Rebellious Daughters of History #11

by Judy Cox

Factory Girl, Socialist and Writer: Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886 – 1962),

Ethel Carnie was born into a weaving family in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire. She started working part-time work in the mill at age eleven and worked full-time from thirteen. In her later articles for the Woman Worker, she described her experience as “slavery”.

Ethel attended Great Harwood British School from 1892 until 1899. She was a passionate reader. Her first book of poems, Rhymes from the Factory, was published in 1907, when Ethel was just 21 years old. When this was republished in 1908 she achieved national recognition.

Socialist Robert Blatchford, proprietor of The Clarion newspaper, offered Ethel a job writing for The Woman Worker, in London. She edited the paper between July and December 1909. Carnie was dismissed after six months possibly because Blatchford did not like her increasingly political and feminist editorials.

A second book of poems, Songs of a Factory Girl, was published in 1911, and her third and final collection of poems, Voices of Womanhood, followed three years later.

Her themes relate to the things she had seen in life: the slavery of the factory system and of domestic service, women exhausted by work as well as family and domestic lives. But what speaks most strongly is Carnie’s faith in human goodness and a determination to declare this on behalf of her class – to show that the fight was a just one.

Ethel Carnie was a member of the Co-operative Society, and the Independent Labour Party and was strongly anti- capitalist. She protested against the introduction of conscription in WWI, addressed 20,000 women during the Women’s Peace Crusade. During the 1920s she lived in Hebden Bridge and edited The Clear Light, an anti-fascist journal, with her husband Alfred Holdsworth who she had married in 1915.

Ethel was the first working class woman to publish best-selling novels. Helen of Four Gates was made into a film in 1924. The novel This Slavery (1925) is about a strike and it’s characters are working-class socialists who read Capital.

The book is dedicated ‘To Mother and Father, slaves and rebels […] with a Daughter’s affection and a Comrade’s greetings’. This is from Rachels speech:

“I wonder when women’ll be free, mother An’ chaps, too, of course. But we, we somehow have a tradition behind us besides an economic slavery. We’ve got the race on our shoulders, an’ all th’ other besides”

Article: ‘Our Right to Play’ (The Woman Worker, April 14, 1909, p.342)

‘For God’s sake, women, go out and play.
Instead of staring round to see what wants polishing or rubbing, go out into the open and draw the breath of the moors or the hills into your lungs.

Get some of the starshine and sunlight into your souls, and do not forget that you are something more than a dish washer – that you are more necessary to the human race than politicians – or anything.

Remember you belong to the aristocracy of labour – the long pedigree of toil, and the birthright which Nature gives to everyone had entitled you to an estate higher than that of princes.’

Poem: ‘Power’

“They built the house of Power on Force and Fear,
And gave authority the key to hold,
Stamping it with the hall-mark of dead gold,
And rusting it in human Blood and Tear.

“Behold!” cried Power, “The glory of my state!
Here I conserve forever all that Is,
Here, manacled and gagged, my priests shall kiss
My sceptre. Prisons, dungeons, be my Gate!

Whilst outside millions claw and scratch for Bread,
And burdened lives go swiftly to the grave.
Hold fast my key, my mistress, and all’s well!”
But Liberty came by with rose-crowned head,
And piped upon her pipe to every slave
These words of Laughter, “Fear is all their spell.”

Revolutionary, campaigner for worker’s safety and journalist Crystal Eastman (1881-1928)

‘When the dead bodies of girls are found piled up against locked doors leading to exits after a factory fire, who wants to hear about a great relief fund? What we want is to start a revolution’.

Three Essentials for Accident Prevention, July 1912

Crystal Eastman was a lawyer, anti-war campaigner, suffragist and revolutionary socialist. Crystal moved to New York with her brother, Max Eastman, in 1907. In 1912 Max and Crystal worked on The Masses, a revolutionary magazine owned cooperatively by its editors alongside John Reed, Louise Bryant and novelist Upton Sinclair.

Crystal campaigned energetically for safer working conditions. In 1911 she explained her interest in industrial statistics, ‘it seems a tame thing to drop suddenly from talk of revolution to talk of statistics, but I believe in statistics as much as I believe in revolution. And what is more, I believe statistics are good stuff to start a revolution with’.

