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Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical
From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived
Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket "martyr" Albert Parsons-Lucy was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a champion of the working classes, and one of the most prominent figures of African descent of her era. And yet, her life was riddled with contradictions-she advocated violence without apology, concocted a Hispanic-Indian identity for herself, and ignored the plight of African Americans.
Drawing on a wealth of new sources, Jacqueline Jones presents not only the exceptional life of the famous American-born anarchist but also an authoritative account of her times-from slavery through the Great Depression.
Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket "martyr" Albert Parsons-Lucy was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a champion of the working classes, and one of the most prominent figures of African descent of her era. And yet, her life was riddled with contradictions-she advocated violence without apology, concocted a Hispanic-Indian identity for herself, and ignored the plight of African Americans.
Drawing on a wealth of new sources, Jacqueline Jones presents not only the exceptional life of the famous American-born anarchist but also an authoritative account of her times-from slavery through the Great Depression.
480 pages, Hardcover
First published December 5, 2017
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March 2, 2024
Lucy Parsons, a towering figure in the history of anarchism in America, was an enigma, partly of her own making. Born a slave (possibly fathered by her master), she spent most of her life actively denying her African heritage while fashioning other identities. Despite her impassioned agitation for the rights of working people, she ignored and distanced herself from the condition of American Blacks. Despite fashioning herself as a traditional, caring mother in her many speaking engagements, she turned on her son, forcing him into an asylum for the rest of his life. Regardless of the fact that she ignored traditional morals in her own private life, she spoke vehemently against the free love championed by a younger generation of anarchists like Emma Goldman. She was an enigma and a walking contradiction, and I find it hard to warm to her.
Despite this, Lucy Parsons was one of the most significant figures in American anarchism. She rose to fame as the widow of the martyred Albert Parsons of Haymarket fame, and spent much of the rest of her life keeping alive his memory and the infamy of the Haymarket trials. Her talent for fiery rhetoric in writing and public speaking made her an infamous figure in Gilded Age America.
Because Parsons deliberately obfuscated much of her early life, more than half of this book is focused on her husband, Albert Parsons, culminating in his arrest, trial, and execution for the 1886 bombing at Haymarket Square, Chicago. As this was the foundation of Lucy’s fame, and as Haymarket was the single most significant event in the annals of American anarchy, this is wholly appropriate. Lucy’s only truly successful life work was keeping alive the memory of Haymarket and its martyrs, so it makes sense that her biography emphasized it above all else.
Despite this, Lucy Parsons was one of the most significant figures in American anarchism. She rose to fame as the widow of the martyred Albert Parsons of Haymarket fame, and spent much of the rest of her life keeping alive his memory and the infamy of the Haymarket trials. Her talent for fiery rhetoric in writing and public speaking made her an infamous figure in Gilded Age America.
Because Parsons deliberately obfuscated much of her early life, more than half of this book is focused on her husband, Albert Parsons, culminating in his arrest, trial, and execution for the 1886 bombing at Haymarket Square, Chicago. As this was the foundation of Lucy’s fame, and as Haymarket was the single most significant event in the annals of American anarchy, this is wholly appropriate. Lucy’s only truly successful life work was keeping alive the memory of Haymarket and its martyrs, so it makes sense that her biography emphasized it above all else.
August 10, 2018
Lots of interesting information, less thrilled with the author's often obvious disdain for Parsons' politics.
February 3, 2018
In the history of American anarchy, women loom large. Most significant among these may be Emma Goldman, who -to be honest- was something of a stage hog. Not that I don't respect her, but when you read her autobio, the many bios of her, and the first-person recollections of Goldman captured in Paul Avrich's 'Anarchist Voices,' the picture that emerges is of a woman who was committed to an ideal, but also saw herself as the best possible vessel for communicating that ideal. I say this because good ol' Emma was mighty disparaging of her contemporaries: Voltarine DeCleyre and Lucy Parsons.
Strange, the latter. Lucy Parsons was the widow of Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket Martyrs unjustly tried and hanged without evidence for a bomb thrown at a demonstration that killed policemen. Goldman cites the Haymarket affair as having radicalized her. Also, Lucy, not content to be a mere widow, became a vocal anarchist activist, speaking around the country, raising funds for workingmen, spreading the gospel of radical anarchy with an eye to overthrowing the Capitalist system. In short, Lucy paved the way...Emma merely followed in her tracks.
Lucy was and still is an enigma. She was born into slavery, but throughout her life denied her African American roots, claiming instead to be Mexican and Native American. Her husband, a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, took up the cause of the working man after demobbing. He and Lucy first embraced socialism, but soon found it too weak for their tastes and quickly embraced Anarchism under the tutelage of Johann Most.
Most was an advocate of violence, 'propaganda by the deed.' He believed that acts of terror could bring the capitalists to their knees so that the working man could assume control and dissolve the state. Albert agreed, preaching dynamite, telling workers to arm themselves, writing violent diatribes in the radical press. Strong stuff, to say the least.
All this is why, when the Haymarket case came to trial, Albert was convicted more for his ideas than any complicity in the crime. It's the injustice that fired up Emma Goldman and still can raise ire today.
'Goddess of Anarchy' captures all of this in meticulous detail. Jacqueline Jones is a formidable researcher and an able writer. She shows us how Lucy Parsons invented a history for herself and stayed true to it to the very end. We learn about the tragedies in her life: born into slavery, her lost children, the execution of her husband, at marvel at her strength. She has something of the stage hog in her too, mounting stages she was never supposed to mount, speaking her mind in a time when women didn't speak (especially women of color). Still, there is much to respect.
This is a powerful book about an American anarchist. It's important to remember that the history of America is not just Presidents and explorers, but it is also comprised of people with ideas that -whether the mainstream likes it or not- changed our country, often for the better.
Strange, the latter. Lucy Parsons was the widow of Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket Martyrs unjustly tried and hanged without evidence for a bomb thrown at a demonstration that killed policemen. Goldman cites the Haymarket affair as having radicalized her. Also, Lucy, not content to be a mere widow, became a vocal anarchist activist, speaking around the country, raising funds for workingmen, spreading the gospel of radical anarchy with an eye to overthrowing the Capitalist system. In short, Lucy paved the way...Emma merely followed in her tracks.
Lucy was and still is an enigma. She was born into slavery, but throughout her life denied her African American roots, claiming instead to be Mexican and Native American. Her husband, a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, took up the cause of the working man after demobbing. He and Lucy first embraced socialism, but soon found it too weak for their tastes and quickly embraced Anarchism under the tutelage of Johann Most.
Most was an advocate of violence, 'propaganda by the deed.' He believed that acts of terror could bring the capitalists to their knees so that the working man could assume control and dissolve the state. Albert agreed, preaching dynamite, telling workers to arm themselves, writing violent diatribes in the radical press. Strong stuff, to say the least.
All this is why, when the Haymarket case came to trial, Albert was convicted more for his ideas than any complicity in the crime. It's the injustice that fired up Emma Goldman and still can raise ire today.
'Goddess of Anarchy' captures all of this in meticulous detail. Jacqueline Jones is a formidable researcher and an able writer. She shows us how Lucy Parsons invented a history for herself and stayed true to it to the very end. We learn about the tragedies in her life: born into slavery, her lost children, the execution of her husband, at marvel at her strength. She has something of the stage hog in her too, mounting stages she was never supposed to mount, speaking her mind in a time when women didn't speak (especially women of color). Still, there is much to respect.
