Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley (1890–1964)

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the daughter of workingclass socialists, was born August 7, 1890, in Concord, New Hampshire. A founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a prominent Communist Party member, she was incarcerated under the McCarthy era in the federal prison for women at Alderson. Her account of her imprisonment that she published in the book The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner sheds light on an important period of U.S. penal history.

Biographical Details

Flynn joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1906 and at the age of 16, and gave her first speech at the Harlem Socialist Club, What Socialism Will Do for Women. Subsequent to this speech and due to her political activism, Flynn was expelled from high school. One year later, in 1907, Flynn became a full-time organizer for the IWW. In this capacity, she traveled and took part in the IWW's “free speech” campaigns in several cities as far west as Missoula, Montana, and Spokane, Washington.

Photo 1

None
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Back east, Flynn helped organize campaigns for a wide variety of industrial workers in several different cities: garment workers in Pennsylvania; the textile strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts; the strike of 1913 that involved silk weavers in Paterson, New Jersey; restaurant workers in New York; and finally, the iron miners' strike of 1916 in Mesabi, Minnesota. During these years of traveling and organizing campaigns, speaking out, and raising relief and legal defense funds on behalf of industrial workers, Flynn was arrested 10 times but never convicted of any criminal activity.

In 1918, Flynn helped establish the Workers' Liberty Defense Union and served as secretary until 1922. In 1920, she was a founding member of the ACLU and in 1927 to 1930 she chaired the International Labor Defense. Flynn was particularly concerned with women's rights and was a supporter of birth control and women's suffrage. During this time, Flynn also focused her attention on legal defense issues of labor and was a political activist for aliens who were threatened with deportation for their political views and affiliations.

Communism

In 1936, Flynn joined the Communist Party and made her first speech in 1937 as a Communist in Madison Square Garden. She wrote a feminist biweekly column for the Daily Worker and was also active in the women's commission as chair for the next 10 years. In 1940, due to her Communist Party membership, Flynn was removed from the national committee of the ACLU. Two years later, she ran for Congress at large in New York City, and although she lost she nonetheless received 50,000 votes.

In July 1948, 12 leaders of the Communist Party were arrested and falsely accused of advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence. Flynn initiated a campaign for their release, but found herself arrested in June 1951 in a second wave of arrests under the infamous anti-Communist witch-hunt. On January 24, 1952, after a nine-month trial, Flynn was found guilty and was incarcerated in the Federal Reformatory at Alderson in West Virginia. Flynn described her experiences in Alderson in The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution