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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday March 10, 1909
Chicago, Illinois – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Speaks for Propaganda League
From The Industrial Union Bulletin of February 27, 1909:
PROPAGANDEA LEAGUE LECTURES.
Sunday evening, February 21, Elizabeth G. Flynn gave a very instructive lecture under the auspices of the Chicago Propaganda League, at 55 North Clark street, on the subject, “Why Women of the Working Class Need Not Be Interested in Woman Suffrage.”
The speaker argued not so much against woman suffrage in itself, as against the emphasis now being placed by Socialists upon a question of secondary importance. She pointed out that woman’s activity in the labor movement promised more fruitful results along the line of building up the economic organization, by which alone conditions in industry could be improved and rendered more nearly equal for both men and women, and the danger of “sex war” averted, which was one of the grave possibilities of the agitation merely for “equal political rights.”
The meeting was well attended, and interest manifest throughout the lecture and the discussion which followed.
Next Sunday, February 28, at the same hour (8 o’clock) and place (55 North Clark street). Theodore Hertz will speak on “Tendencies in the European Trades Unions towards Industrial Unionism.” The change in dates for these two lectures was made on account of the fact that Miss Flynn will speak in Buffalo on the 28th.
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[Photograph added.]
From the Buffalo Courier of March 1, 1909:
SAYS WOMEN WILL HAVE TROUBLE WITH ST. PETER
FOR WAY THEY TREAT SERVANTS
—–
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Declares Many Go to Church
on Sunday, and on Monday Bright and Early
Make It Hard for Servants.
—–Miss Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the young women Socialist orator who recently had an audience with President Roosevelt, told the Buffalo Socialists at Odd Fellows’ Hall last night that she believed that many of the good women of this and other cities would have a strenuous time squaring accounts with St. Peter for the way they treated their servants.
Miss Flynn, who is heralded as the greatest girl orator of the day, was brought to Buffalo to be the principal speaker at the Woman’s Day celebration of the Buffalo Socialists’ Branch. She was down on the programme to speak on “Woman in Present and Future Society,” and during the evening electrified her hearers many times with her vivid pictures of the life the woman of the so-called middle classes are leading.
Miss Flynn declared that woman fooled herself when she figured out that by entering industrial life she would be emancipated and that in place of breaking away from man’s terrible clutches she had been more closely entwined. She has made a close study of the woman working in the great mills of the country and gave it as her opinion last night that the great evil of the country was not race suicide, as Roosevelt has said, but race murder resulting from the great number of married women forced to work in the mills especially in the New England States.
The unmarried women have their troubles, too, according to the speaker, and the servant girls have a lot of them.
[Said Miss Flynn:]
I believe that many of the pious women of this city and of all great cities will have a lot of explaining to do when they meet St. Peter. He will want to know why they have made it so hard for their servant girls. Statistics compiled by the United States show that four-fifths of the women who lead lives of shame come from the servant girl class, and I say to you that it is because the women, the church-going women, who employ them, make it hard for them.
On Sunday they go to church and on Monday they start out bright and early to make all the trouble they can for the servant girls.
Miss Flynn had a large audience, the Odd Fellows’ Temple being crowded to the doors. She speaks Friday at International Hall on North Division Street.
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From The Industrial Union Bulletin of March 6, 1909:
ELIZABETH G. FLYNN TO LECTURE IN ST. LOUIS.
The following course of lectures have been arranged for by the I. W. W. locals of St. Louis, Missouri, with Elizabeth G. Flynn as speaker. For particulars as the halls, etc., see local advertisements or address the Secretary of Local 84 at 307 Market Street.
Saturday, April 10.-“Industrial Unionism.”
Sunday, April 11.-“Effects of Modern Machinery on the Working Class.”
Monday, April 12.-“Scientific Socialism.”
Tuesday, April 13.-“Industrial Democracy vs. Capitalist Despotism.”
Wednesday, April 14.-“Class Struggle.”
Thursday, April 15.-“Woman in Industry.”
Friday, April 16.-“Industrial Unionism and Woman Suffrage.”