This is a powerful book about an American anarchist. It's important to remember that the history of America is not just Presidents and explorers, but it is also comprised of people with ideas that -whether the mainstream likes it or not- changed our country, often for the better.
April 17, 2020
First, let me heave a huge sigh of relief that I FINALLY finished this book. It took WEEKS. I had to take a break, start and finish another book, and then come back to it. I readily admit that history and biography are not normally genres I gravitate towards, but I like to mix things up now and then. Lucy Parsons was mentioned in The Future of Another Timeline, which I enjoyed, and I thought she sounded like an interesting character, so I decided to check out Jones' book.
Lucy Parsons may very well have been an interesting character who led an interesting life, but you wouldn't know it from this book. For the most part, it reads like a long list of names and dates and publications and acronyms, all relating to the socialist/anarchist/communist movement in Chicago from the late 19th century through the early 20th. It certainly didn't read like a portrait of Lucy Parsons.
In fact, the first 150+ pages barely mentioned Lucy Parsons at all. It was devoted to her husband, Albert, and HIS contributions to the socialist movement. Ironically, in her epilogue, Jones makes a snide assertion about 2/3 of Lucy Parsons's obituary being dedicated to Albert. Pot, meet kettle. But, for its part, the epilogue was the most interesting chapter in the entire book. Here, Jones finally editorialized and gave some opinions on Lucy Parsons's life rather than just straight fact. If you're going to shove names and dates down my throat, give me a little supposition to go with it.
If you're a big-time history buff who's keen on names and dates, this book will likely hold your interest. But if you're like me and looking for a story to go along with all those facts, maybe move along.
Lucy Parsons may very well have been an interesting character who led an interesting life, but you wouldn't know it from this book. For the most part, it reads like a long list of names and dates and publications and acronyms, all relating to the socialist/anarchist/communist movement in Chicago from the late 19th century through the early 20th. It certainly didn't read like a portrait of Lucy Parsons.
In fact, the first 150+ pages barely mentioned Lucy Parsons at all. It was devoted to her husband, Albert, and HIS contributions to the socialist movement. Ironically, in her epilogue, Jones makes a snide assertion about 2/3 of Lucy Parsons's obituary being dedicated to Albert. Pot, meet kettle. But, for its part, the epilogue was the most interesting chapter in the entire book. Here, Jones finally editorialized and gave some opinions on Lucy Parsons's life rather than just straight fact. If you're going to shove names and dates down my throat, give me a little supposition to go with it.
If you're a big-time history buff who's keen on names and dates, this book will likely hold your interest. But if you're like me and looking for a story to go along with all those facts, maybe move along.
December 10, 2017
Jones goes into as much detail as she can dig up from historical archives & newspaper clippings, which I greatly appreciate. (One of my favorites is the 1886 newspaper headline "Poor Oliver Gathings & His Pretty Mulatto Wife Whom Albert Parsons Stole Away," as if nothing else newsworthy was going on in 1886 Texas.) She makes sure to set the political and historical context for each time period, the same way that Paula Giddings does in her 800-page biography of Ida B. Wells. (However, Jones' context is a lot shorter and more readable than Giddings'.)
A friend once said, of Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention that, while extremely well-researched and well-written, seemed to knock Malcolm off the revolutionary pedestal that so many of us grew up seeing him on. (And that this was not necessarily a good thing.)
This also seems to be the case with Jones' biography of Lucy Parsons. She is much more critical of Parsons than previous (and, until now, sole) biographer Carolyn Ashbaugh Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary, often pointing out the ways in which Parsons did not get involved in direct organizing or other pressing contemporary political issues (and nearly never in issues involving Black people, even Black people in Chicago). And, of course, there's her terrible treatment of her son, whom she had confined to an insane asylum when he wanted to join the army. He spent 20 years in the asylum, often abused by guards and other people incarcerated there because of his mother's notoriety; he was often placed in solitary confinement; he died there. It's unclear (and probably unlikely) whether Lucy Parsons ever visited her son during those 20 years or if she ever regretted ruining his life. Those questions, sadly, weren't answered by any of the historical materials that Jones was able to find and may always be a mystery.
A friend once said, of Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention that, while extremely well-researched and well-written, seemed to knock Malcolm off the revolutionary pedestal that so many of us grew up seeing him on. (And that this was not necessarily a good thing.)
This also seems to be the case with Jones' biography of Lucy Parsons. She is much more critical of Parsons than previous (and, until now, sole) biographer Carolyn Ashbaugh Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary, often pointing out the ways in which Parsons did not get involved in direct organizing or other pressing contemporary political issues (and nearly never in issues involving Black people, even Black people in Chicago). And, of course, there's her terrible treatment of her son, whom she had confined to an insane asylum when he wanted to join the army. He spent 20 years in the asylum, often abused by guards and other people incarcerated there because of his mother's notoriety; he was often placed in solitary confinement; he died there. It's unclear (and probably unlikely) whether Lucy Parsons ever visited her son during those 20 years or if she ever regretted ruining his life. Those questions, sadly, weren't answered by any of the historical materials that Jones was able to find and may always be a mystery.
October 7, 2019
I finished this book on a Friday night, sitting alone in a parking lot eating pupusas and curtido. While I felt definitively good about my late night fare, I remained undecided about the overall tone of this book — at least in some places. By this, I mean that Jones definitely had a very specific slant on things, and wasn’t afraid to assert her own perspective and values on Parsons’ life and decisions, as well as other individuals discussed (such as Lucy Parsons’ husband). All this to say that this was certainly no hagiography, which I’m okay with. I just guess certain judgements made on Lucy Parsons (e.g. her violent rhetoric), weren’t adequately framed or contextualized for me. At least not explicitly. Jones does go into the violence of both state and capital, but does not draw causation from that to the radical and revolutionary rhetoric of violence that surfaces and resonates with the working class.
You certainly see something like this in biblical texts, whether under the violent yoke of some idea of Pharaoh, Babylon, or Rome — in such circumstances, you often get the fiery rhetoric of prophets in response. This was to a debatable extent, a controversy in the Gospel narrative of Jesus, who was accused of saying that he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. While none of the canonical Gospels concede that Jesus actually said that, the Gospel of Thomas attributes such a statement to Jesus. Either way, Jesus was merely drawing on a long prophetic tradition who said similarly radical things, specifically Ezekiel, the prophet par excellence for prophesying temple destruction, and enacting performances of such destruction with a little model of Jerusalem (e.g. Ezekiel 4).
As an aside: I think Benedict Anderson makes a remark in "Under Three Flags" pointing out the irony that it was the wealthy businessman Alfred Nobel who would file a patent for dynamite, that would become such a centrepiece of violent radical rhetoric, and it would be the funds from that 'invention' that would fund his future peace prizes.
Back to my lesser feelings about the book, I also think Jones belabours the point about Parsons' hiding of her 'racial ancestry', and her lack of explicit support for Black workers. I think these are all points worth mentioning, but they were brought up very regularly, and I'm a little unsure why.
