Rebellious Daughters of History #19

by Judy Cox

Suffragist, Socialist, Republican, Communist: Charlotte Despard (1844-1939)

Charlotte French was born in Kent in 1844. When she was ten her father died and her mother was committed to an asylum.

In 1870, Charlotte met Maximilian Carden Despard, a wealthy businessman. When he died in 1890, Charlotte dedicated her life to fighting for socialism. In 1894 Charlotte was elected as a Poor Law Guardian in Lambeth.

She joined the Social Democratic Federation and later the Independent Labour Party. She became friends with Eleanor Marx and was a delegate to the Second International in London in 1896. She campaigned against the Boer War as a “wicked war of this Capitalistic government”

Charlotte joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). On 23rd October, 1906, Charlotte was arrested during a protest meeting at the House of Commons. In 1907 she was imprisoned twice in Holloway Prison.

Despard spent time in Ireland and in 1908 she helped to form the Irish Women’s Franchise League.

In 1909 she met Gandhi and, influenced by his theory of passive resistance, Charlotte and 70 others left the WSPU to form the Women’s Freedom League (WFL). The WFL was a militant but non-violent. From 1912 to 1921, Charlotte had an intense, passionate relationship with Kate Harvey, another pacifist feminist.

Charlotte supported the workers during the Dublin lock out of 1913. She was a tireless and courageous opponent of World War One. In 1918, when women finally won the vote, Charlotte became the Labour Party candidate for Battersea but was defeated.

In 1920 Despard toured Ireland, collecting first-hand evidence of army and police atrocities and helped to set up the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League to support republican prisoners. Charlotte became involved in the Sinn Fein campaign for a united Ireland.

In 1930 Charlotte toured the Soviet Union and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and became secretary of the Friends of Soviet Russia organization. She was an active anti-fascist and powerful public speaker.

Charlotte Despard died on 10th November 1939, after a fall in her new house near Belfast.

Resistance, civil rights and stardom: Josephine Baker (1906 – 1975)

Josephine Baker, who spent most of her life in Paris, was a celebrated performer at the Folies Bergère in Paris. Her performances caused a sensation and she became an icon of the Jazz Age.

Josephine renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French national after her marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. She raised her children in France.

She aided the French Resistance during World War II and was awarded the Croix de guerre by the French military, and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by General Charles de Gaulle.

Baker supported the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s. On a visit to New York Josephine and her husband were refused reservations at 36 hotels and she wrote articles about the segregation in the United States. She also began traveling into the South and giving talks on “France, North Africa And The Equality Of The Races In France”.

She refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States. Her insistence on mixed audiences helped to integrate live entertainment shows in Las Vegas. She received threatening phone calls from the Ku Klux Klan but said she was not afraid of them.

Josephine worked with the NAACP and was presented with life membership. In 1963, she spoke at the March on Washington at the side of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. While wearing her Free French uniform, she introduced the ‘Negro Women for Civil Rights’.

In her powerful speech, Josephine said:

‘I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.’

Josephine continued to perform throughout her life. On 8 April 1975, Baker starred in a revue, celebrating 50 years in show business and won rave reviews. Four days later, Baker was found lying in bed. She died aged 68 on 12 April 1975.

Rebellious Daughters of History #18

by Judy Cox

Racism, Riot and Unceasing Revolt: Lucy Parsons (1851-1942)

Lucy Parsons was born in Virginia in 1851, the daughter of a slave. In 1863, she was moved to Texas where she worked as a seamstress and a cook for white families. In 1870, Lucy was living with a former slave, Oliver Gathing, and had a baby who died at birth. In 1871, Lucy married a white man, Albert Parsons. They were driven out of Texas by racists and settled in Chicago, Illinois.

Lucy began writing for The Socialist and The Alarm, the journal of the International Working People’s Association. In the 1880s, she led marches of seamstresses in Chicago. On 4 May 1886, Albert addressed a rally at Haymarket Square, organised to protest against police violence during a May Day strike.

Lucy was in the crowd when police moved in, a bomb was thrown at them and they shot several protesters dead. The authorities arrested eight men and, despite a lack of evidence, executed four activists. Albert was one of them. Protests against these judicial murders were beginning of May Day labour rallies in the US.

Lucy refused to be silenced. She spoke alongside William Morris and Peter Kropotkin during a visit to Great Britain in 1888. In the 1890s, she published Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly. In 1905 Lucy joined in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and began editing the Liberator. She organized the Chicago Hunger Demonstrations in January 1915.