Saturday, April 17.-“Unemployed Question.”
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Note: emphasis added throughout.
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SOURCES
The Industrial Union Bulletin
(Chicago, Illinois)
-Feb 27, 1909, page 1
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iub/v2n30-feb-27-1909-iub.pdf
-Mar 6, 1909, page 1
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iub/v2n31-mar-06-1909-iub.pdf
Buffalo Courier
(Buffalo, New York)
-Mar 1, 1909
https://www.newspapers.com/image/370656141/
IMAGE
EGF, Socialist Woman Cv, Dec 1908
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA16-IA1
See also:
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday October 8, 1908
Chicago, Illinois – Photograph of Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Jones
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “The East Side Joan of Arc,” Found in Chicago in “Long, Romantic Cape”
From The Spokane Press of October 7, 1908:
CHICAGO, Oct 7.-On a freight train, all the way from New York came “Miner” J. A. Jones and his wife to attend the annual convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, at Brand’s hall, North Clark and Erie streets.
From The Socialist Woman of December 1908:
Photo and Tribute to EGF
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA16-IA1
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA16-IA2
Re EGF, October 1908-March 1909:
The Rebel Girl
-by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
International Publishers, 1973
https://libcom.org/history/rebel-girl-autobiography-my-first-life-1906-26
https://books.google.com/books?id=JawEAQAAIAAJ
Note: see pages 86-87. I can find nothing about any “audience with President Roosevelt,” more research needed.
https://libcom.org/files/rebel-girl-autobiography.pdf
LIFE IN CHICAGO, 1908-1909
[…..]
After the 1908 [IWW] convention was over…we [EGF and husband, Jack Jones] moved to Oak Street, on the North Side. We had a back room next to the kitchen which was heated by a small gas stove….Some other IWWs lived in the same house, among them B. H. Williams, later editor of the IWW paper Solidarity, and Joe Ettor, then 22 years old, smiling rosy-cheeked…I was the only woman in the group and rations were extremely slim. But they managed to provide me with milk and an egg a day on account of my “condition.”
Jones was teetotaler, but St. John and the other”fellow-workers” of the IWW used to take me with them to the North-Side Turner Hall on Clarke Street, where they played chess and checkers. With a five-cent glass of beer they could help themselves to all the free lunch they could eat-frankfurters, sliced ham, potato salad, rye bread and pickles. They would bring me all I could eat, too-at the table, of course, as ladies did not go to the bar in those days….
One morning, after Jack had left for his coal shoveling job, I was gripped with excruciating pains. Finally, I knocked on the folding doors between our room and the front room which was occupied by Ben Williams and another IWW. Ben was an angular New Englander, who had been a school teacher. He immediately surmised that I had labor pains and called the landlady, who got a neighborhood doctor. The baby was born prematurely a few hours later. Jones came home, but the baby boy, whom we had named John Vincent, died in the night. All I remember of this fleeting first child of mine was his big blue eyes-opened wide on a world so soon to be forsaken. We were grief-stricken. If he had lived, it might have drawn Jack and me together. Instead, I sought solace in greater activity.
We were in debt and owed the landlady, the doctor and undertaker. On New Year’s Day, I only had three cents to buy a postcard and stamp to write to my mother. Then my friend Vincent St. John, now in charge of the IWW, took a hand and sent Jones to Cobalt, Ontario, to get a job through the Western Federation of Miners local. It wasn’t long before he arranged for me to come to speak there, as well as at another camp still further north, to which we went by stage coach, a trip that took two days. It was an exciting trip, but the National Office of the IWW, or rather the Saint, as we called St. John, cut it short. He sent for me to return to Chicago to make a speaking trip to the Pacific Coast. I accepted with joy. It would be my first cross-country tour.
[Emphasis added.]
[Note: news accounts place EGF in St Louis in April of 1909, in Butte in June, in Missoula in October, and arrested in Spokane in December. Stay tuned, things are going to heat up for EGF this year.]
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The Rebel Girl – Mats Paulson
Lyrics by Joe Hill.