Rebellious Daughters of History #29

by Judy Cox

Poplar Revolt: Minnie Lansbury (1889 – 1922)

Minnie Glassman, the daughter of Jewish coal merchant Isaac Glassman, was born in Stepney in 1889. She became a school teacher and was active in the campaign for women’s suffrage.

In 1913, Sylvia Pankhurst, with the support of Millie Glassman, Keir Hardie and George Lansbury, established the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELF) to fight for socialism and demand for women’s suffrage.

In 1914 Millie married Edgar Lansbury, the son of George Lansbury, the Labour Party MP for Bow & Bromley. Millie opposed the First World War. In 1918 she was elected Assistant Secretary of the Workers’ Socialist Federation.

Siblings Edgar, Violet and Daisy Lansbury all joined the Communist Party. Daisy was active with Sylvia Pankhurst. Violet spent many years in Russia and married Anglo-Indian communist Clemens Palme Dutt.

In November 1919 Millie was elected to Poplar Council. The Labour Party had won 39 of the 42 council seats. In 1921 George Lansbury proposed that the Council stop collecting the rates for outside, cross-London bodies. On 31st March 1921, Poplar Council set a rate of 4s 4d instead of 6s 10d.

On 29th the Councillors were summoned to Court. They were told that they had to pay the rates or go to prison – they chose prison. At one meeting Millie said: “Poplar will pay its share of London’s rates when Westminster, Kensington, and the City do the same.”

On 28th August over 4,000 people demonstrated at Tower Hill. The Councillors were arrested on 1st September. Five women Councillors, including Millie Lansbury, were sent to Holloway Prison. Twenty-five men, including George Lansbury, went to Brixton Prison. On 21st September, public pressure led the government to release Nellie Cressall, who was six months pregnant.

Several Metropolitan Borough Councils announced their attention to follow Poplar’s example. The government was forced to back down and on 12th October, the Councillors were set free.

While in prison, Minnie developed pneumonia and she died on 1st January 1922. She was 32. Her memorial clock is on Bow Road.

Actress Angela Lansbury is the daughter of Edgar Lansbury and his second wife. Angela is a Democrat supporter in America, supports the Labour party in Britain. “How could I not? I’m not an active member but many members of my family are very much involved.”

Rebel against British Oppression: Nanny of the Maroons (1686 – 1755)

Nanny was born into slavery sometime during the 1680s, on the Gold Coast, now Ghana. She was transported to Jamaica as a slave. She escaped a British colony on Jamaica and led a group of slaves into the inner mountainous areas of the island. Soon, large communities of ex-slaves, calling themselves Maroons, gathered around her. They founded Nanny Town founded around 1723.

From this town, Nanny was able to lead raids against plantations to liberate the slaves. Her revolution quickly captured the attention of the British and a series of campaigns against the Maroons were launched.

Nanny and the Maroons were innovators in guerilla warfare. They used surprise, knowledge of the terrain, and cleverly chosen positions in their fight against the British. Their village was located in rugged territory with only one way in, so attacking soldiers were easily ambushed by camouflaged troops. Nanny never killed all of the attacking force. She would always allow a remnant to return to tell of the horror of massacre.

Nanny Town itself was attacked on a number of occasions, in 1730, 1731, 1732. Finally one British attack in 1734 captured the settlement. Nanny and the survivors fled to found a new camp, from which they proved just as defiant.

Although Nanny and her people faced nearly constant attack and hunger, they remained united and strong against the British under her rule. From 1739–40, the British signed a peace treaty with the Maroons, giving them 500 acres of land to call their own.

Besides being a superb tactician and leader, Nanny was an obea woman, who practiced African spirituality. According to legend, if any straight haired, white man, goes to Nanny Town, he is immediately struck dead.

Nanny, whose image is on the Jamaican $500 bill, remains a powerful symbol of the resistance to slavery

Rebellious Daughters of History #28

by Judy Cox

Mexican Revolutionary: Margarita Neri

Margarita Neri, “The Rebel Queen of Morelos”, was the daughter of a Mayan Indian and a former Mexican general who had rebelled against the repressive government of President Diaz around 1900.

