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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday January 23, 1904
Kate S. Hilliard Defends Mother Jones from Vicious Attack by Polly Pry
From Goodwin’s Weekly (Salt Lake City, Utah) of January 16, 1904:
Tag: Suffragists
Hellraisers Journal: Gertrude A. Lee, Suffragist and Chairman of Democratic State Committee of Colorado, Could Help Free Mother Jones from Military Bastile
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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday January 21, 1914
Mrs. Gertrude Lee of Colorado’s Democratic Party Could Help Free Mother Jones
From The Cincinnati Post of January 20, 1914
-Write or Wire Mrs. Lee, of Colorado’s Democratic Party, to Help Free Mother Jones:
Hellraisers Journal: “Rich Suffragets Know Nothing of Miners’ Wives’ Suffering Says Mother Jones” by William G. Shepherd
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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday October 28, 1913
Mother Jones Lectures Rich Suffragettes on Suffering of Miners’ Wives
From the Chicago Day Book of October 27, 1913:
RICH SUFFRAGETS KNOW NOTHING OF
MINERS’ WIVES’ SUFFERING
SAYS MOTHER JONESBY WM. G. SHEPHERD
Trinidad, Col., Oct. 27.-Mother Jones, 81, here fresh from the West Virginia prisons to help Colorado coal strikers, recently gave me her opinion on women’s suffrage.
From what I see of conditions in this corrupted state of Colorado, where they have had women’s suffrage for 14 years, it seems to me that the influence of women has been utterly useless. I wish Mrs. Pankhurst would frame me a statement as to why women’s suffrage has failed so utterly in Colorado. Conditions of women and children in mining districts are worse than in any other part of the United States.
This state is owned by corporations. Votes of the women of Colorado have never helped Colorado women and children, made their lives easier or lessened their toil or gained for them any additional human rights.
The rights of lower classes are less respected in this great woman suffrage state than in West Virginia, where women don’t vote. It is like prescribing cough medicine to cure consumption for Mrs. Pankhurst to suggest votes for women as a cure for economical slavery.
Mrs. Pankhurst doesn’t understand problems of the lower classes; she belongs to the upper classes. What does Mrs. Belmont or Mrs. Mackay or other rich women who surround Mrs. Pankhurst know about suffering of miners’ wives and infants? Mrs. Pankhurst travels with women who are opposed to what laboring classes of America stand for. They demand to know what right Mrs. Pankhurst has to associate with such women at the same time she talks about uplifting the world. The consumptive, economical America needs something more than Mrs. Pankhurst’s celebrated cough syrup. I wish Mrs. Pankhurst were coming to speak to the women in the tented camps of the coal strikers of Colorado. It would be more of a lesson for Mrs. Pankhurst than for the wives.
[Emphasis added.]
Hellraisers Journal: From the Appeal to Reason: Women, Socialists, Suffragists, and Working Class Economic Struggles
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Hellraisers Journal- Tuesday October 1, 1912
Ryan Walker and Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Women, Socialists and Suffrage
From the Appeal to Reason of September 28, 1912:
-What Socialism Offers Women by Ryan Walker
-“The Socialist and the Suffragist” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
WE NEVER FORGET: Unnumbered Women Dead Due to Long Hours of Labor Under Unsafe and Unhealthy Working Conditions
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From The American Magazine of December 1911:
Judy Collins – Bread and Roses – Judy Collins
Lyrics by James Oppenheim
Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: “Women in Industry Should Organize” by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday June 3, 1911
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Organize Women in Strong Industrial Unions
From the Spokane Industrial Worker of June 1, 1911:
WOMEN IN INDUSTRY SHOULD ORGANIZE
———-BY ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN
From the viewpoint of a revolutionary socialist there is certainly much to criticize in the present labor organizations. They have their shortcomings, of so pronounced a character that many thoughtful but pessimistic workers despair of practical benefit from assisting or considering them further. Yet unionism remains a vital and a burning question to the toilers, both men and women.
[…..]
Little need be said of he seven million wage-earning women. That unionism is their one great weapon, hardly admits of argument. Even more than their brother toilers do these underpaid and overworked women need co-operative effort on their own behalf. Yet many of their experiences with the old unions have been neither pleasant nor encouraging. Strike after strike of cloak makers, shirt waist makers, dressmakers, etc on the East Side of New York has been exploited by rich faddists for woman’s suffrage, etc., until the points at issue were lost sight of in the blare of automobile horns attendant on their coming and going. A band of earnest, struggling workers made the tail of a suffrage kite in the hands of women of the very class driving the girls to lives of misery or shame, women who could have financed the strike to a truly successful conclusion were they seriously disposed, is indeed a deplorable sight. But the final settlement of the many widely advertised strikers left much to be desired.
Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones Speaks to Workingmen and Their Women Folk in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Part II
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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday January 15, 1920
Altoona, Pennsylvania – Mother Jones Speaks at Mishler Theater, Part II
From the Altoona Times Tribune of January 12, 1920:
Mother Jones Elucidates Theories To Altoona Audience
[Part II of II.]
OVERWORK AND UNDERPAY
She scored the conditions which permit men and women to be overworked and underpaid and results in riots and strikes when women and children are shot by brutes. Under her own personal observation at a time like this in the south, she said, was a case of a woman run down by mounted police who gave birth to a child as she was being taken to the morgue.
[She passionately declared:]
You have no Christianity. If you had conditions like this would not exist.
