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"Sexuality and Self-Narration: the 'Rebel Girl' Reconsidered."
"Sexuality and Self-Narration: the 'Rebel Girl' Reconsidered."
Best remembered as the “Rebel Girl” who led landmark strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts (1912), and Paterson, New Jersey (1913) for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964) has been forgotten as the mature woman who pushed a feminist agenda within the Communist Party (CP) from the mid-1930s through 1950. This presentation highlights how Flynn’s unorthodox sexuality prevented her from narrating the full story of her life, limiting our knowledge of the feminist past. Like many men and women on the “Old Left,” Flynn divided her personal life from her political life, but as a woman, she contended with an extra dose of repression. Even as the “Rebel Girl,” she abided by rules of respectability flaunted by elite women and inapplicable to men. From 1926-1936, Flynn lived in a domestic partnership with a woman, but she never identified as a lesbian. In 1937, when she became a communist, she repudiated the “freakishness and bohemianism” of previous leftist movements. Thus, she found herself unable to narrate the story of her life beyond 1926. As a communist leader, Flynn enjoyed a string of short-term relationships with younger men, but she kept them a secret. Flynn’s unorthodox sexuality never fit neatly into her persona as a working-class leader. Her long career provides an opportunity to examine how she navigated the tensions between her belief in “free love,” changing sexual mores, and the political demands of the movements she served.