Rebellious Daughters of History #33

by Jack Robertson (guest contribution) and ,,Judy Cox

Red Clydeside Rent Strike Leader: Mary Barbour

Mary Barbour was born in the Renfrewshire village of Kilbarchan in 1875, daughter and third child of seven to James Rough, a carpet weaver, and his wife, Jane Gavin. Mary left school at the age of 14 and went to work as a thread twister and then carpet printer.

After her marriage to engineering worker, David Barbour, the couple settled in Govan where she became an active member of the ‘Kinning Park Co-Operative Guild’, the first to be established in Scotland. She also joined the Independent Labour Party and took part in the Socialist Sunday School.

By the outbreak of the First World War, Glasgow was a centre of the munitions industry. Discontent grew among the workers and led to widespread strike action in the engineering industry, much of it involving women and unskilled labour.

The trigger for what became known as Red Clydeside was a strike involving women workers at the Singer sewing machines factory in Clydebank, when the workforce of 11,000 came out in solidarity with 12 female colleagues in March 1911.

Housing conditions is Glasgow at the time were appalling. Writing about what he called Glasgow’s Housing Disgrace, one of the leaders of the First Shop Stewards’ Movement on Clydeside, Harry McShane, wrote that

‘thousands of families are denied a decent home life…in some houses, three, four and five persons share the same bed…the houses in which they live are rat infested…young people living in old, dilapidated properties cannot tell their friends where they live’.

When Glasgow landlords, or factors, tried to impose huge rent increases at the same time as young men of fighting age were being sent to fight in France, Mary Barbour was instrumental in forming the ‘South Govan Women’s Housing Association’. She was then a working class housewife with two sons and her husband was employed in the shipyards. The Govan organising committee prevented evictions, blocking the entrance to tenement blocks and the hounding of Sherriff’s Officers.

In his memoir, ‘Revolt on the Clyde’, the Clydeside MP, Willie Gallagher wrote: ‘Street meetings, back-court meetings, drums, bells, trumpets – every method was used to bring the women out and organise them for the struggle. Notices were printed by the thousand and put up in windows: wherever you went you could see them. In street after street, scarcely a window without one: “We Are Not Paying Increased Rent”.

Rent strikes soon spread to the entire Clydeside area and culminated, in November 1915, with one of the biggest demonstrations in Glasgow’s political history. Thousands of women and thousands of shipyard and engineering workers paraded to the Sheriff’s Court “where the demonstration was near riot proportions”. The protestors became known as ‘Mary Barbour’s Army’ and included other leading women fighters such as Agnes Dollan, Helen Crawfurd, Mary Laird and Mary Jeff.

Mary Barbour became a founding member of the ‘Women’s Peace Crusade’, which campaigned for a negotiated settlement to World War 1. Later she stood as a Labour candidate for the Fairfield ward in Govan and became one of the first women councillors elected to Glasgow Town Council.

In March 2018, after a long battle, a statue commemorating Mary Barbour was unveiled at Govan Cross in Glasgow. Her image also forms part of the commemorative mural displayed on the west side of the Clutha Bar, the site of the helicopter crash in 2013.

Black revolutionary: Angela Davis (1944- )

Angela was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the “Dynamite Hill” neighborhood, by the where houses were bombed to drive out middle-class blacks. Her mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a leading organizer of the ‘Southern Negro Youth Congress’, which was influenced by the Communist Party.

As a Girl Scout, she marched and picketed to protest racial segregation in Birmingham and joined a communist youth movement.

She studied French at Brandeis University and she was in Biarritz when she learned of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing by the Ku Klux Klan, in which four black girls were killed. She knew one of the victims.

Angela studied philosophy at the University of Frankfurt in West Germany under the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, later recalling that, “Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary”.

Back in the U.S., Angela studied at the University of California before moving to East Germany, where she gained a doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Back in the U.S., she joined the Communist Party and was active in the women’s movement, the Black Panther Party, and the campaign against the Vietnam War. In 1969, she told a meeting:

“We are facing a common enemy and that enemy is Yankee Imperialism, which is killing us both here and abroad. Now I think anyone who would try to separate those struggles, anyone who would say that in order to consolidate an anti-war movement, we have to leave all of these other outlying issues out of the picture, is playing right into the hands of the enemy.”

In 1969 she was fired as acting assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California (UCLA) due to her Communist Party membership. A court ruled this illegal, so the university fired her again, for using inflammatory language. The report stated, “We deem particularly offensive her repeated characterizations of the police as ‘pigs'”.

Davis supported the Soledad Brothers, three inmates who were accused of killing a prison guard at Soledad Prison.

In 1970, firearms registered to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in California. The teenage brother of a Soledad prisoner, George Jackson, led the raid but when police starting shooting, four people, including the judge, were killed.