Anyways despite some of my reservations for this biography of Parsons, I found all the content and historical coverage extremely fascinating. The front end of the book was more so ‘the times’ of Parsons and covered a lot of labour history, as well as Confederate and Republican Civil War politics, Reconstruction, et cetera. Also the focus was mainly on Albert Parsons for a good portion of the book’s beginning. The lens then begins to start panning towards Lucy Parsons after the Haymarket figures were arrested, and I think that’s where I really started getting into the book.
I loved learning about Lucy Parsons’ encounter with William Morris and Kropotkin, her feud with Emma Goldman and spats with Eugene Debs, her acquaintance with the socialist and bigot Jack London, her near encounters with Ida B. Wells, her arms-length engagements with the IWW and Communist Party of America, the admiration Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had for her. There was even a really fascinating part on Parsons association with Honore Jaxon, the secretary to Louis Riel during the North-West uprising in the Northwest Territories (in an area now part of Saskatchewan). These were all incredibly interesting glimpses into a very interconnected world of radicals.
There were some really interesting sections on the way religion intersected with the life of Parsons and other anarchists. Firstly I should qualify by saying, Lucy and Albert Parsons were known for being extremely critical of religion of any kind, as well as the clergy in particular (which Jones goes into somewhat, locating that impulse from the European radical tradition). Jones mentions also fairly severe critiques of social gospel types that came from the Parsons, a lot of which I think were valid to varying degrees. However, the Parsons also engaged with religion positively too, albeit in some fairly subversive ways. I really loved this tactic Lucy Parsons undertook when police were finding ways to constrain her practice of free speech:
“In the process she would expose the double standard that allowed foot soldiers of the Salvation Army free access to city parks and street corners while radicals were routinely harassed. Denied a speaking permit by the acting police chief, Herman Schuettler (present at Haymarket, and an early member of the Chicago anti-anarchist Red Squad), she decided to go forth mockingly clutching a Bible: “Religions seem to be the style, and I do not see why I should not start one. I have some decided opinions on the matter of religion and I do not think the police have any right to interfere with me so long as I am not infringing on the rights of others.”
I also loved this little excerpt of Albert Parsons after he went underground to hide from the police after the Haymarket affair:
“Boarding with the churchgoing Hoan family, he even addressed their congregation on a couple of occasions, preaching a bland socialism of “liberty, fraternity, equality, for our oppressed and down-trodden fellow man.” Later he would tell the Hoans that he fondly recalled their happy “Sabbath” outings. He also quoted from the Bible the family had given him—passages from the New Testament condemning “the pulpits of mammon” and the hypocrites who would embrace Jesus on the one hand and pursue their own greedy ends on the other. ”
Albert Parsons also quotes James 5:3 in an article he wrote from jail, shortly before he was sent to the gallows: “Go to, now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.” I think there's a special element of humour pondering upon their name, Parsons, which basically means 'clerics'.
Another fascinating area faith enters the picture is in a fellow convict of the Haymarket arrests, Samuel Fielden an anarcho-socialist and Methodist pastor. I hope to read more about him when I get the chance. Albert Parsons eventually turned against him after the arrests because Fielden made concessions with the judiciary, and consequently dodged the death penalty.
It was also neat to read about Lucy Parsons’ subscription to the periodical Free Society edited by the Mennonite Abe Isaak and his family, who eventually would be arrested for the completely unrelated assassination attempt on President McKinley. The name McKinley has been surfacing in some of my reading lately, because I recently visited a lovely region, known as Charlevoix, along the northern shore of the St Lawrence River. William Taft, who would become the ‘progressive era’ president (following Teddy Roosevelt) had a cottage in Charlevoix and spent a number of summers there. Taft was also the governor of the Philippines before he became President. It was while Taft was in the Philippines that McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt became President. It’s only after reading this book that I realize the life of Lucy Parsons overlapped in some measure with American colonization of the Philippines. Being really interested in Southeast Asia, I was fairly interested to discover Parsons as strongly denouncing the American colonization of the Philippines and the suppression of its revolution. The issue of the war in the Philippines was also the event that ultimately estranged Lucy Parsons from her son. This is the corresponding excerpt from Jones’ book:
“In July 1899, however, the US-Spanish-Cuban-Filipino War assumed a personal dimension for her. On the blistering hot day of the sixteenth, she was standing on a State Street sidewalk, calling upon young men to shun military service. The United States was seeking to crush Filipino rebels, the heirs of freedom movements everywhere, including the American Revolution of 1776: “Every stripe of the American flag has become a whip for the monopolist to thrash your backs with. Every star in that flag represents the distilled tears of the children who work out their lives in the factories.” American troops would only do the bidding of American millionaires bent on subjugating the Filipino people. Parsons had placed an ad in the paper the night before announcing this sidewalk address, and so a large and expectant, if sweat-drenched, crowd gathered to hear her. Regardless of their reaction, her argument, directed to young men—suggesting that they “refuse to go to those far-off islands for the purpose of riveting the chains of a new slavery on the limbs of the Filipinos”—failed to resonate with her own son. Now twenty-one, Albert Junior was a high school graduate and employed as a clerk. Ignoring his mother’s agitation against the deployment of young male “fighting machines” to serve abroad, he announced that he intended to enlist in one of the new regiments and ship off to the Philippines. The news precipitated a physical altercation between the two of them, and on July 21 Lucy Parsons took her son to court, claiming he tried to stab her.”
Radical politics and Southeast Asia are two topics I love reading about. I occasionally crack open Benedict Anderson’s "Under Three Flags" when I’m in the right mood, and read about the anti-colonial writer Rizal, who while not an anarchist, followed closely the work of socialists and anarchists, even writing about the portion of the Louvre that was set fire to by the Communards while he was visiting Paris. Anyways, I wanted to just finish on a funny little excerpt from this biography of Parsons:
“Robert Pinkerton, the brother of Allan Pinkerton and now the head of the eponymous private security force, recommended that the United States establish “an anarchist colony, a place where every person who wants anarchy can have it”—preferably on some island in the Philippines. There, Parsons, Goldman, and Most might rant and rave, but they would be forced to support themselves by tilling the soil as peasants of old.”
I heard the Romans did something like that to someone named John. Sent him to Patmos, where he wrote a revolutionary denouncement of the beast that was the Roman empire. Ultimately Rome did collapse.
You certainly see something like this in biblical texts, whether under the violent yoke of some idea of Pharaoh, Babylon, or Rome — in such circumstances, you often get the fiery rhetoric of prophets in response. This was to a debatable extent, a controversy in the Gospel narrative of Jesus, who was accused of saying that he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. While none of the canonical Gospels concede that Jesus actually said that, the Gospel of Thomas attributes such a statement to Jesus. Either way, Jesus was merely drawing on a long prophetic tradition who said similarly radical things, specifically Ezekiel, the prophet par excellence for prophesying temple destruction, and enacting performances of such destruction with a little model of Jerusalem (e.g. Ezekiel 4).
As an aside: I think Benedict Anderson makes a remark in "Under Three Flags" pointing out the irony that it was the wealthy businessman Alfred Nobel who would file a patent for dynamite, that would become such a centrepiece of violent radical rhetoric, and it would be the funds from that 'invention' that would fund his future peace prizes.
Back to my lesser feelings about the book, I also think Jones belabours the point about Parsons' hiding of her 'racial ancestry', and her lack of explicit support for Black workers. I think these are all points worth mentioning, but they were brought up very regularly, and I'm a little unsure why.