The Mexican Revolution began on 20 November, 1910, and raged well into the 1920s. It was an attempt by revolutionaries to overthrow the ruler and dictator Porfirio Diaz Mori and win democracy and reform for the peasants.

The conflict was bloody, with around 900,000 people losing their lives. Despite facing constant inequality and sexism, women were still willing to play a major role in the old regimes eventual downfall.

The most famous of all the soldaderas was Margarita Neri, who not only fought in the war, but also acted as a commander.

From 1910, Margarita commanded a force of over 1,000 which swept through Tabasco and Chiapas, looting, burning and killing.

Neri was so effective in her slaughter of anti-revolutionary troops that the Governor of Guerrero hid in a crate and fled the town upon hearing of her approach.

Her soldiers were a serious threat to the Government.

In 1911, the Los Angeles Times reported on revolutionary battles taking place in Guerrero, a southern state in Mexico. “Petticoat leads band of Rebels,” the headline blared, in a story picked up all across North America. Margarita Neri, “La Neri” or “Pepita” to her 700-plus followers. La Neri ,“although beautiful in feature,” was a daring raider.

Brutal and fiery, the red-headed Neri was known for her passionate dancing—and her threat to personally “decapitate Diaz.”

Her troops were infamous for their violence—looting, burning and pillaging whole towns.

Neri was reportedly eventually executed, but the place and time of her death are unknown. The Mexican Revolution succeeded in transforming Mexican society.

So much more than Malcolm X’s Mum: Louise Little (1897–1989)

Louise Little was born in Grenada, to Edith Langdon. Edith was the daughter of Jupiter and Mary Jane Langdon, who were captured from what is now Nigeria, freed from the slave ship by the Royal Navy and then settled in Grenada.

When she was 11 years old, Edith, was raped by a Scottish man named Edward Norton, and gave birth to Louise.

Louise was raised by her grandparents and was fluent in English, French and Grenadian Creole French. After her grandmother’s death in1917, she emigrated to Montreal, where her uncle introduced her to the ideas of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

Through the UNIA, Louise met Earl Little, and they married on May 10, 1919. The following year they moved to Philadelphia, and then to Omaha, Nebraska. While in Omaha she was of the UNIA’s local chapter. She inculcated black pride in their seven children, and insisted that they read newspapers such as the Negro World, the official periodical of the UNIA.

Louise was pregnant with Malcolm when the Klan visited their house one night. They shouted threats that the Littles should leave town because her husband was “spreading trouble.” After breaking all the windows in the house, they rode off.

In1926, Ku Klux Klan threats‍ drove the family to move to Milwaukee and then to to Lansing, Michigan. There the family was frequently harassed by the Black Legion, a white racist group.

The family home was burned down in 1929. In 1931, Earl died in what was officially ruled a streetcar accident, though Louise believed he had been murdered by the Black Legion.

During the 1930s Louise Little and her son Wilfred were baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1937, a pregnant Louise was abandoned by her lover. In late 1938 she was committed to Kalamazoo State Hospital. The children were separated and sent to foster homes.

Louise was in the Hospital to 1963. Her son Malcolm X joined his siblings in securing her release from the hospital. She lived with her surviving family for another 30 years.

According to historian Erik S. McDuffie, she was “a brilliant and dynamic woman, not some ‘crazy’ or apolitical figure as she is often portrayed in the scholarship about Malcolm X.”

Rebellious Daughters of History #27

by Judy Cox

Agitating for Reform: Ernestine Louise Rose (1810 – 1892)

Rose Potowska was born in Poland. Her father was a wealthy rabbi and she later recalled, “I was a rebel at the age of five”.

When she was 16, her father betrothed her to an older man. Rose rejected the match and appealed to a secular civil court which ruled in her favour.

