The barter and sale that goes on to-day
in the name of love
is highly obnoxious to me.
-Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, age 15
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday January 3, 1907
From the New York Sun: Interview with Miss Elizabeth Flynn
From The Sun of April 8, 1906:
A GIRL STIRS UP SOCIALISTS.
—–COMRADE ELIZABETH FLYNN
A LEADER AT 15.
—–“The Daughter of the Reds.” They Call Her, and Maybe They’ll Elect Her President Yet-Not Yet Out of School, She Captures Meetings With Her Oratory Has Radical Theories and Doesn’t Care for Love, Clothes or Matinees.
Within the last few weeks there has appeared at various social reform meetings a young girl-she is said to be only 15-with the high, broad forehead and the dream filled, far gazing eyes of the idealist; a skin of almost infantile pinkness and whiteness and a mass of flyaway black hair, tied loosely in schoolgirl fashion at the back of her neck who has electrified the audiences by joining in the debate with a certainty of manner, an eloquence of expression and a lucidity of thought that have surprised experienced speakers and even professional radicals.
Her speeches have been the more impressive because she is good to look upon. Added to the charm of her youth and her unusual gifts in line and color harmonies her face is bright and expressive. Her deep blue eyes are of unusual size and purity of color. The delicate, sensitive mouth has a queer little quivering twist of the upper lip. The nostrils of the clear cut, high bridged nose are thin and vibrant. The chin is small, pointed, delicately modelled.
She has always been simply dressed in the regulation schoolgirl shirtwaist and short skirt. Her attire shows a certain inattention to details that betrays a lack of interest in the whole subject of clothes. She is the average height of girls of 15, slender and girlishly immature.
Not long ago she went to the Metropolitan Temple, in Fourteenth street, where the congregation was holding a debate on the proposition that the Government should put down Socialism. She answered the speaker with such force that he was reduced to saying in reply that he knew that his audience would not be influenced by the prattle of babes and that he was certain that it would feel with him only pity for the poor, misguided child who knew not whereof she spoke.
This provoked derisive mirth from both sides, for the singular part of it is that the “child,” whether misguided or not, exhibits accurate knowledge of economics, politics, sociology, civil government and the theories of various reform and a revolutionary parties. She is, moreover, a born debater.
She herself is a Socialist. She calls herself Comrade Elizabeth Flynn, and the Socialists call her “The Daughter of the Reds.” Unlike other young Socialistic prodigies, she is not a worker. She has a prosperous father, a comfortable home at 795 East 134th street and she goes to the Morris High School. There she is not generally known as a Socialist, as she says that the other girls are so densely ignorant of the fundamental principles of economics and sociology that it is not worth while provoking discussion with them.
Both her father and her mother spring from Irish stock and certain marked radical tendencies have been handed down to her. Both Mr. And Mrs. Flynn broke away from the Catholic Church before she was born, and although she was named for a saint she was allowed to grow up in freedom.
She passed through the inevitable religious period, but came out triumphantly on the other side with the works of Tom Paine and Bob Ingersoll clasped triumphantly in either hand. After that she had time to think of other burning problems and she began to read Elbert Hubbard.
[She says:]
From that time, I date my real development. I was then a member of a little neighborhood reading circle, and the ideas that were fermenting in my head burst out at our meetings in criticisms of the present system of government, economies, marriage and education.
These outbursts horrified the members of the club, and, as they couldn’t always deny me the floor, they got around the difficulty by passing a law that all discussions of politics, economics, marriage, religion and education should be barred from the club. As I did not care to listen to encyclopædic papers on Whittier, I resigned and transferred my allegiance to the Harlem Socialist Club.
There I heard discussions on questions of real moment by people who were alive and using their brains. As soon as they got acquainted with me and saw that I was in real earnest they began to give me books to read, and before long a new fermentation of ideas began, and again they proceeded to break out at the club.
Here, however, no new rules were made to shut me off. The members encouraged me to talk, and not long ago they made me the speaker for one of their meetings.
Miss Flynn took for her subject “The Position of Women Under Socialism.”
Her solution of the woman problem is that the State shall provide for the maintenance of every child, thus making it unnecessary for individual women to depend upon individual men for maintenance while bearing children. Her views pleased the club so much that she was asked to repeat the talk at the West Side headquarters of the Socialist Party.
[She said:]
Here, I got a dreadful hauling over the coals by Justice Olmstead of the Children’s Court, who happened to be there that night. As soon as I had finished speaking he got up and gave utterance to the usual masculine platitudes in regard to the order of nature and then, before I could answer him, he picked up his hat and coat and fairly ran out of the hall.
Several of the comrades went after him and tried to get him to stay, but he wouldn’t do it, and I lost the opportunity of showing him the weakness of his position. Nevertheless, in case any of his platitudes had fallen on fruitful ground in the minds of some of the more unthinking members, I took up and refuted every one of the statements which he had advanced as arguments.
To show you that there are unthinking persons, even at Socialist meetings. I have only to tell you that at the end of that talk a young man-a very young man, I am happy to say-got up and announced that he would like to ask the speaker what she considered would be woman’s sphere under Socialism.
