Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution

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.

MARY ANNE TRASCIATTI is Professor of Rhetoric and Director of Labor Studies at Hofstra University. Her recent books are Where Are the Workers? Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites (co-edited with Robert Forrant) and Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (co-edited with Edvige Giunta). As president of Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition she led the project to build the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Memorial, New York City’s first labor memorial, which was dedicated in October 2023.