However, the speaker gave it as her opinion that the workers are becoming educated, getting a different vision; they feel the pulse of the world beating and different days coming. In West Virginia 65,000 men are organized since the inception of the union movement in that section a short time ago. Recently 10,000 of these men marched in a parade which the mayor of the city characterized as the most orderly parade he ever saw. All of which is a good omen.
BRUTALITY COVERED UP
[She cried:]
We want to give America a well fed humanity, intellectually, morally and physically. If the ministers do not wake up they will be thrown on a scrap heap.
At this point she derided the idea of saying “Your honor” to the governor of a state, who has permitted the murder of women and children in industrial uprisings.
This is the most insidiously brutal age that ever was, but it is covered up.
Hellraisers Journal: Suffragist Alice Paul Sentenced to Six Months in Workhouse for “Obstructing Traffic”
We feel that we are not subject
to the laws of this court,
in the making of which we have no part.
-Alice Paul
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Hellraisers Journal, Friday October 26, 1917
Washington, D. C. – Rebel Alice Paul Jailed for Freedom’s Cause
Although the following report from the News and Observer scores Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party as “the laughing stock of Washington,” we nevertheless find therein the statement issued by Miss Paul and her supporters shortly after sentence was passed upon her.
From North Carolina’s Raleigh News and Observer of October 24, 1917:
ALICE PAUL HAPPY IN JAIL UNDER
THE CLAIM OF MARTYR
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She Will Serve at Least Half a Year Unless
There Is Un-expected Turn
—–SHE WAS ILL WHEN FIRST PICKETS
WERE ARRESTED
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Congressional Union For Woman Suffrage or Its Successor
The National Woman’s Party
Considered More or Less a Fake Organization
Since It Started
—–By H. E. C. BRYANT.
Washington, Oct. 23.-Miss Alice Paul is happy now that she is in jail, and can make the claim of martyr. She was ill when the first White House pickets were arrested, tried and sent to prison but as soon as she got well she began to try to force the authorities of the District of Columbia to recognize her as the leader of the lawbreakers. She was sentenced to six months for one offense and one month for another. She will serve at least a half a year unless some unexpected turn comes to free her.
The Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage or its successor, the National Woman’s Party, has been more or less a fake organization ever since it started. Conventions have been held, and delegates “selected” from the “various States.” A few years ago, when a national convention was held here, and all the States were to be represented, the News and Observer correspondent went to the Columbia Theatre, where it assembled, to get a list of the North Carolina suffragists. The Tar Heel seats were filled with women carrying North Carolina standards but only one or two out of the score who “represented” the State had ever as much as passed through it. Most of the women claiming to be North Carolinians lived in the District of Columbia, where they were born. The “national convention” was made up of fake-delegates. Like the three famous tailors of Tooley street they met and resoluted.
Hellraisers Journal: Suffragist Picket Now in Prison & Susan B. Anthony Remembered by Eugene Debs
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Hellraisers Journal, Thursday October 25, 1917
Occoquan Workhouse, Virginia – Photograph of Abby Scott Baker
From Indiana’s Richmond Palladium of October 22, 1917:
Here are shown two photographs of Mrs. Abby Scott Baker, one of the most prominent women members of army set in Washington, recently arrested with other militant suffragists outside the White House and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in the workhouse at Occoquan.
The first photograph depicts her in evening dress, and the second shows her in the coarse uniform given her after she had begun serving her sentence. This uniform consists of underwear made of ticking, thick cotton socks, man’s size shoes with the soles worn through, and a blue gingham apron held at the waist with a string that also served as a corset. In the pocket of the apron she carried a comb and tooth brush, given her by the officials of the workhouse.
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DEBS REMEMBERS SUSAN B. ANTHONY
While the suffragists picketing the White House in Washington D. C. are being dragged off to jail, we offer this remembrance of Susan B. Anthony, whose long and unrelenting struggle for full citizenship these brave women carry on. The fond memorial tribute to Miss Anthony is gleaned from an article by Eugene V. Debs which appeared in the July 1917 edition of Pearson’s Magazine. (We urge our readers to seek out the entire article):
Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for February 1917: Found in New York City & Chicago Fighting for Working-Class Women
When half a million mothers
in the richest city
in the richest country in the world
feel the pinch of hunger
as they are feeling it here now
nothing can prevent trouble.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal, Thursday March 8, 1917
Mother Jones News for February: Fighting for Working-Class Women
During the month of February 1917, before she moved on to the struggles of the working-class women in the cities of New York and Chicago, we first found Mother Jones in Washington, D. C. Here she observed a women, one of them clad in a $7,000 coat, demonstrating for women’s suffrage. Now, Hellraisers does not agree with Mother on the issue of suffrage for women, but we acknowledge that, perhaps, her attitude is shaped by having been on the front lines of the Colorado Coal Miners’ Strike of 1913-1914. In Colorado, at that time, the vote for women did very little good for miners, their wives, or their children.
In that state, women had the right to vote, nevertheless, the miners and their families suffered greatly under the rule of Governor Ammons, Democrat of Colorado. Many of these coal-camp women were immigrants who could not vote. And those women who were citizens, and had the right to vote, had first to get past the company guards before they could exercise their franchise.
The duly elected Governor Ammons sent a brutal military general to rule over the striking miners and their families. It was this Military Despotism which then resulted in the Ludlow Massacre of April 20, 1914. Mother Jones was herself a guest of the Military Bastile established under General Chase who answered directly to the democratically elected Governor of the State of Colorado.