A warrant was issued for Angela’s arrest. The FBI director J. Edgar Hoover listed Davis on the FBI’s ‘Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List’. When she was finally captured President Richard M. Nixon congratulated the FBI on its “capture of the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis.”

Across the nation, thousands of people began organizing a movement to gain her release. John Lennon and Yoko Ono contributed to this campaign with the song “Angela”.

On June 4, 1972, the all-white jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

After her acquittal, Davis went on an international speaking tour and the tour included Cuba, where she had previously been received by Fidel Castro in 1969 as a member of a Communist Party delegation.

During the 1970s she visited Marxist-Leninist governed countries and during the 1980s was twice the Communist Party’s candidate for Vice President

In the 1980s she was professor of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University. Much of her work focused on the abolition of prisons.

In 1991, Angela left the CP and joined the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

Angela joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has received various awards, including the Lenin Peace Prize.

In 2001 Angela spoke out against the war on terror following the 9/11 attacks. She supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel.

In 2017 Angela was an honorary co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington, in protest President Trump’s inauguration.

In November 2019, Davis signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

She continues to campaign for a better a world.

Rebellious Daughters of History #32

by Judy Cox

Chartist Militant and Theoretician: Elizabeth Hanson (1797-1886)

Elizabeth was born in 1797. She married Abram Hanson, a shoemaker, and lived in Elland, near Halifax.

Elizabeth became politically active in the campaign against the Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834. The Act stated that the destitute would only get help if they entered a workhouse, where families were forced apart and prison-like regimes were enforced.

Elizabeth was furious that the legislation “cast women in the role of dependants on their husbands’ incomes rather than as contributors to the family income on their own right”.

In February, 1838, Elizabeth told a meeting that women in the workhouse had their hair cropped and were separated from their children. She argued that the only way to stop this was for women to unite and form political organisations.

Elizabeth led a group of women who ambushed several Poor Law Commissioners outside a workhouse to “treat them with a roll in the snow”.

Elizabeth Hanson and Mary Grassby formed the ‘Elland Female Radical Association’ in March, 1838. The Association supported the campaign for the Charter. She became one of the movement’s most effective speakers, and a newspaper reported she “melted the hearts and drew forth floods of tears”.

Like all radical women, Elizabeth and Mary were attacked and ridiculed in the national press – working class women were not allowed to interfere in politics. One reporter sneered that the poor could not live in ease on the rates and the only solution to poverty was the expansion of trade and commerce.

Undaunted, Elizabeth replied, “You say, extend our commerce. We have ransacked the whole habitable globe. If you can find a way to the moon, we may, carry on our competition a little longer; but if you want to better the condition of the working classes, let our government legislate so as to make machinery go hand in hand with labour, and act as an auxiliary or helpmate, not a competitor”.

In 1839 Elizabeth gave birth to a son, who she named Feargus O’Connor, after the Chartist leader.

She continued to be involved in the campaign for universal suffrage. Elizabeth’s husband Abram recognised that “women are the best politicians, the best revolutionists, and the best political economists.”

After 1840 Elizabeth was less active in the Chartist movement, probably because of caring for her children. She did what she could, and as late as 1852 Elizabeth was sending small donations to Chartist causes.

Communard: Louise Michel

Louise Michel was born in 1830, the illegitimate daughter of a serving-maid. She was raised by her grandparents.

In 1865 Louise opened a progressive school in Paris became involved in the radical politics.

In 1869 Louise joined a feminist group ‘Society for the Demand of Civil Rights for Women’.

When Paris came under siege from Prussian troops in 1870, Louise joined the National Guard. When the Paris Commune was declared in 1871, she was elected head of the ‘Montmartre Women’s Vigilance Committee’.

Michel played a leading role in the revolutionary government of the Paris Commune and the armed struggle against the French government.

Louise fought with the 61st Battalion of Montmartre and organised ambulance stations. In her memoirs she recalled, “I like the smell of gunpowder, grapeshot flying through the air, but above all, I’m devoted to the Revolution.”

She challenged her male comrades to “play a part in the struggle for women’s rights, after men and women have won the rights of all humanity.”

The Commune was brutally suppressed and around 20,000 were executed. In December 1871, Louise was charged with trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves and using weapons. Defiantly, she dared the judges to sentence her to death. She was sentenced to penal transportation, one of some 10,000 Communards who were deported.

After twenty months in prison Michel was deported to New Caledonia, where she met Nathalie Lemel, another female Communard.

Louise taught French to the local Kanak people and took their side in the 1878 Kanak revolt. She also became a teacher for the children of the deported

In 1880, amnesty was granted to Communards. Louise returned to Paris and continued her revolutionary activity. She attended the anarchist congress in London in 1881, where she spoke to huge crowds.

