Rebellious Daughters of History #5

by Judy Cox

Anna Wheeler’s famous appeal

Anna Wheeler (1780–1848) was one of the first socialist feminists to speak out in public to demand radical reform. Anna married Francis Massey Wheeler when she was 15 but he was an abusive alcoholic and she later left him.

Wheeler’s husband died in 1820 and left her penniless. She supported herself and her children by translating into English the works of french socialists. In London, she met Robert Owen, Jeremy Bentham and Frances Wright, and became close friends with radical William Thompson. In 1825, they wrote An Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain them in Political, and Hence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery.

Thompson described the book as the “joint property” of himself and Anna Wheeler.

Wheeler was one of the first women to campaign for women’s rights at public meetings in England. In an address of 1829, Wheeler refuted arguments for male superiority and encouraged women to create an organisation “to obtain… the removal of the disabilities of women and the introduction of a national system of equal education for the Infants of both sexes.”

Wheeler was a friend of the French feminists and socialists Flora Tristan and Jeanne Deroin and Charles Fourier and Henry Saint-Simon. In the early 1830s. she helped to establish the journal Tribune des femmes. Wheeler died in 1848.

One of Wheeler’s great-granddaughters was, Lady Constance Lytton, who became a leading suffragette protester and hunger striker who protested against the privileges given to upper class suffragette prisoners.

Thompson wrote this to Wheeler:

‘You look forward, as I do, to a state of society very different from that which now exists, in which effort of all is to out wit, supplant, and snatch from each other; where the so-called system of morals is little more than a mass of hypocrisy preached by knaves, and practised by them, to keep their slaves, male as well as female, in blind uninquiring obedience; and where the whole motley fabric is kept together by fear and blood.

You look forward to a better aspect of society; where the principle of benevolence shall supersede that of fear; where restless and anxious individual competition shall give place to mutual co-operation and joint possession; where individuals in large numbers, male and female, forming voluntary associations, shall become a mutual guarantee to each other for the supply of all useful wants, and form an unsalaried and uninsolvent insurance company against all insurable casualties; where perfect freedom of opinion and perfect equality will reign amongst the co-operators; and where the children of all will be equally educated and provided for by the whole, even these children longer the slaves of individual caprice.’

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) “Bury me in a Free Land”

Frances Harper, born in 1825 in Baltimore, was a leading African-American poet and writer. She was also an ardent activist in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.

After losing her mother at a young age, Harper was raised by an aunt. She attended a school for African-American children run by her uncle and then began working as a servant. In 1845, Harper published her first collection of poetry, titled Forest Leaves. In 1850 Frances began teaching domestic skills at a school run by leading abolitionist, John Brown. Harper became dedicated to the abolitionist cause.

In 1854, Harper published Poems of Miscellaneous Subjects, which featured one of her most famous works, “Bury Me in a Free Land.” She also became a popular abolitionist lecturer, appearing with Frederick Douglass, William Garrison, Lucretia Mott and Lucy Stone.

Harper made literary history in 1859 when she published “Two Offers” becoming the first African-American female writer to publish a short story. The following year, she married Fenton Harper and in 1862, she gave birth to a daughter, Mary.

She also wrote several poems which explored her experiences during the reconstruction. Harper published her most famous novel Lola Leroy in 1892. Four years later, she cofounded the National Association of Colored Women with Ida Wells, Harriet Tubman. The organization campaigned for the rights of African-American women.

Harper continued to support women’s suffrage and the NACW. She died of heart failure on February 22, 1911, in Philadelphia, and was buried next to her daughter, Mary, at Eden Cemetery.

Bury me in a free land

Make me a grave where’er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth’s humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.

I could not rest if around my grave
I heard the steps of a trembling slave;
His shadow above my silent tomb
Would make it a place of fearful gloom.

I could not rest if I heard the tread
Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,
And the mother’s shriek of wild despair
Rise like a curse on the trembling air.

I could not sleep if I saw the lash
Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.

I’d shudder and start if I heard the bay
Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,
And I heard the captive plead in vain
As they bound afresh his galling chain.

If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms
Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,
My eye would flash with a mournful flame,
My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.

I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might
Can rob no man of his dearest right;
My rest shall be calm in any grave
Where none can call his brother a slave.

I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.

Rebellious Daughters of History #4

by Judy Cox

Harriet Tubman (1822-1913): Emancipation and Liberation

Harriet Tubman was one of the greatest women to fight against slavery and women’s oppression. She will be familiar to many as a leader of the underground railway but this was only one chapter in her remarkable life.

Harriet was born a slave. She struggled with the effects of a head injury inflicted by a slave owner, she never learnt to read or write and spent her whole life in poverty.

Harriet was the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad. In a decade she guided 100s of slaves to freedom. She also built a network of supporters.Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.

During the American Civil War, in 1861 Tubman volunteered to join the Massachusetts troop, the only African American among the white troops stationed at Fort Monroe. The fort was flooded with fugitives. Tubman worked as a nurse, cook and laundress.

