Rebellious Daughters of History #10

by Judy Cox

Dora Montefiore (1851-1933): suffragist, pacifist, communist

Dora Fuller was born on 20th December, 1851. She was educated at home, and then at a private school in Brighton. In 1874 she went to Australia, where she met George Barrow Montefiore, a wealthy businessman. They lived in Sydney, where their daughter was born in 1883 and their son in 1887. Her husband died on 17th July 1889. She became an advocate of women’s rights and in March 1891 she established the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales.

On returning to England in 1892 she worked with Millicent Fawcett at the National Union of Suffrage Societies. She also joined the Social Democratic Federation and eventually served on its executive. She also contributed to its journal, Justice.

During the Boer War Montefiore “refused willingly to pay income tax, because payment of such tax went towards financing a war in the making of which I had had no voice.” Bailiffs sold her goods at public auctions.

Montefiore joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1905 and worked closely with Sylvia Pankhurst in London. In 1906 Dora Montefiore refused to pay her taxes until women were granted the vote.

Outside her home she placed a banner that read: “Women should vote for the laws they obey and the taxes they pay.” This resulted in her Hammersmith home being besieged by bailiffs for six weeks.

In October 1906 Dora was arrested during a WSPU demonstration and was sent to Holloway prison. Dora left the WSPU in 1906 but she remained close to Sylvia Pankhurst, who shared a belief in socialism.

In the autumn of 1907, Dora and seventy other members of the WSPU left to form the Women’s Freedom League (WFL). In 1907 Montefiore joined the Adult Suffrage Society and was elected its honorary secretary in 1909. She also remained in the Social Democratic Federation. Montefiore was pre-eminently a journalist and pamphleteer. Most of her pamphlets were on women and socialism.

On 31st July, 1920, Dora was among a group of revolutionary socialists who attended a meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel in London and agreed to form the Communist Party of Great Britain. She became a close friend of Alexandra Kollontai.

After the death of her son from the delayed effects of mustard gas in 1921 he had suffered on the western front.

Dora died on 21st December 1933, at her home in Hastings, and was cremated at Golders Green, Middlesex.

Here is a letter from kollontai to Dora Montefiore.

Rebellious Nurses of History: Mary Mahoney (1845-1926)

Mary Mahoney was first black American woman to complete nurse’s training in 1879.

Mary Mahoney was born on May 7, 1845, in Boston, Massachusetts. She challenged racist discrimination to be admitted to the nursing school of the New England Hospital for Women and Children, and became the first black woman to complete nurse’s training in 1879.

Mahoney campaigned against racism in the nursing profession. In 1896, she joined the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada (NAAUSC). The NAAUSC consisted mainly of white members, many holding openly racist views. Mahoney felt that a group was needed which advocated for the equality of African American nurses.

In 1908, she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). In the following year, at the NACGN’s first national convention, she gave the opening speech. At the convention, the organization’s members elected Mahoney to be the national chaplain and gave her a life membership.

Mary was one of the first women to register to vote in Boston following the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Mahoney was inducted into both the Nursing Hall of Fame and the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She died in Boston in 1926.

Rebellious Daughter of History #9

By Judy Cox

Sarah Parker Redmond (1826-1894) Abolitionist,suffragist and activist

Sarah Parker Remond was an African American slavery abolitionist, lecturer and physician. Her anti-slavery campaign, which she began at just 16 years old, took her across America and on to Britain and Europe – where she tirelessly condemned the atrocities happening in her country.

Sarah was born in 1826 in Salem, Massachusetts, one of eight siblings. Her older brother, Charles Lenox Remond, became an anti-slavery lecturer; and Nancy, Caroline, and Sarah, were all active in the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. That Society was founded by black women including Sarah’s mother in 1832.

The Remond children suffered from racism. Sarah was refused admission to Salem’s high school. The family had to move to Rhode Island, so the daughters could attend a private school for African American children.

In 1842, when Sarah was sixteen, she gave her first public lecture on the horrors of slavery. In 1853 Sarah attended an opera and refused to leave a section reserved for whites. When a policeman forcibly ejected her, she fell down some stairs. She sued in a civil suit, winning five hundred dollars, and an end to segregated seating at the hall.

In 1856, Sarah toured New York lecturing on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
She shocked audiences by describing the sexual violence endured by female slaves. In 1859 she sailed to Liverpool, writing to a friend, ‘I fear not the wind and the waves, I know however I go, the spirit of prejudice will greet me’.

