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Reviewed by:
  • Strike! The Radical Insurrections of Ellen Dawson
  • Peter Campbell
David Lee McMullen, Strike! The Radical Insurrections of Ellen Dawson (Gainsville: University Press of Florida 2010)

In his concluding chapter to Strike!, entitled “My Personal Obser vations,” author David Lee McMullen describes one of the tasks of the biographer as making connections “between scholarship and imagination.” (185) Indeed, it is [End Page 305] imagination that made possible the writing of Strike! because the entirety of Ellen Dawson’s life for which McMullen has convincing evidence would fit nicely in an article of twenty to twenty-five pages. On this basis, readers will likely have one of two responses to Strike!; either they will question its publication as a book, or they will understandably admire McMullen’s determination, resourcefulness, and dogged refusal to allow the memory of Ellen Dawson to be erased from the historical record.

Ellen Dawson was born into working-class poverty on 14 December 1900 in Barrhead, Scotland, one of the country’s early industrial towns. Part of the metropolitan area of Glasgow, Barrhead’s single largest industry was textiles, and in 1901 slightly more than half the textile workforce was female. (13–14) McMullen provides compelling evidence of overcrowded housing, primitive sanitar y conditions and the high infant mortality rate, but little of it directly related to women in the textile industry that was to become Ellen’s Dawson’s life. He provides more information about wages and working conditions in the foundries than in the textile mills, focusing on Dawson’s father Patrick.

Following a chapter on Barrhead’s industry, workforce and living conditions McMullen details the associational life of Barrhead’s working class. Next, a chapter on co-operation gives us a revealing look at the Barrhead Co-operative Society and the local Women’s Guild. By now the main characteristic of the first half of the book has been established: a well-researched and evocative look at the working-class world in which Ellen Dawson was raised, accompanied by a problematic attempt to locate Ellen Dawson within that world. Lacking membership rolls for either the Co-operative Society or the Women’s Guild, McMullen can only suggest that the evidence “seems to indicate” (23) that members of Dawson’s family belonged to the Co-operative Society, and that the Dawson women “may well have been” (25) members of the Women’s Guild.

McMullen’s chapter on labour radicalism and the “Red Clydeside” is crucial to his claim that Dawson became a left-wing labour organizer in the American textile industry as a result of being radicalized as a youth. The impact of World War I and the labour radicalism of 1919 are described, but in the words of other women activists such as Mary Macarthur and Mary Brooksbank. Ellen Dawson remains silent, although this does not restrain McMullen from claiming that she was “a disciple of Red Clydeside.” (50) The strength of McMullen’s chapter is his short biographies of John Maclean, James Maxton and Mary Macarthur, not what he has to tell us about Ellen Dawson’s radicalization. The problem is that McMullen has no real evidence of this process of radicalization. Once again, almost everything he argues is based on inference. For example, McMullen follows his biography of Macarthur with the claim that there is “every reason to believe” (35) that a young Dawson saw Macarthur speak and was inspired by her.

In fact, there is every reason to believe that as a young girl Ellen Dawson was more influenced by and involved in the Catholic Church than she was involved in and influenced by labour radicalism. In his introduction, McMullen observes that Dawson was born and died a Catholic, and “lived most of her life as a devout Catholic.” (xxiv) McMullen does not even consider the possibility that Ellen Dawson spent her youth involved with the Catholic Church, not being radicalized by the working-class culture in which she lived. McMullen may be right, but he does not convince the reader that he has ruled out being wrong.

In 1919 Dawson moved with her family to Lancashire. McMullen is unable to [End Page 306] explain why such an impoverished...

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