, the wife of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons, was one of the most influential women involved in the American anarchist and labor movements.
Helen Keller Reference Archive
How I Became a Socialist
By Helen Keller
The politics of Helen Keller | International Socialist Review
The politics of Helen Keller | International Socialist Review
Helen Keller is one of the most widely recognized figures in US history that people actually know very little about. That she was a serious political thinker who made important contributions in the fields of socialist theory and practice, or that she was a pioneer in pointing the way toward a Marxist understanding of disability oppression and liberation—this reality has been overlooked and censored.
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“We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now… . I am not for peace at all hazards. I regret this war [World War I], but I have never regretted the blood of the thousands spilled during the French Revolution. And the workers are learning how to stand alone. They are learning a lesson they will apply to their own good out in the trenches… . Under the obvious battle waging there is an invisible battle for the freedom of man.”
– Helen Keller
The Socialist Legacy of Helen Keller
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Archive
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Archive
A founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, she was involved in the campaign against the conviction in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. In 1936 Flynn joined the Communist Party and wrote a bi-weekly column for women’s rights for the Daily Worker, and chaired the women’s commission. In two years she was elected to the CP national committee. In 1942 Flynn ran for Congress in New York and received 50,000 votes.
Sabotage – by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn | Industrial Workers of the World
Sabotage – by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn | Industrial Workers of the World
I am not going to attempt to justify sabotage on any moral ground. If the workers consider that sabotage is necessary, that in itself makes sabotage moral. Its necessity is its excuse for existence. And for us to discuss the morality of sabotage would be as absurd as to discuss the morality of the strike or the morality of the class struggle itself. In order to understand sabotage or to accept it at all it is necessary to accept the concept of class struggle. If you believe that between the workers on the one side and their employers on the other there is peace, there is harmony such as exists between brothers, and that consequently whatever strikes and lockouts occur are simply family squabbles; if you believe that a point can be reached whereby the employer can get enough and the worker can get enough, a point of amicable adjustment of industrial warfare and economic distribution, then there is no justification and no explanation of sabotage intelligible to you.
Women’s history: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Rebel Girl
The story of the Rebel Girl
“FOR PEACE and socialism is in the hearts, in the minds, on the lips of millions around the world…The ‘sun of tomorrow’ shines upon us. The future is ours.”
Flynn Biography
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was one of the most influential labor organizers of the early 20th century, and was the first female leader of the Communist Party. She lived a colorful life full of success and failure both in her professional and personal life, and dedicated her life to helping the working class.