In 1913 she helped to launch the Congressional Union of Women Suffrage to campaign for the vote. During the First World War, she organised against American militarism and imperialism and her Women’s Peace Party greeted the outbreak of the Russian Revolution with, ‘mad, glad joy’.

In 1919 Eastman reported for another radical paper, The Masses, until the paper was closed down. Max and Crystal then co-founded another socialist magazine, The Liberator. Crystal made the dangerous journey to Hungary to give a first-hand account of the revolution in a series, ‘Inside Communist Hungary’.

Crystal also helped to form the American Civil Liberties Union and became co-author of the Equal Rights Amendment. In the same year, Crystal organised the first Feminist Congress. When she was black-listed in the red scare of 1919-20 she found work on radical journals, Equal Rights and Time and Tide.

In the first issue of The Liberator, at the high point of the wave of revolutions which ended World War One,Eastman wrote,

‘Never in all history before could one so joyfully and confidently enter upon the enterprise of publishing and propagating ideas.

Dedicating our admiration to the fearless faith in scientific intelligence of Karl Marx, and our energy to hopes that are even beyond his, we issue THE LIBERATOR into a world whose possibilities of freedom and life for all, are now certainly immeasurable’.

Crystal Eastman died in 1928 aged just 46.

Rebellious Daughters of History #10

by Judy Cox

Dora Montefiore (1851-1933): suffragist, pacifist, communist

Dora Fuller was born on 20th December, 1851. She was educated at home, and then at a private school in Brighton. In 1874 she went to Australia, where she met George Barrow Montefiore, a wealthy businessman. They lived in Sydney, where their daughter was born in 1883 and their son in 1887. Her husband died on 17th July 1889. She became an advocate of women’s rights and in March 1891 she established the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales.

On returning to England in 1892 she worked with Millicent Fawcett at the National Union of Suffrage Societies. She also joined the Social Democratic Federation and eventually served on its executive. She also contributed to its journal, Justice.

During the Boer War Montefiore “refused willingly to pay income tax, because payment of such tax went towards financing a war in the making of which I had had no voice.” Bailiffs sold her goods at public auctions.

Montefiore joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1905 and worked closely with Sylvia Pankhurst in London. In 1906 Dora Montefiore refused to pay her taxes until women were granted the vote.

Outside her home she placed a banner that read: “Women should vote for the laws they obey and the taxes they pay.” This resulted in her Hammersmith home being besieged by bailiffs for six weeks.

In October 1906 Dora was arrested during a WSPU demonstration and was sent to Holloway prison. Dora left the WSPU in 1906 but she remained close to Sylvia Pankhurst, who shared a belief in socialism.

In the autumn of 1907, Dora and seventy other members of the WSPU left to form the Women’s Freedom League (WFL). In 1907 Montefiore joined the Adult Suffrage Society and was elected its honorary secretary in 1909. She also remained in the Social Democratic Federation. Montefiore was pre-eminently a journalist and pamphleteer. Most of her pamphlets were on women and socialism.

On 31st July, 1920, Dora was among a group of revolutionary socialists who attended a meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel in London and agreed to form the Communist Party of Great Britain. She became a close friend of Alexandra Kollontai.

After the death of her son from the delayed effects of mustard gas in 1921 he had suffered on the western front.

Dora died on 21st December 1933, at her home in Hastings, and was cremated at Golders Green, Middlesex.

Here is a letter from kollontai to Dora Montefiore.

Rebellious Nurses of History: Mary Mahoney (1845-1926)

Mary Mahoney was first black American woman to complete nurse’s training in 1879.

Mary Mahoney was born on May 7, 1845, in Boston, Massachusetts. She challenged racist discrimination to be admitted to the nursing school of the New England Hospital for Women and Children, and became the first black woman to complete nurse’s training in 1879.

Mahoney campaigned against racism in the nursing profession. In 1896, she joined the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada (NAAUSC). The NAAUSC consisted mainly of white members, many holding openly racist views. Mahoney felt that a group was needed which advocated for the equality of African American nurses.

In 1908, she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). In the following year, at the NACGN’s first national convention, she gave the opening speech. At the convention, the organization’s members elected Mahoney to be the national chaplain and gave her a life membership.