“Well,” said Miss Flynn’s listener, “what did you say to that?”
[Replied Miss Flynn:]
Say? There was only one thing to say. I answered him in four words, “Any sphere she chooses.” That’s all there is to it. All women want is freedom to choose what they will do.
“And how about love under Socialism?” Miss Flynn was asked.
[She said with the least touch of scorn in her voice:]
Love, I can’t say I’ve thought much about love. As a matter of fact, if love is the thing called by that name that I see all about me, the less I know of it the better I shall be pleased.
What love will be in the future, when there will be freedom of choice, equality and independence of soul and pocket-book for both, I don’t know; but the barter and sale that goes on to-day in the name of love is highly obnoxious to me. Besides it isn’t easy these days for an intelligent woman of advanced views to find a man who can interest her sufficiently to make her fall in love with him, or whose views coincide with hers enough to insure that harmony which should exist in marriage.
But this is a subject which I have been rebuked for discussing, even at Socialist meetings. At the Metropolitan Temple one night an old gentleman who appeared to know a great deal about it-apparently to his sorrow-worked himself up into quite a passion over my temerity in attempting to discuss a matter of which I could and should know nothing. Therefore, lest I offend others who believe that all the information on this subject should be the exclusive property of one sex, perhaps we had better speak of something else.
“Well, then,” said her visitor, “tell me this: Do your audiences appear to resent having the law laid down to them by a fifteen-year-old girl?”
[Said Miss Flynn:]
Well, at the Socialist meeting there are often anarchists who try to trip me up with anarchist catch questions and everywhere I find young men who appear to harbor a constitutional objection to being told anything they don’t know by a woman-particularly if she is younger than they-but the straight Socialists do everything they can to help me develop.
“And so you never attempt to make propaganda in school?”
What is the use? The girls simply don’t know what I am talking about. They want to be amused, not instructed. I wrote a criticism of modern education for their annual, but they returned my paper to me with the information that it was too serious and that they wanted something funny.
I wear my Socialist pin at school and if the other girls ask me what it means I tell them. Otherwise I seldom speak of my convictions. My experience with girls is that they care more about clothes and matinées than economics.
“And don’t you care about clothes?”
I think that beauty ought to enter into every part of our lives whenever we can get it without sacrificing things that are more important, but as beauty cannot be introduced into clothes in these days of fashions without an unwarranted sacrifice of time, thought and money, I think that absolute simplicity of dress is the only salvation for a woman who wants to keep her mind free for more important matters.
“And matinées-don’t you care for them?”
Not much. The sentimental platitudes and the conventional moralities of the theatre bore me. I feel a good deal as Shaw does toward the theatre. It’s the rallying ground of most of our outgrown ideas and old fashioned heroics.
Miss Flynn says that while she will use her gift for writing and speaking for the Socialist cause, she will also put it to her own private advantage in the legal profession. As soon as she finishes high school she will begin the study of the law and will go into active practice as soon as she can be admitted to the bar.
The members of the Harlem Socialist Club look upon Comrade Flynn as their own particular protégée, and it is by them that she has been named “A Daughter of the Reds.” Socialists throughout the city are, however, beginning to be interested in her and to look upon her as a future power in the movement.
At a dinner of the Collectivist Society given recently, at which Miss Flynn spoke on “Woman in Socialism,” Jonas, the Nestor of the Socialist movement in New York, remarked in the course of his own address that when Socialism and the enfranchisement of women were established in America, the Socialists would elect Miss Flynn President of the United States.
———-
SOURCE & IMAGE
The Sun
(New York, New York)
-April 8, 1906
EGF, Girl Socialist at 15, NYS Apr 8, 1906
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1906-04-08/ed-1/seq-37/
See also:
The Rebel Girl: an autobiography,
my first life (1906-1926).
-by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
International Publishers, 1973
https://books.google.com/books?id=TK2y0I-E9EkC
Note: EGF was NOT named for any saint. On page 29 of The Rebel Girl she stated:
My mother..shocked her in-laws and neighbors by having women doctors in the 90s, when her four children were born. This was a radical step at that time, not long after Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell had opened up the practice of medicine to women. I was named after our doctor in Concord, Dr. Elizabeth Kent. I remember her when she vaccinated me to go to kindergarten, a handsome woman dressed in a tailored suit, the first I had seen…
Note: On page 53, EGF stated that her first speech was entitled “What Socialism Will Do For Women,” and that it was delivered Wednesday January 31, 1906, for the Harlem Socialist Club.
Tom Paine
http://spartacus-educational.com/PRpaine.htm
Robert G. Ingersoll
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_G._Ingersoll
Elbert Hubbard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbert_Hubbard
For more on Socialist Feminism:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fraser/1978/socialistfeminism-battleofsexes.htm
George Bernard Shaw
http://www.biography.com/people/george-bernard-shaw-9480925#synopsis
For more on “Jonas, the Nestor [senior or leading figure] of the Socialist movement in New York,” see photo caption from Current Opinion Volume 44 (1908), page 468:
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=pzQiAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA468
The Rebel Girl – Cathy Richardson
Words and Music by Joe Hill
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-4f69-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99/book#page/1/mode/2up