Skip to Main Content

Strike! The Radical Insurrections of Ellen Dawson

Online ISBN:
9780813038674
Print ISBN:
9780813034867
Publisher:
University Press of Florida
Book

Strike! The Radical Insurrections of Ellen Dawson

David Lee McMullen
David Lee McMullen
University of South Florida
Find on
Published online:
14 September 2011
Published in print:
1 July 2010
Online ISBN:
9780813038674
Print ISBN:
9780813034867
Publisher:
University Press of Florida

Abstract

This book is a biography of Ellen Dawson (1900–1967), a Scottish woman who participated in three of the largest and most dramatic textile strikes in U.S. history—Passaic, New Jersey; New Bedford, Massachusetts; and Gastonia, North Carolina. She helped organize the National Textile Workers Union and became the first woman elected to a national leadership position in an American textile union. She spent her formative years in the Glasgow area as a young worker during Scotland's most radical period of labor history. With her family she moved first to England and then to the United States in search of economic survival. As a textile worker in Passaic, she became a leader in the communist-inspired strike of 1926. Later a labor activist working with both the American Federation of Labor and the Communist Party, she traveled to the Soviet Union and was elected to the executive committee of the American Communist Party. This book investigates Dawson's background and the events surrounding her life, as well as the events she participated in to understand why she became a leading labor activist. It provides an unrivaled perspective of early American communists during the 1920s and 1930s, one that ignores the distortions so commonly applied during the Cold War.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close