Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905–1924 by Heather Mayer (review)

In the Pacific Northwest, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) are remembered as a group of transient, unattached men, ready to fight for free speech regardless of the cost in broken bones, prison time, and even death. In her provocative new book Beyond the Rebel Girl, Heather Mayer revises this well-worn image. Placing women at the center of the story, and extending beyond well-known leaders such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mayer offers a spare but compelling argument for the potential of gender history to transform our understanding of the radical past.

In this new view, national leaders recede and regional leaders emerge. Local IWW halls become community centers enlivened by women and by children, whose presence is visible in photographs of IWW picnics, strikes, and funerals. The category of labor expands to encompass prostitution. Marriage is implicated in a system of capitalist oppression. Birth control becomes a question of class politics. Women Wobblies join strikes and free speech fights, and they operate behind the scenes to keep the organization running.

By participating in "direct action in the workplace and on the streets," Mayer argues, working-class women found new avenues for social activism (6). Rather than turn to the suffrage movement, which was dominated by middle-class women and looked to the state for salvation, they joined their brothers in identifying capitalism as a brutal oppressor, impervious to reform but vulnerable to revolution. In taking to the streets, engaging in free love, questioning the validity of marriage, and objecting to World War I, female Wobblies cast off the cloak of respectability that they could have laid claim to as white women, and they suffered the consequences.

To take one example: In 1912, Becky Beck, a young Russian Jewish immigrant, burst onto the Seattle labor scene as a strike leader in the garment industry. Inspired by Emma Goldman, Beck rejected marriage. When Beck and her female compatriots were arrested for harassing strikebreakers, newspapers characterized them as Amazons. Immigration officials used Beck's sexual relationships with men outside marriage, as well the fact that she had commissioned nude photos of herself, to classify her as a prostitute and to press for her deportation. Beck found an attorney to defend her, but the incident shows how the state used charges of immorality to discredit radicals.

Women associated with the IWW challenged the notion that they needed special protection. In the summer of 1913, the IWW supported a strike of female cannery workers against the Oregon Packing Company, which paid women as little as forty cents per day. In addition to higher wages, the workers demanded better hygiene and safety standards. The Oregon Industrial Welfare Commission intervened to secure a minimum wage of one dollar per day, but they neglected to consult the striking women, who rejected the agreement. As in Lawrence, Massachusetts, strikers attacked those who returned to work. Mounted police retaliated, and the conflict became a free speech fight. Arrests ensued and IWW members proselytized in prison, "as Wobblies were wont to do" (84). Prison authorities blamed the Wobblies for putting dangerous new ideas into the heads of other women in the penitentiary, turning them "against authority of every kind" (84–85).

Female Wobblies linked class struggle with gender equality. In a 1910 article in the IWW newspaper, Solidarity, a "Woman Toiler" denied that she needed to be rescued by a union man. She expressed pride in her ability to leave the home and participate in the labor movement. By earning her own wages, she gained the ability to marry out of love rather than necessity. She identified working women, like working men, as "slaves in revolt against the employing class" (106). These radical ideas coexisted with more traditional demands for a family wage. Historians have long discussed these tensions, and they have examined the discourse of...