In Paris in March 1883 Louise led a demonstration by unemployed workers which led to a riot. She was tried for her actions and used the court to publicly defend her anarchist principles. She was sentenced to six years of solitary confinement.

In 1890 she was arrested again and escaped to London where she set up a progressive school for refugee children and toured Europe speaking to thousands of people.
Louise returned to France in 1895. She died of pneumonia in Marseille on 10 January 1905. Her funeral in Paris was attended by more than 100,000 people.

Rebellious Daughters of History #31

by ,,Judy Cox

The First Black Communist: Grace Campbell (1883-1943)

Grace Campbell was born in 1882 in Georgia. Her father was a Jamaican immigrant and teacher and her mother was a woman of mixed African American and Native Ameri- can heritage. The family moved to New York City in 1905 and Grace devoted herself to community projects such as the Empire Friendly Shelter, a home for unwed mothers.

In 1911, she became the first black woman appointed as a parole officer in the Court of General Sessions for the City of New York. She worked as a jail attendant in the women’s section at “the Tombs,” New York’s infamous prison, until her death in 1943.

Grace became active in the Socialist Party of America, the first African American woman to join the party. Her involvement in the Socialist Party in New York placed her in a community of radical women, many of whom were gay and bi- sexual, and agitated for birth control, free love, and gender equality.

In 1920, Grace helped found the People’s Educational Forum in 1920, a forum for debating socialist and black nationalist ideas.

Grace played a pioneering role in Harlem’s early 20th century radicalism and was the most prominent woman in the Harlem Left.

In 1919 and 1920, Grace ran for office in the New York State Assembly on the Socialist ticket. Her groundbreaking ticket won 10% of the vote, nearly 2,000 votes, more than any other black Socialist party candidate. Grace was the first African-American woman to run for public office in the state of New York.

In 1921, she moved away from the Socialist party and was a founding members of the African Blood Brotherhood, which advocated armed self-defense, equal rights, and self-determination and was known as the first Black communist organisation. Grace was the only woman in the leadership of the organisation, which met in her Harlem apartment. Her home remained a busy hub of radical political activity into the 1930s.

In 1923, Grace became the first black woman to join the Communist Workers’ Party and worked as an organizer. She combined community work with a socialist political vision, called for world revolution and focused special concern for black women’s freedom and a passionate commitment to the Communist movement. Later, Grace fell out with the Stalinist leadership of the international communist movement.

Grace was monitored by the FBI, which noted that she carried the Bolshevik red card and reported: ‘Grace Campbell showed herself an ardent Communist . . . Though employed by the City Administration, is frank in her disapproval of it and said the only way to remedy the present situation was to install Bolshevism in place of the present Government.’ (FBI, 4 March 1931)

Grace never married or had children. She continued her work in socialist politics and civil service until her death in 1943, aged 60.

Not just Mrs Lenin: Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869-1939)

Nadezhda (Nadya) Krupskaya was born to a noble but impoverished family. She won a medal at school but was excluded from higher education because she was a woman.

Nadya was already a well-read Marxist when she met Vladimir Lenin in 1894. In October 1896 she was arrested and was allowed to join Lenin in exile in Siberia on condition that they married.

In 1900 Nadya published a pamphlet, The Woman Worker, which explained how women could liberate themselves.

Released from exile in 1901, Krupskaya joined Lenin and spent five years in Munich, Paris and London. Leon Trotsky described how Nadya, ‘received comrades when they arrived, instructed them when they left, established connections, supplied secret addresses, wrote letters, and coded and decoded correspondence. In her room there was always a smell of burned paper from the secret letters she heated over the fire to read’.

After the 1905 Revolution, Nadya returned to St Petersburg and became secretary of the Central Committee before being forced back into exile. She was one of the first Marxists to formulate a socialist theory of education, writing ‘Public Education and Democracy’ (1915).

In the summer of 1917, Nadya became a member of the Vyborg Bolshevik Committee. She was also chair of the Vyborg Committee for Relief of Soldier’s Wives.

In August 1917, Krupskaya was a delegate to the Sixth Party Congress in renamed Petrograd. On 5 October she was one of a seven-person delegation from the Vyborg District to the Bolshevik Central Committee argued in favour of the October Revolution.

Nadya joined a government body devoted to eradicating illiteracy and setting up libraries. She became a prolific author and orator. Her biographer wrote that she, ‘hurled herself at a furious pace into the impossible task of designing and constructing a human, cultivated socialist system of education in a country that was economically ruined, racked by civil war’.

Free and universal access to education was mandated for all children and the number of schools doubled within the first two years of the revolution. Co-education was immediately implemented to combat sex discrimination, and for the first time, schools were created for pupils with disabilities.

