While Mother Jones started her activist life approaching 60 years of age, Gurley Flynn started hers as a 16-year-old schoolgirl, calling on American workers to rise in front of a red flag on a makeshift stage on a New York street corner. Quickly becoming a ‘jawsmith’ (orator) for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), she was devoted to women, the working class, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism. Gurley Flynn was dedicated to women’s rights but saw feminism as bourgeois. She was a key figure in a generation of activists who saw class-based organization as key to the emancipation of women. She believed that women could never be free under capitalism; that only socialism could eradicate poverty and women’s economic dependence on men. She exemplifies intersectional feminism, recognising that the universal category of woman did not acknowledge the additional struggles faced by African American women, for example.

Gurley Flynn’s Irish parents were committed socialists and atheists, who imbued their children with a hatred of capitalism and empire. Annie Gurley encouraged her daughters to aspire to meaningful careers; she continued to work as a seamstress after marriage, at times supporting the household. While Gurley Flynn married at nineteen and had a son, this never defined her and she was determined to be financially self-sufficient (except during her ten-year relationship with the physician, Dr Marie Equi, when she rarely left their Portland home).

As a single parent, with the support of her mother and sister, she maintained her political commitments and gruelling schedule of US-wide public talks. When she started her career with the IWW (or ‘Wobblies’), workplace disputes commonly involved violence, long-drawn-out strikes, and lockouts. She was a brilliant strategist who pioneered new tactics, such as getting workers to sit idle at their machines, which eliminated ‘scab’ labour and prevented lockouts.

By 1910, she was the leading woman in the IWW. She also began to publicly advocate for women’s access to birth control, when it was still illegal to advertise such products in the press. In 1936, after a ten-year hiatus in Portland, Gurley Flynn returned to New York and joined the Communist Party, rising rapidly through its ranks. During the Cold War, communists were harassed and imprisoned as ‘un-American’. Gurley Flynn was one of over 100 communists imprisoned for their views in the 1950s, spending 28 months in the maximum-security wing of Alderson Female Penitentiary, West Virginia, in 1955–7. She had been in a similar position in 1917, when she and other members of the IWW were charged with ‘seditious conspiracy’, a charge next to treason.

American anti-communism only made Gurley Flynn more resolute in her commitment to freedom of speech and political association. She supported deportees who, under the 1918 Immigration Act, were summarily expelled as ‘alien anarchists’ without warning, and without their families. World War II gave American communists a brief reprieve, thanks to the alliance between the USA and the USSR. Gurley Flynn used this time to build a national platform and a wide support base, and to pursue feminist goals.

Her aims as director of the Women’s Commission of the Communist Party included the representation of women at all levels within the Party ‘against all concepts of male superiority’, and the full enfranchisement of African Americans and poorer women. Fascism, as she saw it, placed women in a subordinate position, so she framed gender equality as anti-fascist against the backdrop of millions of ‘Rosie the Riveters’ filling vacant jobs in factories. By 1943, 50% of the Party’s membership was female.

In 1961, she became the first woman elected head of the American Communist Party. She died on her second visit to Moscow in 1964. Lauded as a heroine in the USSR, she was given a full state funeral and Nina Khrushcheva was one of her pallbearers. Half of her ashes were buried by the Kremlin walls; the other half were conveyed to Chicago. Perhaps too-willing to believe that the ideals to which she had committed her life had been realised in the USSR, she never questioned Soviet propaganda about the quality of women’s lives under communism.

Sources: Lara Vapnek, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary (Westview Press, 2015); Obituary, New York Times, 6 Sept. 1964.

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Melanie Lynch

22 May 2016

English, Business, History, SPHE

JOSEPHINE HART / NOVELIST, POETRY EVANGELIST & THEATRE PRODUCER

Melanie Lynch

22 May 2016

English, Business, History, SPHE

JOSEPHINE HART

Novelist, poetry evangelist & theatre producer

1942 - 2011

Mullingar / London

“Poetry, this trinity of sound, sense and sensibility gives voice to experience in the way that no other form can.” Josephine Hart, born and raised in Mullingar, Ireland was an extraordinary and gifted woman; poetry aficionado, captivating wordsmith and artistic Director – and that’s just grazing the surface of her remarkable life.

