Lucy Gonzales Parsons (c. 1853 – March 7, 1942) was a labor organizer and orator. A dynamic, militant, self-educated public speaker and writer, she became the first American woman of color to carry her crusade for socialism across the country and overseas. Lucy was an unrelenting agitator, leading picket lines and speaking to workers’ audiences in the United States, and then before trade union meetings in England.
Lucy Parsons Biography
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.
The Socialist Legacy of Helen Keller
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.
Education & Resources – National Women’s History Museum – NWHM
Education & Resources – National Women’s History Museum – NWHM
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964)
The Wobblies Full Documentary
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ciHHJeCgWk?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=187]
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
IWW History Project
Founded in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World captured the attention of a generation with its fiery rhetoric, daring tactics, and program of revolutionary industrial unionism. Pledging to replace the narrow craft unionism of the American Federal of Labor with massive industrial unions, the organization grew in numbers and reputation in the years before World War I, demonstrating an ability to organize workers neglected by the AFL, notably immigrant steel and textile workers in the Northeast, miners, timber, and harvest workers in the West.