Parsons, Lucy Eldine.

Mrs. L.E. Parsons. [Caption title].

Chicago: Jac Maul, [1880s]. Cabinet card photograph measuring 5 3/8” x 3 7/8” on larger card mount. Very good with a patch of yellow coloring along the top and some staining/foxing to the photograph and mount.

This is a rare cabinet card depicting an extraordinary woman, Lucy E. Parsons. Parsons was a social anarchist who was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World. There are different versions of Parsons' early life: she herself said she was of mixed Mexican and Native American ancestry; historians believe she was born to an African American slave, possibly in Virginia, then perhaps married a Black freedman in Texas. She met the activist Albert Parsons in Waco, Texas, and claimed to have married him although no records have been found. They moved to Chicago together in late 1873 and her left-wing ideology was shaped by the harsh repression of workers in the Chicago railroad strike of 1877. She argued for labor organization and class struggle, writing polemical texts and speaking at events. She joined the Workingmen's Party of the United States and later the Knights of Labor, and she set up the Chicago Working Women's Union with her friend Lizzie Swank and other women.

Parsons had two children and worked in Chicago as a seamstress, later opening her own shop. After her husband was executed in 1887 following his conviction for being a ringleader in the Haymarket affair, she became internationally famous as an anarchist speaker, touring frequently across the United States and visiting England. In the decades following the 1917 Russian Revolution, Parsons moved towards communism. The Chicago police regarded her as a dangerous political figure and attempted many times to stop her from speaking publicly. She continued her activism as she grew older, clashing with the anarchist Emma Goldman over their differing attitudes to free love and supporting challenges to miscarriages of justice in the cases of Angelo Herndon, Tom Mooney, and the Scottsboro Boys. She died in a house fire on March 7, 1942.

This view of Parsons is slightly different than that of the ones previously seen in commerce in the last ten years including the photo sold at Swann in 2020. OCLC locates a photo by a different photographer than this one. Very good. Item #9147

Price: $3,250.00