| Abstract |
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was an agitator and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, an official for the Communist Party, and one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. She was notorious, dubbed 'The Rebel Girl', and, for more than half a century, she was a professional revolutionary against capitalism. The eldest daughter of a family of reformers and activists, she spoke, organised workers, led immigrant worker's strikes, and wrote pamphlets, articles and books with the aim of convincing the public that private ownership and the profit system was inhumane. An excellent orator, she left a permanent record of her protest campaigns through her writings, which call attention to the critical issues of the twentieth century: war, poverty, sexism and civil liberties. Many of the papers in this collection are concerned with Flynn's political activities and her time in the Communist Party (1937-1964), although some cover her earlier years, including the papers of her son, Fred Flynn. Made up of correspondence, biographical sketches, autobiographical notes, telegrams, published and unpublished articles, speeches and poems, diaries, itineraries, clippings, programmes, invitations, course materials, documents pertaining to legal proceedings and files produced by various government agencies, alongside printed materials, including election campaign literature, annotated books, galley proofs and articles and pamphlets the material tells the story of a lesser known, but nonetheless significant, figure of the feminist movement. |
| General note | Includes the following subcollections: Series I: Family and early life, 1896-1907; Series II: The Rebel girl and the industrial workers of the world, 1907-1917; Series III: Defense activities, 1917-1927; Series IX: Files obtained by Rosalyn Baxandall and Helen Camp under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA); Series V: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's "Second life," 1937-1952; Series VI: Smith Act Defense, 1951-1955; Series VII: Alderson Penitentiary, 1955-1957; Series VIII: Final years and after, 1959-1979. |