Born 1 March 1942, Josephine spent her early years attending a convent school at Carrickmacross, County Monagahan, where she was encouraged by the nuns to recite verse at Irish Festivals. It is here, that she admitted to discovering a great love of poetry: “I was a word child. Poets were not only my heroes, they were indeed the gods of language.”

Josephine had a particularly tragic childhood that gave her an overt and unpleasant familiarity with death. At the age of 6, she lost her 18 month old brother, Charles. Then, when Hart was 17, her younger sister Sheila, who had been brain damaged as a result of meningitis and paralysed from the age of 2, passed away. Six months after Sheila’s death, her brother Owen was killed whilst experimenting with chemicals – leaving Josephine and her brother Diarmuid as the only remaining siblings of the Hart clan. Leading Josephine to remark, “It sounds a very strange thing to say, but when I was really young, when I was 17, I had to look at life really hard and say, ok, I will continue to live.” Josephine then stayed at the family home in Mullingar for four years, immersing herself in reading as a replacement for University, which was her original dream.

Josephine moved to London in 1964, working in telesales and studying drama at evening classes. Fantastically, much to Josephine’s delight, just like her favourite poet, T.S. Eliot, she worked in a bank for a short while. Josephine eventually moved to Haymarket Press and became the firm’s only woman director. She married her colleague Paul Buckley, and had a son, Adam. The marriage lasted 7 years, however when Maurice Saatchi came to work in the firm, he romanced Josephine. The pair had an affair and married in 1984. Maurice and Josephine had a son, Edward.

Josephine, who became Baroness Saatchi when her husband’s Baron status was initiated in 1996, was madly in love with Maurice, and he, her. They had a private relationship that was a meeting of minds as well as passions. Ed Victor (Josephine’s literary agent and friend) commented on their relationship, “I have never seen a couple more intertwined than Maurice and Josephine.”

It was Maurice who encouraged Josephine’s creative career. Having listened to his wife complaining of the lack of poetry events in London, he suggested she started one herself – and thus, the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour was born! From 1987 onwards, Josephine organized incredible poetry readings at the British Library, occasionally visiting the National Theatre or the New York Public Library. Josephine would read about the life and work of the poet, with high-profile actors reading the verse. The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour library now celebrates 16 great poets, with actors ranging from Ralph Fiennes, to Charles Dance, to Bob Geldof to Juliet Stevenson – and beyond. Most recently, her Poetry Hour took to the Abbey Theatre in Ireland with Bob Geldof, Lisa Dwan, Sinead Cusack and Peter Campion reading W.B. Yeats to a standing ovation. All of the readings from the incredible Josephine Hart Poetry Hours can be found at thepoetryhour.com.

Josephine’s poetry collections, Catching Life By the Throat (2006) and Words That Burn (2009) were sent free of charge to all secondary schools in England. Her first two novels, Damage and Sin, were re-published as Virago Modern Classics in 2011, with Damage being adapted for film by Louis Malle, and Sin adapted by Theatre Blu. Her other novels include, Oblivion, The Stillest Day and The Reconstructionist, which was later filmed by Roberto Ando. Her last publication was The Truth about Love, which was published in 2009.

The award-winning The House of Bernarda Alba by Lorca saw Josephine’s West End theatre production debut. She also directed, Noel Coward’s The Vortex, Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince and Let Us Go Then You and I at the Lyric Theatre. Josephine staged the first ever West End production of T.S. Eliot poetry.

In 2011, Josephine was to put on a weeklong poetry event at the Donmar theatre. Without her friends having known her fight against illness, to everyone’s shock, she was absent at the opening night. She passed away on 2 June from primary peritoneal cancer, two days into the Donmar run. She died in her prime from a horrific and rare disease, all whilst remaining secretly strong – she was truly, truly remarkable and the Donmar performances will be remembered forever. Her death was a blow to literature, to her friends, but chiefly of course to her family. Her husband, Maurice Saatchi does not bother to hide or deny his grief. Five years on, he still sets a place at the table for Josephine every day ("Queen Victoria did it for Prince Albert for 42 years" he points out)

Her legacy lives through her husband’s devotion. The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation is having great success amongst education and with their website, whilst Maurice’s Medical Innovation Bill has just been passed through government. Josephine will be remembered eternally, as will her passion, flare for life and gratification of verse. “Poetry, this trinity of sound, sense and sensibility, gives voice to experience in the way that no other art form can”.

A special thanks to Eleanor Carter, Former Director of the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, for this wonderful biography.