Anyways despite some of my reservations for this biography of Parsons, I found all the content and historical coverage extremely fascinating. The front end of the book was more so ‘the times’ of Parsons and covered a lot of labour history, as well as Confederate and Republican Civil War politics, Reconstruction, et cetera. Also the focus was mainly on Albert Parsons for a good portion of the book’s beginning. The lens then begins to start panning towards Lucy Parsons after the Haymarket figures were arrested, and I think that’s where I really started getting into the book.
I loved learning about Lucy Parsons’ encounter with William Morris and Kropotkin, her feud with Emma Goldman and spats with Eugene Debs, her acquaintance with the socialist and bigot Jack London, her near encounters with Ida B. Wells, her arms-length engagements with the IWW and Communist Party of America, the admiration Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had for her. There was even a really fascinating part on Parsons association with Honore Jaxon, the secretary to Louis Riel during the North-West uprising in the Northwest Territories (in an area now part of Saskatchewan). These were all incredibly interesting glimpses into a very interconnected world of radicals.
There were some really interesting sections on the way religion intersected with the life of Parsons and other anarchists. Firstly I should qualify by saying, Lucy and Albert Parsons were known for being extremely critical of religion of any kind, as well as the clergy in particular (which Jones goes into somewhat, locating that impulse from the European radical tradition). Jones mentions also fairly severe critiques of social gospel types that came from the Parsons, a lot of which I think were valid to varying degrees. However, the Parsons also engaged with religion positively too, albeit in some fairly subversive ways. I really loved this tactic Lucy Parsons undertook when police were finding ways to constrain her practice of free speech:
“In the process she would expose the double standard that allowed foot soldiers of the Salvation Army free access to city parks and street corners while radicals were routinely harassed. Denied a speaking permit by the acting police chief, Herman Schuettler (present at Haymarket, and an early member of the Chicago anti-anarchist Red Squad), she decided to go forth mockingly clutching a Bible: “Religions seem to be the style, and I do not see why I should not start one. I have some decided opinions on the matter of religion and I do not think the police have any right to interfere with me so long as I am not infringing on the rights of others.”
I also loved this little excerpt of Albert Parsons after he went underground to hide from the police after the Haymarket affair:
“Boarding with the churchgoing Hoan family, he even addressed their congregation on a couple of occasions, preaching a bland socialism of “liberty, fraternity, equality, for our oppressed and down-trodden fellow man.” Later he would tell the Hoans that he fondly recalled their happy “Sabbath” outings. He also quoted from the Bible the family had given him—passages from the New Testament condemning “the pulpits of mammon” and the hypocrites who would embrace Jesus on the one hand and pursue their own greedy ends on the other. ”
Albert Parsons also quotes James 5:3 in an article he wrote from jail, shortly before he was sent to the gallows: “Go to, now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.” I think there's a special element of humour pondering upon their name, Parsons, which basically means 'clerics'.
Another fascinating area faith enters the picture is in a fellow convict of the Haymarket arrests, Samuel Fielden an anarcho-socialist and Methodist pastor. I hope to read more about him when I get the chance. Albert Parsons eventually turned against him after the arrests because Fielden made concessions with the judiciary, and consequently dodged the death penalty.
It was also neat to read about Lucy Parsons’ subscription to the periodical Free Society edited by the Mennonite Abe Isaak and his family, who eventually would be arrested for the completely unrelated assassination attempt on President McKinley. The name McKinley has been surfacing in some of my reading lately, because I recently visited a lovely region, known as Charlevoix, along the northern shore of the St Lawrence River. William Taft, who would become the ‘progressive era’ president (following Teddy Roosevelt) had a cottage in Charlevoix and spent a number of summers there. Taft was also the governor of the Philippines before he became President. It was while Taft was in the Philippines that McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt became President. It’s only after reading this book that I realize the life of Lucy Parsons overlapped in some measure with American colonization of the Philippines. Being really interested in Southeast Asia, I was fairly interested to discover Parsons as strongly denouncing the American colonization of the Philippines and the suppression of its revolution. The issue of the war in the Philippines was also the event that ultimately estranged Lucy Parsons from her son. This is the corresponding excerpt from Jones’ book:
“In July 1899, however, the US-Spanish-Cuban-Filipino War assumed a personal dimension for her. On the blistering hot day of the sixteenth, she was standing on a State Street sidewalk, calling upon young men to shun military service. The United States was seeking to crush Filipino rebels, the heirs of freedom movements everywhere, including the American Revolution of 1776: “Every stripe of the American flag has become a whip for the monopolist to thrash your backs with. Every star in that flag represents the distilled tears of the children who work out their lives in the factories.” American troops would only do the bidding of American millionaires bent on subjugating the Filipino people. Parsons had placed an ad in the paper the night before announcing this sidewalk address, and so a large and expectant, if sweat-drenched, crowd gathered to hear her. Regardless of their reaction, her argument, directed to young men—suggesting that they “refuse to go to those far-off islands for the purpose of riveting the chains of a new slavery on the limbs of the Filipinos”—failed to resonate with her own son. Now twenty-one, Albert Junior was a high school graduate and employed as a clerk. Ignoring his mother’s agitation against the deployment of young male “fighting machines” to serve abroad, he announced that he intended to enlist in one of the new regiments and ship off to the Philippines. The news precipitated a physical altercation between the two of them, and on July 21 Lucy Parsons took her son to court, claiming he tried to stab her.”
Radical politics and Southeast Asia are two topics I love reading about. I occasionally crack open Benedict Anderson’s "Under Three Flags" when I’m in the right mood, and read about the anti-colonial writer Rizal, who while not an anarchist, followed closely the work of socialists and anarchists, even writing about the portion of the Louvre that was set fire to by the Communards while he was visiting Paris. Anyways, I wanted to just finish on a funny little excerpt from this biography of Parsons:
“Robert Pinkerton, the brother of Allan Pinkerton and now the head of the eponymous private security force, recommended that the United States establish “an anarchist colony, a place where every person who wants anarchy can have it”—preferably on some island in the Philippines. There, Parsons, Goldman, and Most might rant and rave, but they would be forced to support themselves by tilling the soil as peasants of old.”
I heard the Romans did something like that to someone named John. Sent him to Patmos, where he wrote a revolutionary denouncement of the beast that was the Roman empire. Ultimately Rome did collapse.
August 6, 2022
The author gets a star from me for adding facts to our knowledge of Parsons, particularly her early life. However, as I was reading, it slowly dawned on me that the author clearly fails to understand anarchism at even a basic level of comprehension. The book's account of the Parsons' political evolution is extremely confused and the book is rife with phrases like "socialism, which is diametrically opposed to anarchism" (indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding, as anarchism arguably emerges as an *offshoot* or variety of socialism - at least, both are anti-capitalist answers to the social question). The tone of the writing is also unnecessarily hostile (especially for biography, a genre that's at its best when it reveals the complexity and nuance of human life, even for the most evil subjects) and unflattering motives are routinely attributed to Lucy, Alfred, and other anarchists even where more plausible motives are evidenced or can easily be speculated. For instance, the Parsons' turn away from party politics is attributed to selfish pursuit of fame and sinecure; no real evidence is presented for this unflattering interpretation and an ideological shift, prompted in part by different cultural and material conditions, seems much more likely. I'm shocked that an actual historian could fumble the intellectual history aspect of this project so badly. I don't expect biographers to *agree* with their subject or withold justified criticism, but I do expect them to give the reader a strong sense of the subject's account of themselves and the (human, understandable, if not necessarily laudable or even minimally morally legitimate) reasons they believed or acted in controversial ways. We should get a detailed warts-and-all account of the subject, including their self-understanding, situated in historical context and complicated or even directly challenged by the views of others (contemporaneous and present-day). This book utterly fails to provide anything like that Which is weird, because there are many rich and complex biographies of much more detestable people than Parsons (see for instance: Chernow on John D. Rockefeller, Caro on Robert Moses - even mass murderers like H. H. Holmes, murderous cult leaders like Jim Jones, dictators like Stalin, literal 3rd Reich Nazis, etc typically get more nuanced treatment from biographers than Jones offers Parsons). What I'm left wondering is why the author picked this topic...