In the 1920s, the Chicago Police Department described Lucy as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters”. In 1925 she worked with the National Committee of the International Labor Defense in 1927, a Communist-led organization that defended labour activists and victimised Black people. Historians believe that Lucy joined the Communist Party in 1939.

In her 80s, Lucy continued to speak out against capitalism. One of her last major appearances was in 1941 when she addressed striking workers at International Harvester.
Lucy died on March 7, 1942, in house fire. Her lover, George Markstall, died the next day from injuries he received trying to save her.

She was approximately 91 years old. After her death, police seized her 1,500 books. She is buried near her husband, near the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument in Forest Park, Illinois.

Revolutionary Republican and Armed: Claire Lacombe (1765-?) and Pauline Leon (1768 – 1838)

Claire was an actress but when she arrived in Paris in 1792, in the middle of the Great French Revolution, she left acting to become a revolutionary. Pauline was born to a family of Parisian chocolate makers and became a political radical after witnessing the execution of leaders of a bread riot.

Like many working women, Claire and Pauline asserted their right to speak, to vote and to bear arms in defence of the revolution. Pauline took part in the women’s march to Versailles in 1789. During the insurrection of 10 August 1792, they both took part in the storming of the Tuileries. Claire was shot through the arm but kept fighting and was awarded a medal for her courage.

In May 1793, the two women united to set up The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, the most radical female revolutionary organisation of the French Revolution. The society first acted as Jacobin Sans Culottes and then the more radical Enragés. They demanded that women be armed to defend the revolutionary republic and that women should have the right to vote in the councils of the Revolutionary Committee.

Claire lived with Théophile Leclerc, leader of the Enrages, and supporter of women’s rights. They broke up and Pauline married him. Under the Reign of Terror, the Enragés were suppressed as was the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women.

On September 16 1793, Claire was publicly denounced as a counter-revolutionary to the Committee of General Security. She was arrested and released in August 1795. She went back to the theatre but soon left and vanished into obscurity. In May 1794 Pauline and her husband were arrested and held separately in prison but later released.

Pauline died at home on 5 October 1838.

Rebellious Daughter’s of History #17

by Judy Cox

From suffrage to Stalins Purges: Rose and Nellie Cohen

The Cohen sisters were the daughters of Maurice and Ada Cohen, refugees from Poland who settled in Whitechapel in 1884. Rose was born in 1894. As teenagers, Rose and Nellie joined Sylvia Pankhurst’s radical women’s suffrage Movement in East London.

In 1913, Nellie became Sylvia Pankhurst’s personal secretary. Nellie and Rose moved into a flat on Grays Inn Road with two comrades from the East London Federation of Suffragettes. Everyone in the flat became Communists.

In March 1917, Sylvia addressed a meeting organised by the East London Jewish community to welcome the overthrow of the Tsar. The Cohen sisters shared this enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution.

In 1919, Sylvia tried to set up a communist organisation in Nellie and Rose’s flat and appointed Nellie to an organisation which built support for Soviet Russia. Rose became a prominent figure in the group which won the approval of the Comintern, the Communist Party of Great Britain, founded in 1921.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Rose was entrusted with a series of missions for the Comintern, taking her to Paris, Moscow and Berlin. Rose met David Petrovsky, a Comintern agent. They married and, in 1929, Rose gave birth to their son Alexey in Moscow, where she had settled.

That same year, Nellie had a daughter, Joyce. The father was a married man who was unaware of Nellie’s pregnancy. Nellie’s friend went to live in New York’s communist circles. She returned to England and worked in the Soviet Embassy in London.

In Moscow in the 1930s, Rose worked as the foreign editor of the USSR’s only English-language newspaper, the Moscow Daily News. In the late 1930s, a wave of arrests and executions were unleashed on the Soviet populace. In 1937 Stalin’s secret police came for Rose and her husband.

David Petrovsky was arrested and executed in September. Rose was also arrested, distraught at the fate of her son. Prominent British Communists such as Harry Pollitt appealed for her life.

Nellie did not grasp the severity of her sister’s situation. On 14 August 1937, she wrote a letter to her sister filled with family anecdotes. The letter was returned to sender. Three months later, Rose was executed.

Nellie remained a committed member of the Parliament Hill Fields branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain until her death in 1979.

