Rebellious Daughters of History #48

by ,,Judy Cox

Marie Curie’s socialist, scientist daughter Irène Joliot-Curie (1897 – 1956)

Irène was the daughter of Marie Curie and Pierre Curie, born in Paris in 1897. Her father was killed in a carriage accident in 1906. Marie Curie was now a single mum. She joined “The Cooperative”, in which eminent scholars helped educate each other’s children.

Irène went onto the Faculty of Science at the Sorbonne to complete her studies until 1916 when World War I broke out. Irène worked as a nurse radiographer on the battlefield aside her mother. She received a military medal for her work in x-rays facilities.

After the war, Irène returned to the Sorbonne in Paris to complete her degree in mathematics and physics in 1918. Irène then went to work as her mother’s assistant at the Radium Institute. Irène became a Doctor of Science in 1925.

From 1928 Irène and her husband Frédéric researched atomic nuclei. They identified both the positron and the neutron.

In 1933, they were first to discover the accurate weight measurement of the neutron.

In 1934, the Joliot-Curies made the discovery that sealed their place in scientific history. Building on the work of Marie Curie, the Joliot-Curies succeeding in creating radioactive nitrogen from boron, radioactive isotopes of phosphorus from aluminium, and silicon from magnesium and were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935. It was thirty years after her parents first Nobel prize, and two years after her mother had died of aplastic anemia. Irène was awarded a professorship at the Faculty of Science.

Irène became increasingly active in opposing the fascist movement. She joined the Socialist Party in 1934, the ‘Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes’ a year later, and in 1936 she actively supported the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War. Irène was appointed Undersecretary of State for Scientific Research by the left wing French government.

Irène became actively involved in promoting women’s education, serving on the National Committee of the Union of French Women and the World Peace Council.

Irène continually applied to the French Academy of sciences, knowing that she would be rejected because she was a woman.

In 1948, during a strike involving coal miners, Irène campaigned to convince families to temporarily adopt the children of the coal miners during the strike. She adopted two girls during that time.

In 1956, Irène was admitted to the Curie hospital in Paris, where she died on 17 March at the age of 58 from leukaemia due to exposure to radiation.

“Madam Moscow” of Harlem: Louise Thompson Patterson (1901 – 1999)

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Louise was the daughter of a domestic worker and single parent. Louise became one of the first black women to graduate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1923. She became a professor at the renowned Hampton Institute, a historically black college in Virginia aged just 22. While at Hampton, Louise led a student strike against the predominantly white, authoritarian college authorities.

Louise then moved to New York to join the vibrant cultural community in Harlem. She set up a salon called Vanguard that attracted Harlem artists with concerts, dances and discussions of Marxist theory. Her closest friend was author Langston Hughes.

Louise organised several protests over the conviction of the Scottsboro boys, nine black teenagers wrongly sentenced to death by an all-white jury for raping two white women.

The American Communist Party asked Louise to organize a group of twenty-two Harlem writers, artists, and intellectuals to travel to the Soviet Union to make a film about discrimination in the US. Many important individuals of the Harlem Renaissance were involved, including Langston Hughes.

The project fell through due to lack of funding and political pressures. Back in New York Louise set up the Harlem chapter of the ‘Friends of the Soviet Union’ and the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which presented plays written by Hughes and other black writers and featured all-black casts.

Louise joined the Communist Party. She was the driving force behind is the Sojourners for Truth and Justice which were a radical civil rights organization led by African American women.

Louise and Langston Hughes went to Spain together to support the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War.

Louise married writer Wallace Thurman in August 1928 but their marriage broke up six months later. She later married William L. Patterson, a prominent member of the American Communist Party who was jailed for refusing to give names to Senator McCarthy.

She protested against the anti-Communist policies of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. She organised a national tour in solidarity with Paul Robeson.

In the 1960s, Louise was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. She spoke out in support of the Free Angela Davis Campaign in the 1970s.

Louise died of natural causes on August 27, 1999, shortly before her ninety-eighth birthday, in New York City.

Rebellious Daughters of History #46

by ,,Judy Cox

Anne Ellis and the Dewsbury weavers’ strike (1875)

On 1 February 1875, weavers In West Yorkshire learned that mill owners planned to impose a wage cut of two to three shillings per week. Male and female weavers walked out of the Stubley and Taylor mills in Batley. On 5 February, three hundred male and female weavers at Oldroyd’s mill in Dewsbury joined the strike.

The male and female members voted for an all-female strike committee to represent them before the Masters Association cartel. Never before had an all-female committee represented a group of male and female weavers.

A male weaver told the The Huddersfield Examiner that female weavers in Dewsbury were ‘coming to the front and taking on labour and there wasn’t another place in England where they had done that.’

On 13 February 1875, 9000 female and male striking weavers converged in a field near Spinkwell Mills, Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

A young mother, Anne Ellis, emerged as a strike leader. The Dewsbury News reported Anne’s speech: ‘They could not stand a reduction – for rents, rates or coals or flour were dear, as everyone who kept a house would know….and whilst the masters could live on less profits, it was not possible for the workers to live on nothing to eat’. (Huddersfield Examiner, 15 February1875)

One male weaver told the local paper, ‘the men should be faithful and true to the women… a man who won’t back a woman is no man at all.’

The masters retaliated by threatening to sack the striking male relations of the female committee members.

The Weavers Committee rejected outside help from middle-class led women’s trade union organisations. Ann Ellis argued that the women of Dewsbury and Batley could win their own strike. But they did call for solidarity from the miners of Wakefield and other weavers which boosted the strike fund to over £1200. Working-class solidarity defeated the masters and the price for weaving was restored.

Ann Ellis died in the Bradford Workhouse in 1919 at the age of seventy-six. The Dewsbury and Batley Weavers Committee established the fundamentals of New Unionism before the even the Match Women and the London dockers.

Demanding Equal Pay: Women’s Bus Strike 1918

During the First World War, women took over many of the jobs that had previously been done by men. By 1918, the London General Omnibus Company employed 3500 women, and thousands more were employed by other bus and train companies in London. Many women joined unions, but the unions refused to support equal pay for women.

In mid-1918, male workers were given a 5 shilling a week wartime bonus to help cope with the increased cost of living. Women were not given this bonus.

On the 16th of August, a meeting of women at Willesden bus garage decided to go on strike the following day, without informing their bosses or unions.

The next day, they were joined by women at the Hackney, Holloway, Archway and Acton depots and garages, and the strike continued to spread throughout the day.

At first the women demanded the same 5 shilling per week bonus as men, but their demands soon escalated to equal pay, and they adopted the slogan ‘Same Work- Same Pay.’

By the 23rd of August, female bus and tram workers around the country had joined the strike, including in Bath, Bristol, Birmingham, Brighton, and Weston-super-mare.

The strikers held a series of mass meetings at the Ring, on Blackfriars Road in Southwark. It was a boxing arena that had been destroyed by aerial bombing. Many women brought their children and picnics with them.

The strike was settled on the 25th of August although many women did not want to go back to work. The women won the 5 shilling bonus, but not equal pay.

The struggle of women transport workers was not isolated. In the same month there was agitation among school teachers, and in Woolwich 6,000 ‘munitionettes’ took the day off and demonstrated in Whitehall. In October 1918 women street cleaners in Holborn struck and there were violent clashes when women set about scabs with brooms.

There was also a series of upheavals among the thousands of women workers at the Mount Pleasant postal sorting office at Clerkenwell; the unions representing ‘inside’ staff had refused the women membership, so the had to set up their own unofficial committees.