I learned more from this book review than Jones's actual book: https://networks.h-net.org/node/11717...
I learned more from this book review than Jones's actual book: https://networks.h-net.org/node/11717...
May 21, 2018
Lucy Parsons spent her life offending, agitating, and generally shit-stirring. We all know people like this. They are important for challenging the rest of us — encouraging us to examine our values, to do better, or to acknowledge the limits of what we find acceptable. But they are generally not kind, generous, empathetic, or even sincere believers in the causes they espouse. This book left me suspicious about how much Parsons truly believed in the cause of anarchism; it seems likely that she would have latched on to any cause that would have put her at the outer limits of the dominate group. She was courageous as hell, but also cold as ice, leaving her son to rot in a mental institution because he wanted to join the army and choosing to align with white workers while ignoring the (much worse!) plight of African American workers.
This book reads a bit too much like a dissertation to me, but it's very well researched and I learned so much about political and worker's movements from 1870-1920 in the U.S. It was a tough go, but definitely educational and worth the effort.
This book reads a bit too much like a dissertation to me, but it's very well researched and I learned so much about political and worker's movements from 1870-1920 in the U.S. It was a tough go, but definitely educational and worth the effort.
November 9, 2018
Fascinating biography about a fascinating figure. The background to Parson's life also serves as a history of the labor movement and Leftist politics in the U.S.,which I found interesting. The writing is terrific and Parsons emerges as a complicated individual, well worth reading about. Highly recommended!
May 24, 2022
Lucy was an amazing woman, and seemed fearless in the face of danger. or perhaps she thrived on the rush. She was an Anarchist, and began every speech with those words, I am an Anarchist. He speeches were well done and riveting, and she had the ear and respect of many. But her personal life was a lot of lies and deceit. She was born a slave and was able to go to school, when she was married to a man who could afford to send her there. Rumors abound that she was intimate w/ the school teacher, but no one knows for sure, then Albert Parsons came into her life, and she eventually "ran off" with him after getting married and her child w/ her husband before him, died, no one know how exactly. When In Chicago, they become activist and settle down in a German community, telling everyone she is of Indian and Mexican descent. thus her skin color. She never again admitted she was actually African American, and never again spoke to her parents or siblings. She never stood up for the plight of the blacks in Chicago at this time, (1886 and up), and later after her husband was hanged and became a martyr of the Haymarket Square. continued to fight for "the cause" of Anarchy. Her and Albert had a son and daughter, Lulu, and Albert Jr. Lulu died young, of some disease (she was always out traveling and speaking and left them w/ friends), and Albert told her he was going to sign up to be a soldier and go to war, she had him committed to an asylum where he finally died after years of abuse at age 42. This was very disturbing to me, and I then saw through her actions, not as a true activist, but someone who was angry and this got her a chance to let it out. (my opinion). She and her second husband and the ashes of. her two children from her house are buried in the cemetery in Chicago (Waldheim Cemetery) where the Haymarket martyrs are buried. She died in a fire in her home, at the age of 91, and her. husband died shortly afterwards from trying to rescue her from the fire.
February 24, 2024
We love to see women scamming
April 1, 2018
excellent for feminists, anarchists, free thinkers.
October 6, 2019
It may be my own personal biases at work, but the author seems to take every possible opportunity to denigrate Parsons, from Jones' judgement on Parsons' decision to downplay her life as a former slave to the book sales which supported Parsons post-Haymarket.
Examples include when Parsons consults her husband's defense team to talk strategy in the murder trial: "if the defendants were truly principled Anarchists they would have refused counsel arguing that the state-run proceedings were inherently corrupt." A baffling argument.
Also, Jones's judgement of the content of Parsons' 1886-1887 speaking tours: "she exhibited a seemingly perverse indifference to the escalating state sanctioned assaults on the bodies and rights of black southerners." A completely unsubstantiated argument which relies on attributing psychological motives to Parsons which may or may not be valid.
The book is riddled with these political jabs and other cheap shots. I could have done without them.
Examples include when Parsons consults her husband's defense team to talk strategy in the murder trial: "if the defendants were truly principled Anarchists they would have refused counsel arguing that the state-run proceedings were inherently corrupt." A baffling argument.
Also, Jones's judgement of the content of Parsons' 1886-1887 speaking tours: "she exhibited a seemingly perverse indifference to the escalating state sanctioned assaults on the bodies and rights of black southerners." A completely unsubstantiated argument which relies on attributing psychological motives to Parsons which may or may not be valid.
The book is riddled with these political jabs and other cheap shots. I could have done without them.
February 8, 2018
A fascinating, "warts and all" biography of a great American radical, a fiery voice of revolution in the labor movement and other causes.
June 18, 2018
BIOGRAPHY/HISTORY
Jacqueline Jones
Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical
Basic Books
Hardcover, 978-0-4650-7899-8, (also available as an e-book, an audiobook, and on audio CD), 480 pgs., $32.00
December 2017
Lucy Parsons. Slave, freedwoman, student, wife, mother, writer, editor, internationally renowned orator, socialist, communist, anarchist, cipher. From her birth to a slave in antebellum Virginia in 1851, to her education and formative years in Reconstruction–era Waco, Texas, where she married Albert Parsons, an Anglo man who would later be hanged in connection with the bombing of Haymarket Square, to swiftly industrializing Chicago in the Gilded Age, until her death in 1942, Parsons fought for the laboring masses, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly in a nation dizzy with change, a nation sometimes exalted by rapid innovation, oftentimes staggering beneath it. From the 1880s until the day she died, Parsons “held fast to the ideal of a nonhierarchical society emerging from trade unions, a society without wages and without coercive government of any kind.” Even if this result could be achieved only by dynamite.
Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical is the latest work of biographical history from Jacqueline Jones, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, MacArthur Fellow, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and winner of the Bancroft Prize. Goddess of Anarchy is a dramatic and entertaining account of a difficult, complicated, and flawed but significant life almost lost to history, as are those of untold numbers of impactful women.
Goddess of Anarchy recounts much of the history of the labor struggle in the United States as told through the prism of Lucy Parsons’s singular, startling life. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the catalyst for a receptive Parsons to devote her life to “the labor question” and convince her that the two-party system of Republicans and Democrats would always fail the great unwashed in order to remain in power at all costs. Believing the ballot a failure, Parsons advocated bullets.
