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Reviewed by:
  • Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary by Lara Vapnik
  • Denise Lynn
Lara Vapnik, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary (Boulder: Westview Press 2015)

The mission of the Lives of American Women Series from Westview Press is to create accessible biographies of women for the undergraduate classroom. As such, the biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn by Lara Vapnik is by no means an exhaustive investigation into Flynn’s life, nor does it claim to be. It is a comprehensive look at a woman whose entire life was wholly devoted to working people and especially to working women’s lives. The text includes a small handful of primary sources, a glossary of terms, an annotated bibliography, and a short list of study questions making it an appropriate text for undergraduate classrooms. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is an especially appropriate person to be included in the series since she lived through momentous changes in the modern United States; her life straddles both the Old and New Left. However, her myopic devotion to communism and anti-capitalism made her a relic of sorts in the New Left. She also came under attack during the red scare and McCarthyism. Flynn’s life is most remarkable because she was involved in decades of radical politics against the greatest of odds.

Flynn is also unique because her radical career started at a young age. Born to parents who had both been involved in the Knights of Labor, and who were supporters of Irish independence, Flynn’s early years were forged in radical socialism and anti-imperialism. By the age of sixteen Flynn was making street speeches against capitalist exploitation. Even as a teenager Flynn’s focus was on women’s particular exploitation under capitalism. Her early speeches advocated communal laundries, kitchens, and nurseries and an end to women’s enslavement to household drudgery. Flynn supported women’s access to birth control, but was lukewarm on the vote; though she supported it in theory she felt that women’s economic independence would be more liberating than the political right to vote.

Flynn followed her father’s enthusiasm for socialism, but became frustrated with the Socialist Party’s conservatism. She joined the Industrial Workers of the World (iww). It was a natural fit for her. She, like the iww, saw the state as an instrument of capitalism and thus exploitation. She was especially drawn to the iww’s organization of the most exploited and most downtrodden workers, particularly women and minorities.

Though labour organization was essential to Flynn, she remained focused on women’s rights. Vapnek highlights a crucial distinction between Flynn’s brand of women’s rights activism and the work of some of her better known Progressive contemporaries. Progressives sought to use the power of the state to transform society; Flynn saw the state as part of the problem. As a firebrand speaker and organizer for the iww, Flynn travelled the [End Page 306] country and witnessed the state’s power being used to suppress working people and labour organizers. The state was the nexus of capitalist power and an instrument in preventing workers’ organization.

Flynn’s anti-capitalism did often blind her to the efficacy of cross-class alliances. She praised the “Uprising of the 20,000” and the Women’s Trade Union League’s organization of the strike; however, she rejected the involvement of middle-class women arguing instead that workers had to organize as a class. She also scorned the puritanical sexual values of some reformers; Flynn advocated birth control and voluntary motherhood as well as women’s sexual expression.

Flynn’s life is also remarkable because she was often involved in some of the more important moments in labour and women’s history – sometimes tangentially and sometimes directly. She was an important organizer for the Lawrence Strike in 1912, and the Patterson silk cloth workers strike. She also worked with or knew some of the more notable iww organizers and leaders including Big Bill Haywood, Joe Ettor, and Carlo Tresca. She was involved in the women’s group Heterodoxy whose purpose was to debate different approaches towards women’s rights and included notables like Mary Heaton Vorse and Crystal Eastman.

The...

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