At her overflowing UK lectures, Remond told audiences of thousands of the horrors of slavery and of the discrimination and indignities suffered by ‘free black’ people in the US. She was thought to be the first woman to denounce slavery in front of mass audiences.

Thousands of workers, including many women, in the textile districts of Lancashire heard Sarahs’ powerful denunciations of slavery:

“I appeal on behalf of four million men, women and children who are chattels in the Southern States of America, not because they are identical with my race and colour, though I am proud of that identity, but because they are men and women.”

During the American Civil War, the campaign led by Sarah and other black activists played a role in cementing support for the North among textile workers, despite the hardships caused by the blockade of US cotton. Karl Marx wrote that this support for the North was one of the highest points reached by the British working class.

Sarah became the first black woman to enrol at Bedford College in London, a college offering education to women. She also became a founder member of the influential Ladies’ London Emancipation Society. After the war, she raised funds to support free black people and campaigned against British brutality against slave rebellions.

Sarah moved to Florence, Italy. She enrolled at a medical college and fulfilled a lifelong ambition by training as a nurse. She married an Italian man in 1877. Sarah died in Rome in 1894 and was buried there in the Protestant cemetery.

The indefatigable Anne Knight (1786–1862)

Anne Knight devoted her considerable energies to defeating slavery and establishing women’s rights. Anne was born in Chelmsford in November 1781 to a family of Quakers who were pacifists and social reformers. In the 1830s Anne set up a women’s anti-slavery society in Chelmsford.

In early 1833 Anne Initiated a national women’s petition against slavery. It was signed by 298,785 women, the largest single anti-slavery petition in the movement’s history.

In 1834 Anne Knight toured France where she gave lectures on need for the immediate abolition of slavery without compensation.

Anne attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention held at Exeter Hall in London, in June 1840. But as a woman she was refused permission to speak, a move she bitterly criticised.

In 1847 Anne published a leaflet which argued: “Never will the nations of the earth be well governed, until both sexes, as well as all parties, are fully represented and have an influence, a voice, and a hand in the enactment and administration of the laws”.

Knight became active in the Chartist movement despite criticising them for not supporting women’s right to vote. In a letter published in the Brighton Herald in 1850 she demanded that the Chartists should campaign for what she described as “true universal suffrage”.

In 1848 Anne was in Paris. She was active in the revolution, joining with with French female socialists to press for women’s rights. She attended a conference on world peace held in 1849. In 1851 Anne Knight and Anne Kent established the Sheffield Female Political Association.

Later that year the Associated published an “Address to the Women of England” which was presented to parliament. This was the first mass petition that demanded women’s suffrage.

Anne Knight died on 4th November, 1862.

Rebellious Daughters of History #8

by Judy Cox

Louise Otto Peters (1815-1895): ‘The Lace-makers’ (1840)

Born in March 1819 to a middle-class family, Louise Otto-Peters was educated at home by a radical father. After his death, she established herself as a writer to support herself and her sisters, publishing volumes of socially committed novels and poems.

Her 1845 book, Schloss und Fabrik (Castle and Factory), was influenced by Frederick Engels’ ‘Condition of the British Working Classes’ and explores the possibility of women’s freedom. The work was censored by the German government because it exposed treatment of both male and female factory workers. It was not published in full until 1989.

Otto-Peters moved to Leipzig in 1848, where she participated in 1848 Revolution, becoming known as ‘The Red Democrat’. In 1849 she founded the Frauen-Zeitung, a newspaper devoted to women’s issues, the papers motto was: ‘Female Citizens in the Republic of Liberty’. The government of Saxony introduced a law to stop women editing newspapers known as the the ‘Otto Law’.

In 1858 Louise Otto Peters married the writer and journalist August Peters. The couple had fallen in love during the 1848 revolution but Peters served seven years in prison because of his activism. In October 1865, Louise Otto-Peters helped to establish the General German Women’s Association which campaigned for economic and political rights for women.

The next German women to edit a paper was Clara Zetkin in 1891. Zetkin paid this tribute to Otto-Peters: ‘she wanted to put into practice the dream she had in the 1849s: full equality for her sex; full equality for workers’ Zetkin will be tomorrow’s rebellious woman.

The Lace-Makers (1840)

See the women making lace
Pallid cheeks and eyes so red!
Tired out, and all for nothing,
Nothing but the coarsest bread!

