America's most "dangerous" women!

Radical women who made a big difference in the United States

Greetings Gold and Silver Level Templar Knights! You may not realise this but the United States was shaped by women who were deemed to be very dangerous during their lifetimes. Let’s go meet them.

At the turn of the twentieth century, America was rocked by rebel movements led by women described by polite society and the powers-that-be as utterly dangerous. Women who advocated bombing, assassination, strikes, smashing of property, and generally breaking the law. In every area of protest, it was female voices that led the way. These were the dangerous women of the Gilded Age.

Emma Goldman - the Queen of Anarchism

Described by President Teddy Roosevelt as the most dangerous woman in America - Lithuanian-born Emma Goldman (1869-1940) is a largely forgotten name today but in the early years of the twentieth century, she struck terror into mainstream American society. Accused repeatedly of being the architect of several high-profile political assassinations around the world - in particular, the shocking murder of President William McKinley in September, 1901. McKinley lingered - fighting off death for eight days - while Chicago police took Goldman in for questioning.

The anarchist who fired the fatal bullet at McKinley - Leon Czolgosz - was indeed known to Goldman, though she had suspected he was a police spy. In what was most likely a desperate bid to win her favour, Czolgosz carried out the third presidential assassination in American history and went to the electric chair for his crime. In the round up of suspects that followed, Goldman was both vilified in the newspapers and interrogated by senior cops. But she did not share Czolgosz's fate.

Not that Goldman emerged from the police station chastened and silent. While most of America was in shock and mourning after McKinley's untimely death, she fulminated against the dead man days later as "the president of money kings and trust magnates".

There's no doubt that Goldman was involved in plotting the killing of political enemies. In 1892, she planned the murder of Henry Clay Frick, a steel plant manager who was an implacable foe of the trade union movement. Whereas most socialists and trade unionists opted for the weapons of strikes and demonstrations - Goldman and her fellow anarchists subscribed to the 'propaganda of the deed'. By committing an audacious act - like an assassination - they could provoke the working class into revolution.

This notion was dismissed contemptuously by Marxists like Leon Trotsky and the first leader of the Soviet Union - Vladimir Lenin. They argued that a mass movement could not be replaced by the actions of individuals. Lenin soon incurred the wrath of the world's anarchists and one of them - a woman called Fanny Kaplan - fired two bullets into Lenin that remained in his body until his death. The Bolsheviks had just got rid of capital punishment but brought it back especially for Fanny who, unlike Lenin, did succumb to a bullet.

Carrie Nation - American woman with a dangerous hatchet

Carrie Nation (1846-1911) brought her own reign of terror to the United States at the same time Emma Goldman was preaching anarchy. The object of Carrie's anger was alcohol and her favoured tactic to achieve prohibition was to smash up saloons with her hatchet. She was soon joined by other like-minded women. At packed out events, Carrie would sell photographs, books, and hatchets to eager ladies.

She extended her campaign to tobacco stores as well. In 1901, Joseph Wallenstein's cigar store in New York got an unwelcome visit from Carrie Nation in person who informed the proprietor that he was committing a moral crime by selling the "pernicious weed". When he begged to differ, she smashed his display case.

In 1964, one of Carrie Nation's teenage helpers appeared on the quiz panel show, I've Got A Secret - revealing that back in 1901, she had smashed up a saloon with her hero. It's a very touching moment.

Mother Jones - radical trade union activist

At exactly the same time that Emma Goldman was plotting her bombings and Carrie Nation was conducting her hatchet raids - "Mother" Jones (1837-1930) was becoming the scourge of America's industrial bosses as the country's most radical union organiser. Born in Ireland as Mary Harris Jones, she was radicalised after her husband and children died of yellow fever and her dress shop was destroyed in The Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

She became a leading activist in the United Mine Workers Union. One of my fourth cousins - on the Irish side of my family - was a miner and member of the same union. His name was P.F. Gatens and he addressed a ten-thousand-strong rally alongside Mother Jones in September, 1918. But it seems to have been a disease super-spreader event. A month later, he and two of his children died of Spanish flu - which was sweeping through the US and Europe at the time.

The high point of her life was the 1901 march of children working in the silk mills of Pennsylvania. What shocked Mother Jones was that by being forced through poverty to work, the kids were denied any education. And their wages were also pitiful. A female reporter went to a mill area to meet some of the striking child workers, one of whom approached her clutching a doll.

She described their "little old faces and bent forms". They thought the reporter might be Mother Jones so she had to let them down gently. Disheartened, one of them murmured: "They say that strikers always win when they have Mother Jones to help them." The reporter noted that they seemed to view their absent hero as "a sort of all wise female providence who always turned up just in the nick of time to take the side of the striker against the employer". She didn't have the heart to tell the children that Mother Jones was hundreds of miles away.

Mother Jones had frequent brushes with the law. In court, one district attorney said this of her: "There sits the most dangerous woman in America. She comes into a state where peace and prosperity reign... crooks her finger, [and] twenty thousand contented men lay down their tools and walk out."

Mother Jones (pictured below) criss-crossed the United States organising pickets, strikes, and marches. But curiously, she was less bothered about women getting the vote. To her - class was everything. She once said "you don't need the vote to raise hell!" That was most certainly not the view of the next dangerous American woman.

Women's Suffrage - getting the vote!

Mother Jones may not have cared too much about women getting the vote but other campaigners did. The veteran American voice for votes was Susan Anthony (1820-1906) who worked closely in later decades with Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902).

They were old enough to have been involved in the campaigns against slavery during the American Civil War yet opposed the franchise for African American men - not because they didn't think black people should vote but because they wanted all women included in the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution - universal suffrage in other words. However, their stance did irritate African-American activists.

Susan (right) and Elizabeth (left) are pictured below.