Cover image for Goddess of anarchy : the life and times of Lucy Parsons, American radical
Goddess of anarchy : the life and times of Lucy Parsons, American radical
Title:
Goddess of anarchy : the life and times of Lucy Parsons, American radical
ISBN:
9780465078998
Edition:
1st ed.
Physical Description:
xv, 447 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
Contents:
Part 1: An enduring Civil War -- Wide-open Waco -- Republican heyday -- Part 2: Gilded Age dynamite -- A local war -- Farewell to the ballot box -- A false alarm? -- Haymarket -- Bitter fruit of braggadocio -- "The dusky goddess of anarchy speaks her mind" -- The blood of my husband -- Part 3: Blatherkite -- Goddess of free speech -- The widow Parsons sets her course -- Variety in life, and its crimes -- Tending the sacred flame of Haymarket -- Wars at home and abroad -- Part 4: The falling curtain of mystery -- Facts and fine-spun theories -- Epilogue.
Genre:
Summary:
Goddess of Anarchy is the biography of the formidable radical activist, writer, and orator Lucy Parsons (1853-1942), also known as Lucia Eldine Gonzalez Parsons, whose long life was entwined with the major radical labor struggles of her turbulent era. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851, Parsons became the wife of Confederate veteran and anarchist organizer Albert R. Parsons, who was unjustly imprisoned and eventually hanged in 1887 for his alleged role in the Haymarket bombing in Chicago. After Albert's imprisonment and death, Parsons forged her own career as orator and labor agitator, editor, free-speech activist, essayist, fiction writer, publisher, and political commentator. A fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a founding member of the Socialist Party of America in 1900, and a cofounder of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, Parsons was one of only a handful of women and the only African American of her era to speak regularly to large crowds throughout the nation. Parsons was a thoughtful critic of Gilded Age America, but also well-known for her rhetorical provocations. She worked closely with, or bitterly against, other labor agitators of her day, including Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, with whom she had a feud about the sexual liberation of women. And yet Lucy Parsons' life was shrouded in contradictions, marked by a series of traumas and personal tragedies. Historian Jacqueline Jones presents here a nuanced portrait of Parsons, reckoning with all of her paradoxes--her consistent advocacy of violence, her made-up Hispanic-Indian identity, and her refusal to acknowledge her African descent and the plight of African-Americans --
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