Revolution, Guns and Peace: Anastasia Bitsenko (1875-1938)

Anastasia Bitsenko was born into a peasant family in a small village but managed to qualify as a teacher. During a famine in 1899, she organised communal kitchens. She then went to Moscow to continue her studies. There, she met and married Mikhail Bitsenko, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In 1901, they were arrested and banished from Moscow for organising student disorders.

In 1903, Anastasia left her husband and travelled to St Petersburg, where she became a full-time activist for the Social Revolutionaries (SR). The next year, she joined a member of a women’s terrorist group which planned to assassinate the minister of the interior, but she was betrayed, arrested and exiled to the Arctic Circle. Anastasia escaped and returned to Moscow, where she was in charge of organising rail workers before joining a SR flying combat detachment.

In 1905 Anastasia volunteered to assassinate the Minister of War, who had brutally repressed a peasant revolt. She marched into his office, placed a draft of his death sentence on his desk and shot him dead. She was arrested and sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment. She spent 11 years in penal servitude.

Anastasia was released by the February Revolution of 1917. During the October Revolution, she served on the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets. Anastasia was a highly-respected revolutionary.

She was appointed to the Soviet delegation to the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations which ended the fighting on the Eastern Front. Sitting amidst the uniformed Generals, with their medals and monocles, Bitsenko stood out as the only women present, and almost certainly the only delegate who had shot a minister of war.

Back in Russia in November 1918, she joined the Communist Party and served on several important committees. Anastasia fell victim to Stalin’s purges. She was sentenced to death and shot on 16 June 1938.

Rebellious Daughters of history #16

by Judy Cox

International revolutionary Angelica Balabanoff (1878-1965)

Angelica Balabanoff, was by any standards an extraordinary person. Born to Jewish parents, in Kiev, Ukraine in 1878, she left home aged 19 to study at a radical university in Brussels where she met Russian and Italian Marxists.

After graduating, she continued to study under the Marxist philosopher, Antonio Labriola then she settled in Switzerland becoming a lecturer and journalist for the Italian Socialist Party. She was the party’s delegate to the Congresses of the Second International in 1907 and 1910.

In 1910, Angelica moved to Italy where she organised low-paid immigrant women in the textile factories. She served on the Socialist Party’s central committee and co-edited the party’s paper, Avanti. She opposed the First World War and was active in the anti-war Zimmerwald Movement.

In 1917, she returned to Russia to support the revolution and was deeply moved by what she witnessed:

‘You cannot form any idea of what is taking place here. One witnesses daily the miracle of re-organization of an old, decrepit and rotten system which only the new regenerative forces can put life into; one looks on at this work of constant renewal going on amidst attempts to boycott it, to sabotage and blockade it in all directions.

The spectacle is infinitely inspiring; it fills you with pride; it revivifies your faith in human power and the divine potency of the ideal’.

Angelica became secretary to the Communist International in 1919, working alongside Lenin and Trotsky. She opposed the measures they took to defeat the White Armies during the Civil War and left Russia, eventually settling in New York where she campaigned to raise awareness of the danger represented by Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism.

At the end of the Second World War, Angelica travelled once again to Italy and resumed her activity in Italian socialist politics. She died in Rome in 1965. In her memoir, My Life as a Rebel, Angelica wrote,

‘The experience of over 40 years has only intensified my socialist convictions and if I has my life to live over again, I would dedicate it to the same objectives’.

Disability and Socialism: Helen Keller (1880-1968)

Keller is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities. She was also a suffragette, pacifist, and radical socialist.

Helen was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her family were confederates. When she was 19 months old, Keller contracted an illness which left her both deaf and blind. In 1886, Keller, was referred to Alexander Graham Bell and went to an institute where she met Anne Sullivan, who became Keller’s instructor and life-long companion.

Helen joined the American Socialist Pary in 1909 and by 1912, she had become a national voice for socialism. In 1913, Helen joined the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) saying that parliamentary socialism was “sinking in the political bog”.

In 1916 she supported strikes against World War One. She welcomed the Russian Revolution and defended Lenin and campaigned for an end to the blockade on soviet Russia. Many of her speeches and writings were about women’s right to vote. The FBI kept a file on Helen.

In the 1930s, Helen became increasingly isolated from socialism although she never stopped campaigning for the disabled.

In “Why I Became an IWW”, Keller explained her motivation for activism:

“I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers”.

Keller also cited the 1912 strike of women textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts for inspiring her support of socialism.

In 1911 she wrote,

“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all … The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor.

The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands—the ownership and control of their livelihoods—are set at naught, we can have neither men’s rights nor women’s rights.

The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”