Parsons’s contemporaries included Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, Samuel Gompers, and Jane Addams, with all of whom she feuded. Many of her peers thought she harmed the cause by denigrating voting and unions. When Progressivism arrived, Parsons decried charity as “hush money to hide the blushes of the labor robbers.” She thought the New Deal and FDR co-opted the movement.
Though she lived in the public eye for almost seven decades, Parsons went to great pains to veil her African origins and personal life. Parsons “expressed a deep commitment to informed debate and disquisition,” Jones writes, but in the next breath would invoke “the virtues of explosive devices.” As she states in her introduction, Jones intends a “more nuanced approach by integrating Parsons’s secret private life with her high-profile public persona.” I don’t think integration was achieved, and I doubt it possible to reconcile the contradictions of a person exceedingly talented at compartmentalization.
The most pressing issues of Parsons’s lifetime remain so in ours, a circumstance which is either wholly depressing or indicates there is truly nothing new under the sun, or both. The two-party system failed to work for the poor; technology displaced workers; the middle class eroded; money and influence corrupted elections and public policy; a “new iteration of the KKK indicated that the more the pace of technological innovation accelerated, the more likely it became that a significant portion of the white laboring classes would seek refuge in a narrow tribalism.”
Jones’s writing has a vitality to it as she explores Parsons’s many contradictions, offers psychological insights, and tartly makes her points. Jones is a master of the concise introductory paragraph and the concluding paragraph that simultaneously foreshadows and whets the appetite for the next chapter. Goddess of Anarchy is an education and a bravura performance from a stylish wordsmith.
Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.
Jacqueline Jones
Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical
Basic Books
Hardcover, 978-0-4650-7899-8, (also available as an e-book, an audiobook, and on audio CD), 480 pgs., $32.00
December 2017
Lucy Parsons. Slave, freedwoman, student, wife, mother, writer, editor, internationally renowned orator, socialist, communist, anarchist, cipher. From her birth to a slave in antebellum Virginia in 1851, to her education and formative years in Reconstruction–era Waco, Texas, where she married Albert Parsons, an Anglo man who would later be hanged in connection with the bombing of Haymarket Square, to swiftly industrializing Chicago in the Gilded Age, until her death in 1942, Parsons fought for the laboring masses, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly in a nation dizzy with change, a nation sometimes exalted by rapid innovation, oftentimes staggering beneath it. From the 1880s until the day she died, Parsons “held fast to the ideal of a nonhierarchical society emerging from trade unions, a society without wages and without coercive government of any kind.” Even if this result could be achieved only by dynamite.
Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical is the latest work of biographical history from Jacqueline Jones, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, MacArthur Fellow, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and winner of the Bancroft Prize. Goddess of Anarchy is a dramatic and entertaining account of a difficult, complicated, and flawed but significant life almost lost to history, as are those of untold numbers of impactful women.
Goddess of Anarchy recounts much of the history of the labor struggle in the United States as told through the prism of Lucy Parsons’s singular, startling life. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the catalyst for a receptive Parsons to devote her life to “the labor question” and convince her that the two-party system of Republicans and Democrats would always fail the great unwashed in order to remain in power at all costs. Believing the ballot a failure, Parsons advocated bullets.
Parsons’s contemporaries included Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, Samuel Gompers, and Jane Addams, with all of whom she feuded. Many of her peers thought she harmed the cause by denigrating voting and unions. When Progressivism arrived, Parsons decried charity as “hush money to hide the blushes of the labor robbers.” She thought the New Deal and FDR co-opted the movement.
Though she lived in the public eye for almost seven decades, Parsons went to great pains to veil her African origins and personal life. Parsons “expressed a deep commitment to informed debate and disquisition,” Jones writes, but in the next breath would invoke “the virtues of explosive devices.” As she states in her introduction, Jones intends a “more nuanced approach by integrating Parsons’s secret private life with her high-profile public persona.” I don’t think integration was achieved, and I doubt it possible to reconcile the contradictions of a person exceedingly talented at compartmentalization.
The most pressing issues of Parsons’s lifetime remain so in ours, a circumstance which is either wholly depressing or indicates there is truly nothing new under the sun, or both. The two-party system failed to work for the poor; technology displaced workers; the middle class eroded; money and influence corrupted elections and public policy; a “new iteration of the KKK indicated that the more the pace of technological innovation accelerated, the more likely it became that a significant portion of the white laboring classes would seek refuge in a narrow tribalism.”
Jones’s writing has a vitality to it as she explores Parsons’s many contradictions, offers psychological insights, and tartly makes her points. Jones is a master of the concise introductory paragraph and the concluding paragraph that simultaneously foreshadows and whets the appetite for the next chapter. Goddess of Anarchy is an education and a bravura performance from a stylish wordsmith.
Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.
April 27, 2020
It took me awhile to finish because it's a bit dense and I kept getting lost in the details about the various labor unions, but overall, I learned a lot about Lucy Parsons' migration from Virginia to Texas and then to Chicago, the circumstances around her marrying a confederate soldier turned anarchist, her writing, and her promotion of dynamite as a tool of class warfare, etc. She was definitely a resilient and principled person, and I'm glad to know a little more about her life and her work. What she fought for so hard in 1885 is the same stuff we're fighting for in 2020. That sucks.
I will say, for a biography about Lucy Parsons it felt like a lot of it was really about Albert Parsons - and maybe that's unavoidable.
I don't usually read biographies, so I'm not familiar with how common it is for the author to interject with their opinion about the subjects' thoughts or motivations. There was a fair amount of that happening in this book and occasionally it would cause me to raise my eyebrow (like remarking that true anarchists wouldn't have hired lawyers to represent them because they don't see the state as legitimate --- come on.). The author did a lot of speculating about Lucy's lack of engagement with Black people during her work promoting labor unions, and why she lied about her origins as a former slave and I mean, we can't know why that was, but it almost felt like the author was subtly suggesting that Lucy should have cared more about what was happening to Black communities at that time.
I will say, for a biography about Lucy Parsons it felt like a lot of it was really about Albert Parsons - and maybe that's unavoidable.
I don't usually read biographies, so I'm not familiar with how common it is for the author to interject with their opinion about the subjects' thoughts or motivations. There was a fair amount of that happening in this book and occasionally it would cause me to raise my eyebrow (like remarking that true anarchists wouldn't have hired lawyers to represent them because they don't see the state as legitimate --- come on.). The author did a lot of speculating about Lucy's lack of engagement with Black people during her work promoting labor unions, and why she lied about her origins as a former slave and I mean, we can't know why that was, but it almost felt like the author was subtly suggesting that Lucy should have cared more about what was happening to Black communities at that time.
October 2, 2019
Thought this was an excellent well researched book. The audio recording was very badly done and would not recommend.
Read
April 18, 20266.5 out of 10.
April 9, 2018
Lucy Parsons was a master of self-definition and self-invention, and I got the impression that the writer bought her version of the story neither too much nor too little and thus was able to tell a truthful version of the story. Of course I have no reason to believe my impression in this matter more than anything else. The biography included considerable historical context to make it all the more interesting.
The close of the book the author tried to include some sort of moral lesson, using the most obnoxious turn of phrase for it that I have happily mostly forgotten "useful something." But setting that aside, all in all a book I would recommend.
The close of the book the author tried to include some sort of moral lesson, using the most obnoxious turn of phrase for it that I have happily mostly forgotten "useful something." But setting that aside, all in all a book I would recommend.
