Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution

Mary Anne Trasciatti author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Rutgers University Press

Publishing:17th Jun '25

£29.99

This title is due to be published on 17th June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn cover

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was involved in almost every major campaign of the U.S. Left in the first two thirds of the twentieth century. An outstanding orator, writer, and tactician, Flynn is one of the most important figures in the history of the American labor movement. Inspired by the Irish freedom struggle and appalled by the exploitation and grinding poverty she saw around her, she devoted her life to the advancement of civil liberties. Here, Mary Anne Trasciatti traces Flynn’s personal and political life to explore the broader social issues of a fraught era.
 
Born in 1890, Flynn began her activist career by joining the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) when she was just sixteen, and she ended it as the first female chair of the American Communist Party, a position she held from 1961 until her death in 1964. In the intervening years she organized workers into unions, led strikes, championed women’s rights, supported anti-imperialist movements around the globe, protested deportation, advocated for prison reform, and fought for Black liberation. Above all, she showed absolute devotion to workers and their struggles.
 
Slandered as an “un-American” in the anticommunist fervor of the 1940s and 1950s, Flynn was eventually ousted from the very organization she helped found, the American Civil Liberties Union, and imprisoned for two years. Though her own movement abandoned her, her commitment to the cause never wavered. This stirring biography illuminates Flynn’s inspiring life and worldview and returns her to her rightful place at the heart of labor and civil liberties history.

“It is certainly time, actually past time, for a revival of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's saga and her reputation. Guided by the continuing thread of Flynn's civil liberties work, Trasciatti’s Elizabeth Gurley Flynn will be the book to bring her back.” -- Paul Buhle * coeditor of Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson *
"Elizabeth Gurley Flynn represents an important addition to the scholarship on the history of the American Left. Trasciatti weaves the personal together very effectively with the political in the presentation of significant new documentation and the breadth of Flynn's activism.” -- Norman Markowitz * author of The Rise and Fall of the People's Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941- *

ISBN: 9781978817579

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 454g

384 pages