Rose left home at the age of seventeen. She traveled to Berlin, where an anti-Semitic law required all non-Prussian Jews to have a Prussian sponsor. She invented perfumed paper for use as a room deodorizer, which she sold to fund her travels.

Rose traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and finally England. Her ship was shipwrecked and all her possessions lost.

In England, she met Robert Owen, a Utopian socialist, who invited her to become a public speaker. She helped him to found the Association of All Classes of All Nations, a group that campaigned for human rights. She also met William Ella Rose, an Owenite. They were married by a civil magistrate.

In May 1836 the Roses emigrated to the New York where Rose began to give lectures on the abolition of slavery, public education, and equality for women. When she was in the South, one slaveholder said he would have “tarred and feathered her if she had been a man.”

In 1855, a local newspaper in Maine called her “a female Atheist… a thousand times below a prostitute.” Rose had to flee From Charleston, West Virginia, after giving a lecture on the evils of slavery.

In the winter of 1836, Rose organised the first petition in support of women’s rights. She also attended and spoke at numerous conferences and conventions, becoming the ‘Queen of the Platform’.

Rose was elected president of the National Women’s Rights Convention in October, 1854, in spite of objections that she was an atheist.

In 1869, she successfully lobbied for legislation in New York that allowed married women to retain their own property and have equal guardianship of children.

In 1869, Rose made the closing address at the nationwide Women’s Rights Convention but her health took a downward turn, and she and her husband set sail for England.

After 1873, her health improved, and she began to advocate women’s suffrage in England, attending the Conference of the Woman’s Suffrage Movement in London and speaking in Edinburgh at a large public meeting in favor of woman’s suffrage.

She died in Brighton, England, in 1892.

Haitian Revolutionary: Sanité Bélair, (1781 – 1802)

Sanité was a female Haitian Freedom fighter and revolutionary, lieutenant in the army of Toussaint Louverture.

Sanité was born an affranchi, a free person of colour, in Verrettes, Haiti in 1791, the year that a revolt against French colonial rule broke out.

This revolt became the Haitian Revolution, a successful insurrection by self-liberated slaves. Ex-slave Toussaint Louverture emerged as Haiti’s most charismatic hero.

Sanité married Charles Bélair in 1796 When she was 15. Charles was a Brigade commander and later a General in the revolutionary army. Sanité became a sergeant and later a lieutenant.

The Belairs were pursued by Faustin Répussard’s column of the French army, and took refuge in the Artibonite department. Répussard launched a surprise attack and captured Sanité. Her husband surrendered so he could be with her. Both were sentenced to death, he to be executed by firing squad and she by decapitation. She watched Bélair’s execution and went to her own execution, refusing to wear a blindfold. She was 21.

The Haitian revolution ended in 1804 with the former colony’s independence. It was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state free from slavery, and ruled by non-whites and former captives. It is now widely seen as a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World.

Sanité Bélair is remembered as one of the heroes of the Haitian Revolution. In 2004, she was the only woman featured on a banknote for the “Bicentennial of Haiti” Commemorative series

Rebellious Daughters of History #26

by Judy Cox

Striking a Light: Sarah Chapman (1862-1945)

Sarah was born in 1862 to Samuel Chapman, a brewer and sometime docker, and Sarah Ann Mackenzie. Sarah and her six siblings grew up in Mile End and could all read and write.

By the age of 19, Sarah worked with her mother and sister, Mary, at the Bryant and May match factory in Bow.

The match women were known for being rowdy and rebellious. Mainly were of Irish descent and were familiar with republican and socialist ideas. In 1882, factory boss, Theodore Bryant, deducted a shilling from each worker’s wage to pay for a statue of William Gladstone. Workers disrupted the unveiling by pelting the statue with stones, red paint and their own blood.

Anger among the women was fuelled by low wages, long hours, appalling working conditions and the unfair fines system. Poisonous white phosphorus left many girls suffering from ‘phossy jaw’, a form of cancer.

In July 1888, some 1400 women marched out of the factory. The next day some 200 girls marched from Mile End down to see Annie Besant, a campaigning journalist. A deputation of three, including Sarah, went into her office and Annie agreed to help them organise a Strike Committee to which Sarah and 8 other women were elected.

The first strike meeting was followed by meetings with Members of Parliament. The women marched from the East End into central London to win support and went from door to door collecting solidarity donations.

By 17th July, their demands were met. All fines and deductions were abolished and sacked workers reinstated. Bryant and May provided a room for meals away from the work room. The women’s victory helped to inspire the Great Dock Strike of 1889.

The Union of Women Match Makers was set at Stepney Meeting Hall, and 12 women, including Sarah, were elected to its committee.

Sarah was elected by her union to be the first TUC representative and she was also a delegate to the 1888 International TUC in London.

In December 1891 Sarah married Charles Henry Dearman, a Cabinet Maker, and stopped working at Bryant and May. They moved to Bethnal Green and had six children.

Sarah died of lung cancer, in Bethnal Green in 1945 aged 83. Louise Raw has rightly pointed out that the Match women should be remembered, not as women dependent on any leaders, but as a collective of powerful and insurgent women.

Read more in Louise Raws great book ‘Striking a Light: the Match Women’s Place in History’ which is available from Bookmarks bookshop.

From terrorism to Marxist Revolutionary : Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (1851 – 1919)

Vera was born in Mikhaylovka, in the Russian Empire, daughter of an impoverished minor noble. After graduating from high school in 1866, she moved to Saint Petersburg, and worked as a clerk. She became involved in radical politics and taught literacy classes for factory workers. She was just 17 when she was arrested and imprisoned for 4 years in 1869.

Vera was released in 1873, she settled in Kiev, where she became a leader of a revolutionary group of Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchist supporters.

In July 1877, a political prisoner, Alexei Bogolyubov, refused to remove his cap in the presence of Colonel Trepov, the governor of St. Petersburg who was famous for his suppression of rebellions. Trepov ordered Bogolyubov to be flogged, which caused outrage. A group of revolutionaries plotted to kill Trepov and Vera was selected to act. She walked calmly into his office and shot and seriously wounded Trepov.

At her widely publicized trial, it was Trepov’s crimes which were put on trial and the jury found Zasulich not guilty. Vera fled the court as the police tried to rearrest her. A crowd gathered to protect her and one of her supporters was shot dead. In the chaos, Vera managed to escape.

Vera fled to Switzerland, where she became a Marxist and co-founded the Emancipation of Labour group with Georgi Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod in 1883. The group commissioned Zasulich to translate a number of Karl Marx’s works into Russian, which was one of the factors that led to the creation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898.

In mid-1900, the leaders of the radical wing of the new generation of Russian Marxists, Julius Martov, Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Potresov, joined Zasulich, Plekhanov and Axelrod in Switzerland. The six founded Iskra, a revolutionary Marxist newspaper, and formed its editorial board.

The Iskra editors convened a pro-Iskra Second Congress of the RSDLP in Brussels and London in 1903. However, Iskra supporters split into two factions, Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Martov’s Mensheviks. Vera sides with the Mensheviks.

She returned to Russia after the 1905 Revolution. She joined a group with Plekhanov in early 1914. The group supported Russian side in World War I and opposed the October Revolution of 1917.

In the winter of 1919, she developed pneumonia and died in Petrograd on 8 May 1919.

In his book Lenin, Leon Trotsky acknowledged her contribution to Russian socialism:

‘She remained to the end the old radical intellectual on whom fate grafted Marxism. Sasulich’s articles show that she had adopted to a remarkable degree the theoretic elements of Marxism. But the moral political foundations of the Russian radicals of the ’70s remained untouched in her until her death.’

Oscar Wilde’s first play was ‘Vera; or, The Nihilists’, inspired by Vera’s shooting of Trepov. The play was published in 1880 and first performed in New York in 1883