November 19, 2020
Not knowing anything about Lucy Parsons beyond her name, I found this bombastic and exhaustive. It seems as though details of her personal life remained scant, at best, much by her own design. An extremely private person despite being a public figure for decades, Parsons was a ball of contradictions. And that may be the most important aspect about her.
A prominent black woman, formerly enslaved, lied about her race and remained disconnected to race struggles throughout her life. Which means all of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. She advocated violence. Bombings, assassinations, and the like, and decried electoral politics or really voting of any kind. She believed in syndicalism and fought for it throughout her entire life, while also being rather authoritarian in her beliefs about leadership. She viewed the masses as uneducated blobs that needed to be herded by people like her, who knew theory. Too, despite supporting unions and believing in them throughout her life, she was never an organizer, like Mother Jones or many prominent socialists and communists of the time. Publicly, she espoused sexual conservative ideals while privately living a sexually open life with a sequence of men after her husband's murder. She espoused family values but locked her son in a brutal insane asylum for decades until he died.
She was a fierce advocate for worker's rights and for the elimination of government control. Despite everything else, she remained firm in those beliefs. All of her actions can viewed through the lens of her belief in anarchism as a political revolutionary movement.
She was spiteful and petty, boisterous and vulgar, and she inspired countless radicals for generations.
This biography shows all of her. The brutally petty and the idealistically bold.
Definitely a fascinating book about one of the most fascinating and little known figures of american history.
A prominent black woman, formerly enslaved, lied about her race and remained disconnected to race struggles throughout her life. Which means all of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. She advocated violence. Bombings, assassinations, and the like, and decried electoral politics or really voting of any kind. She believed in syndicalism and fought for it throughout her entire life, while also being rather authoritarian in her beliefs about leadership. She viewed the masses as uneducated blobs that needed to be herded by people like her, who knew theory. Too, despite supporting unions and believing in them throughout her life, she was never an organizer, like Mother Jones or many prominent socialists and communists of the time. Publicly, she espoused sexual conservative ideals while privately living a sexually open life with a sequence of men after her husband's murder. She espoused family values but locked her son in a brutal insane asylum for decades until he died.
She was a fierce advocate for worker's rights and for the elimination of government control. Despite everything else, she remained firm in those beliefs. All of her actions can viewed through the lens of her belief in anarchism as a political revolutionary movement.
She was spiteful and petty, boisterous and vulgar, and she inspired countless radicals for generations.
This biography shows all of her. The brutally petty and the idealistically bold.
Definitely a fascinating book about one of the most fascinating and little known figures of american history.
January 24, 2018
Jacqueline Jones skillfully educates the reader on Lucy Parsons many accomplishments in public life while while simultaneously giving the reader insights as to who she was as a person out of the public eye. These two elements merge to form a very engaging read. Too often historical biographies leave out the humanizing elements of the subjects life leaving the account one dimensional, such is not the case here.
I finished the book with a better understanding of both Parsons contributions to American history and who she was to friends and loved ones. I wish i could've seen her speak in the flesh after knowing virtually nothing about her before reading the book. She inspired and radicalized political luminaries throughout her life. The FBI called her more dangerous than a thousand rioters upon her death at the menacing age of 91.
If you are a history buff, interested in left politics, or love biographies you won't be disappointed. Not only will you learn about one of the more enigmatic and impactful figures in American history, you'll learn about American labor history in general.
I finished the book with a better understanding of both Parsons contributions to American history and who she was to friends and loved ones. I wish i could've seen her speak in the flesh after knowing virtually nothing about her before reading the book. She inspired and radicalized political luminaries throughout her life. The FBI called her more dangerous than a thousand rioters upon her death at the menacing age of 91.
If you are a history buff, interested in left politics, or love biographies you won't be disappointed. Not only will you learn about one of the more enigmatic and impactful figures in American history, you'll learn about American labor history in general.
April 1, 2023
(Trying very hard here to remember that I'm not reviewing Lucy Parson's life, but rather this book that happens to be about her life.)
Do I feel like I have a better understanding of who Lucy Parsons was, what she did, and her place within a larger movement as a result of having read this book? Absolutely!
Did I have to read "between the lines" to get to that better understanding? I sure did! As Teka Lo writes for Public Intellectuals, "This book is a middle class pathologization of working class people." Jones "cites already known facts and then decorates those facts with digs on her manner of dress, questions of the sincerity of her motives, and the policing of how she lived as a Black person" (https://www.publicintellectuals.org/l...).
That about sums it up for me. Happy to know more about Lucy Parsons, but disappointed I went with this source before others.
Do I feel like I have a better understanding of who Lucy Parsons was, what she did, and her place within a larger movement as a result of having read this book? Absolutely!
Did I have to read "between the lines" to get to that better understanding? I sure did! As Teka Lo writes for Public Intellectuals, "This book is a middle class pathologization of working class people." Jones "cites already known facts and then decorates those facts with digs on her manner of dress, questions of the sincerity of her motives, and the policing of how she lived as a Black person" (https://www.publicintellectuals.org/l...).
That about sums it up for me. Happy to know more about Lucy Parsons, but disappointed I went with this source before others.
April 11, 2021
Lucy Parsons was the wife of Albert Parsons, one of the men executed as a result of the Haymarket bombing (of which I knew only vaguely about prior to reading this book). She was also known as a political writer and speaker in her own right, before and after his death. The book provides a fascinating overview of some of the politics and personalities in the anarchist and socialist communities in Chicago at the turn of the last century. My only complaint about it is by focusing so much on Lucy Parson's life and personality it provides relatively little insight into her as an intellectual or historian (unless it is deliberately making the tacit claim that she was nothing more that a facile rabble-rouser).
January 11, 2019
I want to think on this before reviewing. I don't know how to talk about the book without talking about how it changed my perception of Parson's for the worse. If this book is accurate- and it seems well researched and written- Parson's has become my least favorite anarchist woman that I've learned the history of. From her refusal to identify with and include Black people in movements to her hypocritical maligning of many feminist anarchist principles. At the same time, she paved part of the way for some white women anarchists and survived hell on Earth many times over. I will likely write a longer, better review when I think more on it.
July 9, 2018
A positive shout-out to the author, Jacqueline Jones, one the best written non-fiction books I have read in some time. Wonderful read, a page turner for sure, with an amazing subject matter that questions and haunts the reader to draw from his or her's moral spectrum of right and wrong.
A followup book would be the American Radical history since the death of Lucy Parsons. But for now , indeed, a great book.
A followup book would be the American Radical history since the death of Lucy Parsons. But for now , indeed, a great book.
March 23, 2026
When I read Jacqueline Jones’s Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical, I was looking for a mirror. I was looking for the reflection of a Black woman who stared down the barrel of American capitalism and refused to blink. What I found was a meticulously researched, deeply fascinating, yet ultimately frustrating biography that captures the fire of Lucy Parsons while somehow missing the heat of the flames she walked through.
