"One Infallible, Unchangeable Motto: Freedom" Lucy Parsons's personae and historical role provide material for the makings of a truly exemplary figure—not to mention a "poster girl"—or U.S. radical history. Think of it: lifelong anarchist, labor organizer, writer, editor, publisher, and dynamic speaker, a woman of color of mixed black, Mexican, and Native American heritage, founder in the 1880s of the Chicago Working Women's Union that organized garment workers and called for equal pay for equal work, and also invited housewives to join with the demand of wages for housework—and later (1905), co-founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which made organizing women and people of color a priority. But acknowledgment of Lucy Parsons has been minimal. It is not that radical women have been ignored in the new women's history, or that women have been ignored in the new histories of radicalism; witness the prominence in both of other female activists of the time: Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, Ida B. Wells, Mary Marcy, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Agnes Smedley, Margaret Sanger, Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, Mabel Dodge, Helen Keller, Kate Richards O' Hare, Carolyn Lowe, and many others are presented as strong and autonomous activists. Certainly, as Carolyn Ashbaugh, Parsons's lone biographer, asserts, "Lucy Parsons was black, a woman, and working class three reasons people are often excluded from history." On the left, the view of Lucy Parsons as the "devoted assistant" of her martyred husband Albert Richard Parsons is prevalent. Feminists who have forgotten the radical working class roots of the feminist movement have also overlooked Lucy Parsons. Editors of the Radcliffe Notable American Women three-volume work consigned Lucy Parsons to their discard file on the grounds that she was "largely propelled by husband's fate" and was "a pathetic figure, living in the past and crying injustice after the Haymarket Police Riot."(1) The present publication of Parsons's selected writings and speeches surely illustrates the fallacy of such a characterization of the fifty-plus years of her life as anarchist, agitator, publicist, and organizer which followed the 1887 judicial murder of her partner, Albert Parsons. And Lucy Parsons did not become an activist only the day after her husband's death. Indeed, she "was a recognized leader of the predominately white male working class movement in Chicago long before the 1886 police riot."(2) The Working Women's Union predated the death of Albert Parsons by nearly a decade.Most trade unions of the time did not allow female membership but pressure from the Working Women's Union opened up the Knights of Labor to women. Dismissal of Lucy Parsons as a serious subject of U.S. radicalism is not new. In her own time it seems she was regarded by some, such as Emma Goldman, as a ubiquitous nuisance, using her dead husband's martyrdom and name to gain attention and remain in the spotlight. Undoubtedly, Parsons did use her status as martyr's widow to gain the platform she aggressively pursued until her death to promote revolutionary consciousness and action, based on anarchist and workingclass principles. Goldman lumped Parsons with wives of "anarchists [who] marry women who are millions of miles removed from their ideas... even Lucy Parsons, who goes with every gang proclaiming itself revolutionary."(3) Goldman had to know better. One suspects competition for celebrity. Not until the advent of the radical wing of the Women's Liberation Movement in the late 1960s, did feminist theory forge a new debate by asserting that female human beings constitute a caste/class in all human societies, historically and contemporaneously.(4) Up to that development, female activists tended to adopt male leadership methods and personae, even when their constituency or audience was primarily female. Leadership style and even the necessity for leadership at all generally termed "elitism" were fiercely debated in the radical movements of the 1960s. Being a female agitator in the limelight in Lucy Parsons's time was a rare occurrence with probably no more than ten percent of the ranks of the anarchist and socialist movements being women and even less in positions of leadership. Goldman, surely in part due to her long exile during which she was neither organizing nor in touch with ordinary workers, developed ideas which struck Parsons as foolish and unrealistic. However, even more than two decades before being exiled from the United States, Goldman was in a very different position than Lucy Parsons. Ashbaugh writes: Emma Goldman spent a year on Blackwell Island in 1893-94 for inciting to riot. After her release, she went to Europe to study nursing and midwifery and returned to the U.S. in the fall of 1896 to become the anarchists' foremost advocate of free love. Goldman could study in Europe and travel in educated circles, opportunities which Lucy Parsons's dark skin precluded for her. Goldman became interested in the freedom of the individual; Parsons remained committed to the freedom of the working class from capitalism.(5) This and other theoretical issues marked early leftist thinking on the "woman question," as it was then called. Whereas Sixties feminists who advocated woman freeing herself sexually drew upon Goldman's life and work as a model, the socialist-feminists of the same period did not "discover" Lucy Parsons. Their differences, which may be gleaned from their separate writings and work, touched on the issues that became key to later feminist theory. With the internationalization of the woman question during three decades of United Nations' sponsored activities and education, these issues are quite contemporary and probably more important than ever in terms of developing universalist theory upon which to visualize and build a just and equitable social order.Historian Alice Echols lists some of the unresolved questions debated by female radicals in the Women's Liberation Movement: Was women's behavior the result of conditioning or material necessity? Was heterosexuality a crucial bargaining chip in women's struggle for liberation (as in "a revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo") or a source of women's oppression? Should women's sexual pleasure be enhanced or men's sexuality curbed? If the personal was political, was the political personal? Did men oppress women because of the material benefits they reaped or because they found it intrinsically pleasurable to do so? There was even some disagreement on the question of whether radical feminism implied the minimization or maximization of gender differences.(6) Goldman and Parsons had in common a commitment to the working class and to the destruction of capitalism and the state They each also maintained a lifelong eschewal of liberalism, particularly electoral politics even before women had the vote since, they believed, the whole structure and grid of society must be destroyed and rebuilt. What these two female giants of the U.S. anarchist movement did dispute was sexual behavior, marriage, and family. Ashbaugh observes that while Emma Goldman, and the anarchist movement as a whole, moved toward sexual freedom and individualism, Lucy Parsons tended toward what became the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World—that is, toward mass action, revolutionary industrial unionism, and anarcho-syndicalism."(7) Ashbaugh makes a critical distinction between the two world-views:Radical feminism was a workingclass development which came out of the analysis of the role of women under capitalism. Lucy Parsons's feminism, which analyzed women's oppression as a function of capitalism, was founded on working class values. And Lucy Parsons never put family before principles. A dramatic case in point occurred when her eighteen-year-old son enlisted to serve in the Spanish-American War. Actively opposed herself, as a militant anti-imperialist, she had him committed to a mental institution. Apparently, the boy was "normal" by society's standards but not by the standards of Lucy Parsons's political principles. Albert Parsons, Jr. died in the asylum two decades later without ever being seen by his mother during that time.(9) The distinction between Goldman and Parsons in the prioritization of the woman question preshadows the disagreement between radical and socialist feminists of the 1960s women's movement, the anarchist/radical feminist holding that destroying capitalism is necessary but not sufficient for female liberation, and the socialist/communist feminist believing that the establishment of socialism will automatically destroy the basis for women's oppression. (Analogous questions also arose in the radical movements of African-Americans, Chicanos, and Native Americans.) What is particularly significant about the debate in the earlier period, in contrast with more recent times, is that these discussions took place within the workingclass movement. That fact might suggest that we rethink the basis of similar debates in the Sixties women's liberation movement, that were widely attributed to the middle-class backgrounds of the female activists who promoted an autonomous women's liberation movement. Ashbaugh oversimplifies Parsons's views on marriage, monogamy, the family, and free love, when she characterizes them as traditional and conservative: The women's question was a real problem for Lucy. She had three strikes against her from birth: poor, non-white, woman. She felt poverty the most acutely, and she put the fight against racism and sexism secondary to class struggle. She believed in monogamous marriage and the nuclear family as fundamental "natural" principles and argued that the problems of marriage resulted from the economic system, not from flaws in the institution itself.(10) Parsons worried, as did some radical feminist theorists of the Sixties movement, that obliterating those values and institutions under capitalism would harm women, not men.