In 1862 Tubman traveled to South Carolina to a hospital at Port Royal. Injured Soldiers were dying of illnesses like typhoid, cholera, malaria, yellow fever, chicken pox and dysentery. Tubman was knowledgeable in local roots to treat diseases; her healing powers became legendary among soldiers.

After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 black people were allowed to enroll in the military. Tubman lead a group of scouts to create lifelines and escape routes for trapped slaves.

On the night of June 2, 1863 Tubman guided a troop of 150 black soldiers of the Second South Carolina battalion on the Combahee River. The plan was to liberate as many slaves by catching slaveholders by surprise.

The attack became known as the Combahee River Raid and liberated more than 750 slaves. The first black feminists to develop intersectionality theory in the 1970s called themselves the Commager River Collective in memory of Tubman.

When the war was over in 1865 Harriet returned home to New York. A battle to get compensation for her services would last 30 years. Tubman joined the campaign for women’s right to vote. She toured New York, Boston and Washington speaking in favor of women’s suffrage rights.

She was especially interested in the rights of African American women. In 1896, she was the key speaker at the first meeting of the National Association of Afro-American women. She established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Elderly in 1908.

Alexandra Kollontai ‘heroine of Bolshevism’

Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) was a leading figure in the international socialist movement and most prominent female Bolshevik during the Russian Revolution. Born into aristocratic privilege, the Finnish-Russian Kollontai was a socialist orator and activist who travelled around Europe and America.

She was a member of the Mensheviks but responded to the horrors of the First World War by joining Lenin and the Bolsheviks. She was a very popular speaker and tireless activist, finding new ways to reach out to working class women. Kollontai supported Lenin’s calls for revolution in October 1917.

In 1918, the American periodical Current Opinion called her the “Heroine of the Bolsheviki upheaval in Petrograd” and announced its incredulous readers that “she holds a cabinet portfolio, dresses like a Parisian, and does not believe in marriage.”

After the October Revolution, Kollontai became the Commissar of Social Welfare and helped to found the Zhenotdel (the women’s section of the Party). She oversaw a wide variety of legal reforms and public policies to help liberate working women and to create the basis of a new socialist sexual morality.

When Stalin overthrew the Revolutionary regime, she was sent off to Norway to serve as the first Russian female ambassador (and only the third female ambassador in the world), beginning a long diplomatic career which culminated in her twice nomination for the Nobel Peace prize.

You can read more about kollontai in Emma Davis’s Rebel’s Guide to Alexandra Kollontai from Bookmarks. I wanted an excuse to share this spine-tingling recording of Kollontai speaking

Rebellious daughters of history #3

by ,,Judy Cox

Adelaide Knight – From suffrage to communism

Adelaide Knight was born in 1871 and lived with her working class family on Kenilworth Road in Bethnal Green. After a childhood injury she used crutches or a stick for the rest of her life.
In 1894 Adelaide married a sailor, Donald Adolphus Brown, born in what is now Guyana.
He shared Adelaide’s political beliefs and supported her activism. They both joined the Independent Labour Party and he took Adelaide’s surname and was widely known as Donald Knight.

The first London branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was opened in Canning Town in 1906 and Adelaide was its secretary. In June 1906 she was arrested alongside Annie Kenney and Mrs Sparborough, when they tried to see the prime minister, Herbert Asquith.

The women were sentenced to prison for six weeks unless they agreed to be ‘bound over’ for one year and give up their campaigning. It was a difficult decision for Adelaide as she was in poor health, and the couple had two small children to care for.

All three women chose prison. Adelaide said: “I refuse to barter my freedom to act according to my conscience, while my health permits me to fight on.” She sang The Red Flag every morning to keep her spirits up.

Adelaide left the WSPU and joined Sylvia Pankhurst in the militant East London Suffrage Federation which campaigned for working class women. They linked suffrage to economic reform, opposed the First World War and celebrated the Russian Revolution.

In 1920 Adelaide became a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The Intransigent Nathalie Lemel

Lemel was a Parisian radical bookbinder. In the 1860s she became one of very few female strike leaders, and campaigned for equal pay. She joined the First International in 1865.

In 1871, Lemel became a leading figure in the Paris Commune. Lemel joined with other members of the First International such as Elizabeth Dimitrieff to establish the ‘Union of Women’ to build support for the Commune among working women.

Every member of the Union was a member of the First International. The Union campaigned for equal pay, for education for girls, for the right to divorce and for work. It became one of the most powerful organisations of the Commune.

When the Commune came under attack, Lemel issued a defiant public address: ‘We have come to the supreme moment, when we must be able to die for our Nation. No more weakness! No more uncertainty! All women to arms! All women to duty! Versailles must be wiped out!’

Lemel was one of many women who fought on the barricades of Paris. After the defeat of the Commune, Lemel was sentenced to exile in the Canadian Nouvelle-Calédonie penal colony. She shared a cell with another great female Communard, Louise Michel.

Lemel had to wait for an amnesty declared in 1880, before she could return to Paris. Unbowed by these experiences, Lemel worked for a radical paper, L’Intransigeant, and continued her fight for women’s rights. She died in 1922.

