Hellraisers Journal: Honeymoon of Elizabeth Flynn & Jack Jones Halted, Will Rejoin Comrade Husband in Spring

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You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones

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Hellraisers Journal, Friday February 14, 1908
New York, New York – Young Socialist Returns to Parent’s Home

For the past few weeks, the news of the arrest of the husband of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn has been published in newspapers across the nation. For example, we have this item from Alabama’s Centreville Press of February 13th:

Socialist’s Husband Arrested.

John A. Jones, husband of Elizabeth Flynn, the girl Socialist agitator, was arrested at Aurora, Minn., on a charge of incendiarism.

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At this time Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is in New York City and her husband, Jack Jones, is out of jail and has recently been interviewed by a reporter for the Duluth News Tribune.

From Mississippi’s Vicksburg Evening Post of February 3, 1908:

PRISON HALTS HONEYMOON OF GIRL
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EGF, DEN (ca) p 21, crpd, Sept 21, 1907

New York, Feb. 3.-With a romance written in suffering, a lifetime crowded into a few months, through which the divine fire of a cause gleams like a beacon light, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the girl Socialist agitator whose words have at seventeen made her known across a continent, has returned ill and exhausted to her father’s home in New York City.

It is just two years ago since Miss Flynn, then a student in the Morris Heights High School, became affiliated with the Socialist movement. Gifted with a quick brain and a facile oratory, she seized upon the dramatic possibilities of the great struggle of labor and capital and spoke as one inspired.

The Flynns are New England folk, the father of a Bowdoin College man and civil engineer, whose difficulties with a company which refused him the money he had earned first aroused the thoughtful Elizabeth, eldest of a brood of four, to interest in the situation. When the Flynns left their Connecticut home to come to New York the girl, already deep in socialist literature, became associated with the leaders in this city. But she was a child, too young to become a member of the association, therefore she was permitted to speak from their platform only as an affiliated agitator.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Honeymoon of Elizabeth Flynn & Jack Jones Halted, Will Rejoin Comrade Husband in Spring”

Hellraisers Journal: Miss Flynn, 16, Plans Rejuvenation of World. Not an “out-and-out woman suffrage socialist.”

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It is glorious to be arrested
in a good cause.
-Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, age 16

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Hellraisers Journal, Friday January 4, 1907
From Her Flat in the Bronx: An Interview with Miss Flynn

From New York Evening World of August 24, 1906:

EGF Girl Socialist w Hat, NYW, Aug 24, 1906

LIFE’S BIG THINGS ALONE INTEREST
GIRL SOCIALIST
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Miss Elizabeth Flynn at Sixteen
Plans Rejuvenation of World.
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STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL.
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Is Leading Spirit of Unity Club
and Laughs at Her Arrest.
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NO WOMAN SUFFRAGIST.
—–
Says She Fully Realizes the Size of
the Task, but Will Devote
Life to It
—–

The youngest girl socialist in America is undoubtedly Miss Elizabeth Flynn, who was arrested for preaching socialism in the streets and discharged yesterday, and who to-night will address an open-air meeting on Main street, Orange. Although she is only sixteen years of age, Miss Flynn has become the leader of a club of Socialists, the title of which is Unity and the purpose of which is to bring about a lull in the fighting that has so far marked the progress of the socialist party.

Miss Flynn, who lives at No. 795 East One Hundred and Thirty-fourth street, talked freely to-day with an Evening World reporter,. She announced her plan to devote her life to the socialistic cause, saying that she believes it is much better for a woman to give her time to the conversion of mankind to a great economic improvement than to be a mother of children.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Miss Flynn, 16, Plans Rejuvenation of World. Not an “out-and-out woman suffrage socialist.””