(11) In other words, Parsons was not a utopianist, but she did advocate that women free themselves from the kitchen and the nursery and be economically independent of men if possible.Above all, Lucy Parsons defended female workers, including their right to the same pay as male workers. At the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, Lucy Parsons made it clear that she saw her presence and voice as representing women: "We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it ... but we have our labor. Wherever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class uses women to reduce them." She did not forget the particularities of the oppression of women within the working class itself. On the question of dues, she referred to low-paid women textile-workers and wanted assurance that dues be set at an amount that would allow them to join the IWW: They are the class we want. This organization is for the purpose of helping all, and certainly it is the women in the textile mills that are of the lowest paid. Make it so that the women who get such poor pay should not be assessed as much as the men who get higher pay.(12) Regarding free love, Parsons was concerned about venereal disease and pregnancy as well as the fate of the children born of such unions, the burden of which would inevitably reside with the woman. Parsons did argue that prostitution and rape could and did happen within marriage but did not fault the nuclear family as an institution inherently oppressive to women. At any rate, it was clear to her that for the working class, the family was its sole refuge. Parsons herself never remarried but did have a number of serious relationships with men, which is a statement in itself from one who so firmly embraced "direct action" and "propaganda by the deed."Emma Goldman did not reconsider Lucy Parsons's concerns later on when she passed middle age and found that men were no longer attracted to her sexually, whereas older men, including her own lifetime companion Alexander Berkman, had no problem attracting young women. In 1936, Goldman expressed her outrage at this double standard: I do not believe that middle-aged women lose their sexual attraction or "usefulness." as you call it. That is only one of the many prejudices in regard to women. I know scores of women who are wonderfully youthful, vivacious, and interesting who are past middle age. It is only the idiotic discrimination society makes between the man and woman of the same age. Thus any man, no matter how decrepit, can and does attract young girls. Why should it not be the same in the case of the woman?(13) Lucy Parsons was not alone in the anarchist movement of the time in questioning the extension of human freedom to sexual promiscuity and the end of monogamous relationships. In fact, there is little in Lucy Parsons's life and work that would suggest, as Ashbaugh does, that Parsons was not truly an anarchist. For reasons that are not clear, Ashbaugh insists that Lucy Parsons was not authentically an anarchist, and inexplicably encloses the term itself in quotation marks:Lucy Parsons had claimed to be an "anarchist" when the title was pinned on her by the bourgeois press and her state-socialist enemies. She believed her husband had died for anarchism, and she was prepared to defend and die for anarchism. Although her beliefs were syndicalist rather than anarchist, she tried to cling to the "anarchist" movement as it changed shape.(14) Although Ashbaugh's entire thesis in her biography rests on arguing and demonstrating that Lucy Parsons was her own person as an activist, here she falls into the living-for-her-husband theme. She appears to be trying to rescue Lucy Parsons's "image" with this absurd assertion. A few years before her death, during the Franklin Roosevelt era, Parsons worked in the International Labor Defense (ILD) and was therefore close to people in the U.S. Communist Party, which always downplayed Parsons's anarchism. Ashbaugh seems to have fallen into the same mode, revealing her own lack of respect for anarchism as a revolutionary current as varied as socialism or communism. Anarcho-syndicalism, which promoted federation through trade unions and workplaces, and projected the general strike as a revolutionary strategy, was one of several prominent theoretical lines in the anarchist movement. Anarcho-pacifism sought to create autonomous communities and non-violent resistance; anarcho-individualism promoted the absolute freedom of the individual; anarcho-mutualism envisaged federalist networking of autonomous group cooperatives; and anarcho-communism rejected wages, advocated armed struggle, called for free communal associations sharing according to need from community-based distribution centers.