———-
Hellraisers Journal – Friday December 31, 1909
Spokane, Washington – Miss Flynn, Age 19, Braves Motherhood in Jail Cell
From The Tacoma Times of December 29, 1909:
ONLY 19, SHE BRAVED MOTHERHOOD IN CELL
TO AID IN STRUGGLE FOR FREE SPEECH
(Special Correspondence.)
SPOKANE, Dec. 29.,-“If I have found work to do in a struggle for what is right, and just and human, then I would be unworthy and unhappy, should I lay down the work because of hardships, persecutions or privations. That is all.”
Nineteen years old, a wife, soon to be a mother, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, member of the national committee of the I. W. W., explained in her cell in the city prison here why she passed unflinchingly through the indignity of arrest, trial and conviction, through the insults of the “third degree” and the tortures of the “sweat box;” why she faced bravely a coming ordeal of motherhood behind jail bars.
This girl was arrested here for her activities in the struggle for free speech being carried on by the Industrial Workers of the World against the city authorities who are attempting to enforce what has been declared by one judge an unconstitutional ordinance against street speaking. She was tried for “criminal conspiracy,” convicted and sentenced to a term in jail. She heard the sentence without any visible manifestation of emotion and though in a delicate condition, she smiled calmly when the grated door of her cell was swung shut, leaving her alone.
Ten miserable years of childhood spent in the squalid poverty-ridden tenement districts of New York are the explanation of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s activities in the “free speech war” in Spokane. Filled with a spirit of revolt against existing industrial systems, she allied herself, four years ago, with the work of the Industrial Workers. She was a frail slip of a girl, 15 years old, then. When she was 17 she became the wife of J. A. Jones, an I. W. W. organizer. Though her married life has been happy, in her work she has retained her maiden name. Her education, snatched from bitter expedience and what few books she could find time to read, this girl leader is refined and gentle in speech and manner.
———-
Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Age 19, Braves Motherhood in Spokane Jail Cell in Fight for Free Speech” →
———-N December 3rd Prosecuting Attorney Pugh thundered, in his attack upon the Industrial Workers of the World: “Let them feel the mailed fist of the law,” amply justifying our definition of government as “the slugging committee of the capitalist class.” This threat was presumably made in a full appreciation of what a roaring farce “constitution,” “justice,” “rights” constitute in Spokane—city of the Washington Water Power Company and the employment sharks.
———-
———-
———-