Rebellious Daughters of History #2

by Judy Cox

Frances Wright (1795 –1852)

Wright was a Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, abolitionist. She mixed with radical thinkers and philosophers in Britain and the US. In 1825, she became the only woman to set up a utopian community, the Nashoba Commune, Tennessee. It was the only such community to welcome freed slaves as members and caused a scandal by permitting interracial relationships.

In the late 1820s Wright was the first woman to give public lectures to mixed audiences. Thousands heard her demand radical reforms, such as universal education, abolition of slavery, birth control and sexual freedom for women. She denounced organised religion and was a passionate opponent of capital punishment. Wright was vilified by the church and the press and threatened by mobs.

Unlike other feminists of the time, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Wright supported working class organisation. She was a prominent supporter of the working men’s associations which sprang up in New York in the late 1820s.

She wrote plays plays, published editions of her lectures and became the first woman to edit a newspaper in the US, first the Free Enquirer and, later, The Sentinel and Working Man’s Advocate. A chartist wrote the first biography of Wright, and the Chartist Northern Star advertised all her works. She had a child but lost custody when she was divorced from her husband. She died aged 57.

Jeanne Deroin: locked up but never silenced

Jeanne Deroin was one of the great women revolutionaries of the 19th century. Born in Paris in 1805, Deroin scraped a living as a seamstress to support her alcoholic husband and four children, one of whom was severely disabled. She became a utopian socialist, committed to the abolition of private property, the replacement of competition with cooperation and gender equality.

In the French Revolution of 1848, she organised women workers and set up a socialist paper aimed at women and sold on the streets, demanding the right to work and to vote. She fiercely opposed the misogyny of radical men like Joseph Proudhon and she became the first woman to attempt to stand for parliament. She was arrested in 1851 and continued to agitate for reform from her prison cell.

On her release, Deroin fled to London where she joined the First International, alongside Marx and Engels and later the Socialist League alongside Eleanor Marx and William Morris. When she died in 1894 the local paper reported on her funeral:

‘The remains of Mdme Jeanne Deroin, the lady who obtained considerable notoriety during the French Revolution of 1848, were laid to rest in Hammersmith Cemetery on Saturday afternoon.

There was a large attendance of sympathising friends, including a contingent of local Socialists, who attended the funeral, headed by their banner. Mr. William Morris, Mr. Sparling, and other well-known holders of advanced ideas spoke at the grave- side.

At the conclusion of the ceremony, one of Mr. W. Morris’s chants for Socialists entitled ‘No Master’ was sung.’

Rebellious Daughters of History #1

by Judy Cox

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) was born a slave in New York and named Isabella Baumfree. She was bought and sold four times and subjected to harsh physical labour and violent punishments. In her teens, she was united with another slave with whom she had five children.

Between 1826-27 Truth ran away with her infant Sophia to a nearby abolitionist family. The family bought her freedom for $20 and helped Truth successfully sue for the return of her five-year-old-son Peter, who was illegally sold into slavery in Alabama. She was the first black woman to sue a white man.

Truth moved to New York City in 1828 where she worked for a local minister. In 1843, she declared that the Spirit had called on her to preach the truth, and renamed herself Sojourner Truth. She met abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, and it was Garrison’s anti-slavery organisation that encouraged her to give speeches about the evils of slavery.

In 1850, having never learned to read or write, Truth dictated what would become her autobiography— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth—to Olive Gilbert, who assisted in its publication. She survived on sales of the book.

In 1851, Truth began a lecture tour that included a women’s rights conference in Akron, Ohio, where she delivered her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. In it, she challenged the racism of the women’s movement and asserted the rights of black women.

During the 1850’s, Truth settled in Michigan. She continued speaking nationally and helped slaves escape to freedom. When the Civil War started, she organised supplies for black troops, and after it ended, she helped freed slaves to find jobs and build new lives.

While in Washington, DC, she lobbied against segregation, and in the mid-1860s, when a streetcar conductor tried to violently block her from riding, she ensured his arrest and won her subsequent case. In the late 1860s, she collected thousands of signatures on a petition calling for the provision of land to former slaves, though Congress never took action. Nearly blind and deaf towards the end of her life, Truth spent her final years in Michigan.

Elisabeth Dmitrieff (1850-?) was a Russian-born feminist and revolutionary leader of the 1871 Paris Commune. She was the daughter of a Tsarist official but rebelled against her background and joined the socialist circles of St Petersburg.

In 1868, she travelled to Switzerland and co-founded the Russian section of the First International. Delegated to London, she met Karl Marx and spent months with the Marx family. In March 1871, Elisabeth was aged only 21 when Marx proposed she cover the incredible events of the Paris Commune.

She became one it’s greatest women leaders. Working with the anarchist Nathalie Lemel, Elisabeth helped to found the Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and Care of the Wounded, and the co-founded of the Women’s Union. She campaigned for women’s education, raised women’s concerns and organising cooperative workshops.

Elisabeth contributed to the Socialist newspaper La Cause Du People (The Cause of the People). After having fought on the barricades during the Bloody Week, she fled to Russia.

Once back in her native country, she married a man who was later convicted of fraud, and in 1878 followed him into exile in Siberia, where she disappeared from view.

This article first appeared in Socialist Review. Reproduced with the author’s permission.