Nadya survived for 15 years after Lenin’s death in 1924, both defending Lenin’s legacy and making compromises with Stalin to survive. She dedicated her life to the struggle for a better world and was a revolutionary in her own right.

Rebellious Daughters of History #30

by ,,Judy Cox

Chartist, Feminist, Journalist and Communist: Helen MacFarlane (1818-1860)

Helen Macfarlane was born in Barrhead, Paisley, Scotland. Her father, George, owned a calico-printing works. There was radicalism in the Macfarlane family and the mill workers who were solid supporters of Chartism.

In 1842 the Macfarlane mills went bust and the family were utterly ruined. Helen had to take employment as a governess.

In 1848 Helen was in Vienna when the Revolution against the Habsburg Monarchy broke out. She wrote: “I am free to confess that, for me the most joyful of all spectacles possible; one which I enjoyed extremely at Vienna, in March 1848, a universal tumbling of impostors. For it amounts to this, that men are determined to live no longer in lies!”

Following the defeat of the 1848 Revolution, Helen returned to Britain, first to Burnley, then to London. She began to write for the paper of radical Chartist George Julian Harney, The Red Republican, and became friends with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Historians of philosophy have ignored Helen’s role as the first British commentator on, and translator of, the writing of G.W.F. Hegel.

Helen saw Chartist tactics as less effective than the revolutionary French Blanquists:

“How comes it that our French brothers have done so much compared with us? Because they are organized into one compact mass, which, under the guidance of competent leaders, moves like an army of well-disciplined soldiers, steadily onward to a given point.”

In 1850 Austrian General Haynau, the infamous butcher of the 1848 Revolution, visited London. Workers at the Barclay Perkins brewery tried to drown him in a vat of beer then chased him dow the street. There was a press outcry, but Helen wrote,

“Had I been present when those brave proletarians gave this ruffian his deserts, I should certainly have dissuaded the mob from… laying hands on him… brothers, your hands are blackened and hardened from honest toil. Do not pollute them from touching that beast. Take mops and brooms, sweep him out as you do other kinds of dirt. Like to like. Filth to filth. Haynau to the common sewer.”

Helen published the first translation of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ in English, in the ‘Red Republican’ in 1850. When Helen fell out with Harney at the end of 1850, Marx commented that Harney had broken with, “the only collaborator on his spouting rag who had original ideas – a rare bird, on his paper…”

In 1852 Helen married Francis Proust and in 1853 gave birth to a daughter named Consuela Pauline Roland Proust (Pauline Roland was a great French leader of the 1848 Revolution). In 1853 the family sailed to a new life in South Africa, but Francis died on the journey, and Consuela died days after arriving in South Africa.

Helen returned to England and in 1856 she married Reverend John Wilkinson Edwards a widower with 11 children. She gave birth to two boys, Herbert and Walter. In 1860, at age 41, she fell ill with bronchitus and died.

Portuguese Anti-fascist icon: Catarina Eufémia

This month marks the anniversary of the assassination of Catarina Eufémia, a young militant agricultural worker who was gunned down for answering back to a police officer whilst canvassing support for a strike in Alentejo, Portugal.

Catarina became a serious icon for resistance against the fascist government of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

Catarina was born in Baleizão in the most arid and hot region of Portugal. The economy was run by a system Latifundia where landowners ruled the big estates ruthlessly, often with the help of the local police (GNR) and the hated secret police (PIDE).

Catarina was born into a family of jornaleiros (dayworkers). By the age of 17 she was married and had already been working in the fields for years. By 1954 she was a mother of 3 children and pregnant with a fourth.

From the mid 1940s onwards, agricultural workers raised economic demands, usually just before the harvest. In 1954 they demanded an increase in pay from 16 escudos to 23, still a pitiful amount. The landowners not only refused to pay but also hired other labour from different parts of the region.

On hearing that the other agricultural labourers had been hired, Catarina and 14 women workers went to address them as they arrived and appealed for solidarity. However, the police had already arrived. Undeterred, Catarina approached the workers but was stopped by a GNR who asked her what she wanted. ”Only bread and work’ was the reply.

The agent, considering the reply as ‘impudent’ gunned her down with a machine gun. She died minutes later and the 8 month child she was carrying in her arms was also injured. The agent was never prosecuted.

The police attacked people at Catarina’s funeral and some mourners were even sentenced to 2 years jail on trumped up charges.

Catarina then became a symbol of struggle in the Alentejo and throughout the country. Although not confirmed, many say she was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party, and she certainly attended meetings.

Catarina was an emblem of growing resistance to the Salazarista regime but it would be another 20 years before her great hope of a new world would flourish.

Some have commented that had she not been killed – she would have remained anonymous. But this is the point – socialism is about the tiny as well as the major struggles that are carried out regularly by nameless people, who make sacrifices in order to better the now but also work for a just future.