(15)None of these variants of anarchism were mutually exclusive, and they overlapped each other. Certainly, Lucy Parsons embraced direct action and even armed struggle as viable and admissible means of struggle, which would make her as much anarcho-communist as syndicalist. In terms of armed self-defense on the part of the oppressed, there can be no doubt as to Parsons's thinking. While denying Parsons's real commitment to anarchism, Ashbaugh documents evidence of it even before Albert Parsons's death. In Lucy Parsons's 1884 article, "To Tramps," she tells of advising a tramp who was about to commit suicide that he should use explosives and take a few rich people along: "Each of you hungry tramps who read these lines, avail yourselves of those little methods of warfare which Science has placed in the hands of the poor man—Learn the Use of Explosives!" Ashbaugh warns that this essay "has frequently been used out of context to do a disservice to her and her cause." But Lucy Parsons's own statement makes such an apology dubious. Ashbaugh further apologizes for Parsons's militancy, explaining why Lucy Parsons was more committed to "propaganda by the deed" than her husband: "all the oppression which Lucy suffered for her dark skin and her womanhood went into the anger with which she encouraged the use of dynamite."(16) "To Tramps" was typical rather than exceptional in Lucy Parsons's writings and speeches. In some of her writings she argued that destruction of ruling-class property was educational and liberating for workers, energizing their struggles under horrible conditions. Here, she sounds like a precursor of Frantz Fanon, who proposed that violence was not only necessary but liberating to oppressed peoples in throwing off the shackles of colonialism.(17) Lucy Parsons, and most anarchists, regarded the new invention, dynamite, as an almost magical tool, easily accessible to workers. Parsons wrote, "The voice of dynamite is the voice of force, the only voice which tyranny has ever been able to understand. It takes no great rummage through musty pages of history to demonstrate this fact." During the same year, in reaction to militia shooting and killing of workers in Illinois, she called for nothing less than "a war of extermination and without pity" against the wealthy. Soon her group resolved "to arm and organize into a company and become a part of the military organization now forming throughout the city" and "to establish a school on chemistry where the manufacture and use of explosives would be taught." She advised a black community in Mississippi to respond to recent white supremacist massacres of their friends and families that: You are not absolutely defenseless. For the torch of the incendiary, which has been known to show murderers and tyrants the danger line, beyond which they may not venture with impunity, cannot be wrested from you.(18) In Lucy Parsons's view, fomenting chaos in the ruling class, the people becoming ungovernable, destruction of the institutions and rulers of government, not to be replaced, were positive anarchist goals, not ones born of exhaustion and hopelessness. As a matter of fact, many anarchists, including Goldman and Parsons, moderated, not their ultimate goals of stateless societies, but violence as a means, in the wake of the demise of left hegemony in the working class in the face of Fascism and Nazism. However, Lucy Parsons never agreed that there was any need for centralized political and economic authority other than to protect the rich and exploit the propertyless.One contemporary praised Parsons, comparing her to French anarchist Louise Michel, famous as a leader of the 1871 Paris Commune: "She is a wonderfully strong writer and it is said she can excel her husband in making a fiery speech." Albert Parsons was widely considered just about the best English-speaking orator the working class had. Once he was silenced by imprisonment, Lucy Parsons's already finely developed organizing skills and voice expanded and refocused; she continued to speak for anarchism and the need for revolutionary organization as well as on such topics as "The French Revolution" and "The Paris Commune," but she also emphasized the defense of political prisoners, a cause she worked for tirelessly during the following fifty years of her life. Lucy Parsons used her platform as the wife of Albert Parsons to support the Haymarket defendants, and after their deaths used her platform as the martyr's widow to memorialize them, all the while promoting anarchist goals and methods. Never did she moderate her views in order to win public support. The main issue at the mass protest meeting that ended in the Haymarket police riot was police brutality against workers striking for the eight-hour day—a struggle Lucy Parsons supported. She made it clear, however, that she envisaged a time when working hours would be reduced to one or two. All through the "Red Scare" that followed the Haymarket bomb incident, she continued to uphold the right of workers to defend themselves against police or military attack. "For five years, I have spoken against this civilization... I have said that any and all means are justifiable to destroy it, and by that statement I will stand or fall..."