Grandma’s eyes are blinded now,
Only death will set her free,
Wringing hands, she quietly prays:
God help us in extremity.

The children move their little hands,
Up and down the bobbins fling.
Toil and trouble without end
Is what their future life will bring.

God protect each little Miss
Who nothing knows of youthful zest –
For poverty embraces all;
Want snuggles into every breast.

See the women making lace,
Pillow lace, a work of art;
Rich and famous – do not scruples
Linger in your inner heart?

While they decline, you feast and spend,
And savour life in luxury,
Meanwhile these women starve and die,
Released, at last from misery!

See the women making lace
Is not your faith hypocrisy?
All their belief extinguished now,
They call your faith apostasy!

See the woman making lace,
Have you no mercy for her plight?
For else your final waking hour
Will reap her curse from pain and blight!

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933): , revolutionary socialist

Clara Eissner, the daughter of a schoolteacher was born in Saxony, on 5th July, 1857. When the Social Democratic Party (SDP) was formed in 1875, Clara joined. In 1878 Otto von Bismarck introduced the anti-socialist law which banned SDP meetings and publications so Clara left Germany for to live in exile in Zurich and Paris.

Clara married Ossip Zetkin, a Russian revolutionary who was also living in exile. Ossip was a carpenter and a Marxist. In 1883, her son Maxim, was born, followed by Kostya in 1885. In Paris Clara and Ossip became members of the international socialist group which discussed Marxist theory.

Ossip Zetkin died of tuberculosis in January, 1889. Clara continued with her political campaigns and supporting women workers in their demand for higher wages. When the anti-socialist laws were lifted in 1890, Zetkin returned to Germany. Membership of the SDP grew rapidly.

In 1891 Clara Zetkin became editor of the SPD’s journal, Die Gleichheit (Equality). Zetkin took the circulation from 11,000 in 1903 to 67,000. Zetkin changed her views on women’s suffrage, which she had dismissed as a middle-class movement, and helped to organize the first International Conference of Socialist Women in Struttgart.

Clara Zetkin initiated International Women’s Day in 1910 at an International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen.

Clara campaigned with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht against the right wing of the party. This fight came to a head when war broke out on 4th August, 1914. While the leaders of the socialists parties across Europe collapsed into nationalism, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were among a tiny group of socialists who opposed the war as an imperialist war.

As anger against the horrors of war began to grow, Zetkin used her position as editor of the Die Gleichheit (Equality) and as Secretary of the Women’s Secretariat of the Socialist International to campaign for the anti-war movement at international conferences

The left began to organise this growing anger against the war. They set up the Spartacus League which initiated demonstrations and argued that socialists should turn this nationalist conflict into a revolutionary war.

On 28th June 1916, Liebknecht was arrested 55,000 munitions workers went on strike. The government responded by arresting trade union leaders and conscripting them into the Army. In April 1917 Clara Zetkin joined other left-wing members of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) formed the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD).

The German revolution began with a naval mutiny in November. By the evening of 4th November, Kiel was firmly in the hands of about 40,000 rebellious sailors, soldiers and workers. By the 8th November, workers councils sprang up in every major town and city in Germany.

The leaders of the Social Democratic Party were now in government and rushed to deflect the revolution. They set up a provisional government and announced elections to a constitutional assembly would be held.

On the 5th January, Frederich Ebert called in the German Army and the Freikorps to bring an end to the uprising in Berlin. By January, 1919 the rebellion had been crushed and most of its leaders were arrested. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who refused to flee the city, and were captured on 16th January and taken to the Freikorps headquarters and murdered.

Clara was devastated by the death of her great friends and comrades but continued to fight. She was elected to the new Constituent Assembly. On 29th January 1919, she was the first woman to speak in a German parliament. In the speech she delivered an attack on Friedrich Ebert.

In January, 1919 the Spartacus League changed its name to the German Communist Party (KPD). Clara Zetkin joined served on the Central Committee of the KPD. She was also appointed to the executive committee of Comintern.

A life-long anti-racist, Zetkin took part in the international protests against Jim Crow laws in the United States. She also campaigned against the conviction of the Scotsboro Boys.

In 1932, Zetkin, although seventy-five years old, was once again elected to the Reichstag. In her speech, she denounced the Nazi Party. Clara Zetkin died on 20th June, 1933.