Mary was one of the first women to register to vote in Boston following the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Mahoney was inducted into both the Nursing Hall of Fame and the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She died in Boston in 1926.

Rebellious Daughter of History #9

By Judy Cox

Sarah Parker Redmond (1826-1894) Abolitionist,suffragist and activist

Sarah Parker Remond was an African American slavery abolitionist, lecturer and physician. Her anti-slavery campaign, which she began at just 16 years old, took her across America and on to Britain and Europe – where she tirelessly condemned the atrocities happening in her country.

Sarah was born in 1826 in Salem, Massachusetts, one of eight siblings. Her older brother, Charles Lenox Remond, became an anti-slavery lecturer; and Nancy, Caroline, and Sarah, were all active in the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. That Society was founded by black women including Sarah’s mother in 1832.

The Remond children suffered from racism. Sarah was refused admission to Salem’s high school. The family had to move to Rhode Island, so the daughters could attend a private school for African American children.

In 1842, when Sarah was sixteen, she gave her first public lecture on the horrors of slavery. In 1853 Sarah attended an opera and refused to leave a section reserved for whites. When a policeman forcibly ejected her, she fell down some stairs. She sued in a civil suit, winning five hundred dollars, and an end to segregated seating at the hall.

In 1856, Sarah toured New York lecturing on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
She shocked audiences by describing the sexual violence endured by female slaves. In 1859 she sailed to Liverpool, writing to a friend, ‘I fear not the wind and the waves, I know however I go, the spirit of prejudice will greet me’.

At her overflowing UK lectures, Remond told audiences of thousands of the horrors of slavery and of the discrimination and indignities suffered by ‘free black’ people in the US. She was thought to be the first woman to denounce slavery in front of mass audiences.

Thousands of workers, including many women, in the textile districts of Lancashire heard Sarahs’ powerful denunciations of slavery:

“I appeal on behalf of four million men, women and children who are chattels in the Southern States of America, not because they are identical with my race and colour, though I am proud of that identity, but because they are men and women.”

During the American Civil War, the campaign led by Sarah and other black activists played a role in cementing support for the North among textile workers, despite the hardships caused by the blockade of US cotton. Karl Marx wrote that this support for the North was one of the highest points reached by the British working class.

Sarah became the first black woman to enrol at Bedford College in London, a college offering education to women. She also became a founder member of the influential Ladies’ London Emancipation Society. After the war, she raised funds to support free black people and campaigned against British brutality against slave rebellions.

Sarah moved to Florence, Italy. She enrolled at a medical college and fulfilled a lifelong ambition by training as a nurse. She married an Italian man in 1877. Sarah died in Rome in 1894 and was buried there in the Protestant cemetery.

The indefatigable Anne Knight (1786–1862)

Anne Knight devoted her considerable energies to defeating slavery and establishing women’s rights. Anne was born in Chelmsford in November 1781 to a family of Quakers who were pacifists and social reformers. In the 1830s Anne set up a women’s anti-slavery society in Chelmsford.

In early 1833 Anne Initiated a national women’s petition against slavery. It was signed by 298,785 women, the largest single anti-slavery petition in the movement’s history.

In 1834 Anne Knight toured France where she gave lectures on need for the immediate abolition of slavery without compensation.

Anne attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention held at Exeter Hall in London, in June 1840. But as a woman she was refused permission to speak, a move she bitterly criticised.

In 1847 Anne published a leaflet which argued: “Never will the nations of the earth be well governed, until both sexes, as well as all parties, are fully represented and have an influence, a voice, and a hand in the enactment and administration of the laws”.

Knight became active in the Chartist movement despite criticising them for not supporting women’s right to vote. In a letter published in the Brighton Herald in 1850 she demanded that the Chartists should campaign for what she described as “true universal suffrage”.

In 1848 Anne was in Paris. She was active in the revolution, joining with with French female socialists to press for women’s rights. She attended a conference on world peace held in 1849. In 1851 Anne Knight and Anne Kent established the Sheffield Female Political Association.

Later that year the Associated published an “Address to the Women of England” which was presented to parliament. This was the first mass petition that demanded women’s suffrage.

Anne Knight died on 4th November, 1862.