(19) In her speeches, Parsons argued that the Haymarket bomb had been placed by goons of Wall Street in order to destroy the eight-hour movement. She said that those conspirators were the same ones who drove poor women into prostitution and working men to drink and suicide: I come to talk to you of those who stand in the shadow of their own scaffolds. I come to you an avowed Anarchist. I am a revolutionist, but I incite no one to riot, for I am not out on that mission; I hope to be some day...(20) The birth of the Industrial Workers of the World gave Lucy Parsons an ideal vehicle for fusing her anarchist and syndicalist views. Although there is no indication that she had a hand in writing the IWW constitution, its Preamble captures her unshakeable anarchism and class perspective:The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. In that speech and during the proceedings, Parsons strenuously argued in favor of the most fundamental of anarchistic demands: the general strike as the primary tactic of a revolutionary strategy to crush the power structures, and the non-electoral politics characteristic of the IWW as an organization. She wove these two concepts together elegantly in her speech: My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production. Do you think the capitalists will allow you to vote away their property? You may, but I do not believe it... It means a revolution that shall turn all these things over... to the wealth producers... When your new economic organization shall declare as brothers and sisters that you are determined that you possess these things, then there is no army that is large enough to overcome you, for you yourselves constitute the army.(21) As Phillip S. Foner wrote: "In the IWW, the general strike was first mentioned at the founding convention where it was advocated by Lucy E. Parsons... But the majority of the delegates were not prepared to endorse a general strike, and the proposals died for lack of support."(22)Following the convention, Lucy Parsons became editor of an IWW-oriented newspaper: The Liberator, that she herself named in honor of the abolitionist newspaper founded by William Lloyd Garrison. While agitating for the new union through the newspaper, she also remained a militant activist. Eight years after its founding, the IWW began to focus on organizing the unemployed, starting on the west coast. Among her many activities, the most publicized nationally occurred in San Francisco in 1914. The IWW had begun to focus on organizing the unemployed and started on the west coast. Parsons, representing the IWW, led a march and demonstration of unemployed men. The police attacked the marchers, and Parsons was arrested.(23) U.S. entrance into World War One brought intense political repression against all "reds," especially the IWW. Hundreds of its most active members were railroaded to prison, and for a time the union was severely weakened. Much like the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the 1920s was a lonely and frightening time to be a social activist. But Lucy Parsons was not one to retire from activism. Despite her advanced years and poor eyesight, she continued to speak on May Day and November 11th meetings, and to work with such groups as the IWW's General Defense Committee and the Communists' International Labor Defense to secure the freedom of such political prisoners as Tom Mooney and the Scottsboro Eight. She gave as her reason for working with the Communist Party: "They are the only bunch who are making a vigorous protest against the present horrible conditions."(24) In her 1955 memoir of the years 1906-1926, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who became a leader of the Communist Party, draws a picture of Lucy Parsons as an iconic, devoted old widow woman: I remember Mrs Parsons speaking warmly to the young people, warning us of the seriousness of the struggles ahead that could lead to jail and death before victory was won. For years she traveled from city to city, knocking on the doors of local unions and telling the story of the Chicago trial...(25) How a dark-skinned single woman managed to survive the life of an open revolutionary during that period is phenomenal. For Lucy Parsons, identity—other than being of and for the working class—was irrelevant.Yet the ethnic/racial identity of Lucy Parsons was an issue to others during her own life and remains disputed. Ashbaugh began her biography with an unequivocal characterization: "Lucy Parsons was black, a woman, and working class.(26) On the other hand, Hedda Garza in Latinas: Hispanic Women in the United States, began a four page snapshot of Lucy Parsons quite differently but also unequivocally: Born in 1853 in Johnson County, Texas, Lucia Eldine Gonzalez never discussed her family background except to say that she was Mexican. Throughout her life, though, dark-complexioned "Lucy" (as her friends called her) was often referred to as "that colored woman" by her enemies.(27) Chicano historians Afredo Mirande and Evangelina Enriquez devoted a section to Parsons in their La Chicana, as did Rodolfo Acuna in Occupied America. These historians proudly present Parsons as a Chicana by birth and a great labor activist, but they point out that beyond claiming to be Mexican, she seems to have had no relationship with the Mexican community or labor movements of the time.(28) Chicano and Mexican labor movements were continuous during Parsons's active life and were closely linked to the organizations with which she was affiliated: the anarchist movement, the IWW, and the International Labor Defense, and very active in her home state of Texas. This was the time before, during, and in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Therefore, it does seem odd that if Parsons was certain and proud of her Mexican heritage and claimed a Spanish maiden name, Gonzalez that she would not take a greater interest in the grand historical drama of her people being played out before her eyes.Ashbaugh leans toward the theory that Lucy Parsons was actually African-American, and perhaps born into slavery. Parsons denied being black and until recently has not figured into African-American historical revisions. Ashbaugh observes that Lucy Parsons internalized the racism of white society to the extent that she denied her own black ancestry, and that her denial of being black, and therefore oppressed as a black woman, limited her ability to analyze her social position, or that of oppressed peoples in general, in relation to anything but class status. Parsons did speak on the question of race, always maintaining, as she did regarding women, that the oppression of African-Americans was economically based. Following the 1886 massacre of thirteen black people in Jim Crow Mississippi, Parsons wrote an article titled, "The Negro. Let Him Leave Politics to the Politician and Prayers to the Preacher." She asked: Are there any so stupid as to believe these outrages have been, are being and will be heaped upon the Negro because he is black? Not at all. It is because he is poor. It is because he is dependent. Because he is poorer as a class than his white wage-slave brother of the North.(29) And yet, Lucy Parsons's April 1892 response to southern lynchings would suggest a more complex theory than mere reductionist economism.30 These texts have a familiar ring to us, permeated as they are with the language of self-reliance and self-determination—the language of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, challenging the civil rights movement during the 1960s.Whatever her national identity or her position on the woman question, Lucy Parsons was without doubt a highly visible labor leader for over seventy years, a time stretching from just after the end of the Civil War to U.S. entrance into World War Two. In view of her role in the Knights of Labor, the Working Women's Union, the eight-hour struggle, and the IWW, the fact that Parsons is little mentioned in revisionist labor studies as a militant in her own right is truly inexplicable.(31) If a person's politics can be at least in part judged by her library, then Lucy Parsons was no professional widow of a radical martyr. At her death at the age of eighty-nine, she owned more than 1500 books on the topics of sex, socialism, and anarchism all of which, along with all her papers, were stolen by the FBI or the Chicago Red Squad and never seen again.(32) Sadly, Lucy Parsons and her grand legacy of revolt and revolution fell into the cracks of radical, labor, feminist, African-American, Latino, and Native American revisions of history, an orphan in memory as well as in life. Heroes are selected by states to promote patriotism, so it is no surprise that Lucy Parsons is absent there. But heroes are selected by revolutionary movements as models of tireless commitment and struggle under conditions of great adversity, human and flawed, often damaged human beings who overcome their vulnerabilities through their struggles on behalf of all oppressed and exploited persons, groups, and peoples. The absence of Lucy Parsons's ideas and life work has been a great loss for generations of radicals during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Direct action, however—the best two-word summary of Lucy Parsons's anarchist activism—has made a big comeback, and will continue to be relevant in the coming years, as evidenced in the many ongoing anti-WTO, anti-World-Bank, and similar demonstrations all over the world. With their colorful diversity and improvisation, these mass protests remind us of the revolutionary parades led by Lucy Parsons in the 1880s. For a better understanding of the concept of direct action, and its implications, no other historical figure can match the lessons provided by Lucy Parsons. San Francisco, October 2003 NOTES:
1. Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons; American Revolutionary. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1976: 6. Source: |