Jones does an incredible job of excavating the truth of Lucy’s origins. Born Lucia, an enslaved girl in Virginia in 1851, she was dragged to Texas during the Civil War by her enslaver. Later, she married Albert Parsons, a white former Confederate soldier turned radical Republican, and they fled the violent white supremacy of post-Reconstruction Texas for Chicago. There, Lucia reinvented herself as Lucy, claiming Mexican and Native American heritage. Jones spends a lot of time dissecting this fabrication, sometimes with a tone that feels like an indictment. She chides Lucy for her “pronounced indifference” to the specific plight of African Americans and her refusal to claim her Blackness.
But as a Black woman reading this, I don’t see a traitor to the race; I see a survivor. I see a woman who understood exactly what this country does to Black women who dare to speak too loudly. Lucy didn’t just want to survive; she wanted to burn the system down. She recognized that in the late 19th century, a Black woman calling for the violent overthrow of capitalism wouldn’t just be ignored—she would be annihilated. Her racial ambiguity was a shield, a tool she wielded to get her foot in the door so she could kick it off the hinges.
What breaks my heart, and what this book brings into sharp, agonizing focus, is the erasure of Lucy’s voice. For over fifty years after her husband was executed for the Haymarket Affair, Lucy Parsons was a force of nature. She was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World. She edited radical newspapers like Freedom and the Liberator. She wrote the infamous “To Tramps” article, urging the unemployed and starving to “learn the use of explosives!” She was so terrifying to the establishment that the Chicago police called her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.”
Yet, when she died in a tragic house fire in 1942 at the age of 89, the state finally got its revenge. Before the ashes of her home were even cold, the Chicago police and the FBI raided the ruins. They confiscated her personal library of over 3,000 volumes. They took her letters, her manuscripts, her personal journals—sixty years of a Black woman’s radical intellectual labor, seized and swallowed by the very government she spent her life fighting.
This loss is not just a historical footnote; it is a profound, bleeding wound. It speaks to a specific kind of violence inflicted upon Black women: the theft of our intellectual property, the silencing of our voices, the deliberate erasure of our contributions. Society loves to consume our labor, our culture, and our bodies, but it is terrified of our minds. The FBI didn’t just take books; they took the evidence that a Black woman born into slavery possessed the intellectual capacity to dismantle their entire worldview. They made sure she could not speak from the grave.
And this suppression doesn’t just come from the state. Reading about Lucy’s life, I couldn’t help but reflect on how Black women are often sidelined within our own communities and movements. Lucy fought with mainstream labor unions that only wanted “respectability.” She feuded with other leftists who found her too radical, too uncompromising, too much. Even today, Black women are expected to be the mules of social justice movements—we are told to organize, to vote, to march, to save democracy. But the moment we demand liberation on our own terms, the moment we prioritize our own self-duty and happiness over the collective comfort, we are deemed difficult or divisive.
We are expected to carry the burden of both race and gender, to be the loyal wives, the nurturing mothers, the steadfast pillars of the community. But Lucy Parsons refused those traditional narratives. She took lovers after her husband’s death. She prioritized her political commitments over societal expectations of motherhood and domesticity. She lived for the future she wanted to build, unshackled from the polite constraints placed on women of her era.
Jones’s biography is essential reading because it puts Lucy Parsons back on the map, but it also serves as a cautionary tale about who gets to tell our stories. Jones judges Lucy by a modern standard of racial solidarity, missing the profound radicalism of a Black woman who simply refused to let America define her.
Lucy Parsons was a woman who looked at a world that wanted her enslaved, silent, and subservient, and decided instead to become the Goddess of Anarchy. They took her writings, they tried to erase her legacy, but they couldn’t extinguish the spark she left behind. For every Black woman who has ever been told she is too loud, too angry, or too dangerous, Lucy Parsons is our patron saint. We owe it to ourselves to remember her, not just as Albert Parsons’s widow, but as the brilliant, terrifying, unyielding force she was. We must keep speaking, keep writing, and keep fighting because they are still trying to take our words away.
Jones does an incredible job of excavating the truth of Lucy’s origins. Born Lucia, an enslaved girl in Virginia in 1851, she was dragged to Texas during the Civil War by her enslaver. Later, she married Albert Parsons, a white former Confederate soldier turned radical Republican, and they fled the violent white supremacy of post-Reconstruction Texas for Chicago. There, Lucia reinvented herself as Lucy, claiming Mexican and Native American heritage. Jones spends a lot of time dissecting this fabrication, sometimes with a tone that feels like an indictment. She chides Lucy for her “pronounced indifference” to the specific plight of African Americans and her refusal to claim her Blackness.
But as a Black woman reading this, I don’t see a traitor to the race; I see a survivor. I see a woman who understood exactly what this country does to Black women who dare to speak too loudly. Lucy didn’t just want to survive; she wanted to burn the system down. She recognized that in the late 19th century, a Black woman calling for the violent overthrow of capitalism wouldn’t just be ignored—she would be annihilated. Her racial ambiguity was a shield, a tool she wielded to get her foot in the door so she could kick it off the hinges.
What breaks my heart, and what this book brings into sharp, agonizing focus, is the erasure of Lucy’s voice. For over fifty years after her husband was executed for the Haymarket Affair, Lucy Parsons was a force of nature. She was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World. She edited radical newspapers like Freedom and the Liberator. She wrote the infamous “To Tramps” article, urging the unemployed and starving to “learn the use of explosives!” She was so terrifying to the establishment that the Chicago police called her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.”
Yet, when she died in a tragic house fire in 1942 at the age of 89, the state finally got its revenge. Before the ashes of her home were even cold, the Chicago police and the FBI raided the ruins. They confiscated her personal library of over 3,000 volumes. They took her letters, her manuscripts, her personal journals—sixty years of a Black woman’s radical intellectual labor, seized and swallowed by the very government she spent her life fighting.
This loss is not just a historical footnote; it is a profound, bleeding wound. It speaks to a specific kind of violence inflicted upon Black women: the theft of our intellectual property, the silencing of our voices, the deliberate erasure of our contributions. Society loves to consume our labor, our culture, and our bodies, but it is terrified of our minds. The FBI didn’t just take books; they took the evidence that a Black woman born into slavery possessed the intellectual capacity to dismantle their entire worldview. They made sure she could not speak from the grave.
And this suppression doesn’t just come from the state. Reading about Lucy’s life, I couldn’t help but reflect on how Black women are often sidelined within our own communities and movements. Lucy fought with mainstream labor unions that only wanted “respectability.” She feuded with other leftists who found her too radical, too uncompromising, too much. Even today, Black women are expected to be the mules of social justice movements—we are told to organize, to vote, to march, to save democracy. But the moment we demand liberation on our own terms, the moment we prioritize our own self-duty and happiness over the collective comfort, we are deemed difficult or divisive.
We are expected to carry the burden of both race and gender, to be the loyal wives, the nurturing mothers, the steadfast pillars of the community. But Lucy Parsons refused those traditional narratives. She took lovers after her husband’s death. She prioritized her political commitments over societal expectations of motherhood and domesticity. She lived for the future she wanted to build, unshackled from the polite constraints placed on women of her era.
Jones’s biography is essential reading because it puts Lucy Parsons back on the map, but it also serves as a cautionary tale about who gets to tell our stories. Jones judges Lucy by a modern standard of racial solidarity, missing the profound radicalism of a Black woman who simply refused to let America define her.
Lucy Parsons was a woman who looked at a world that wanted her enslaved, silent, and subservient, and decided instead to become the Goddess of Anarchy. They took her writings, they tried to erase her legacy, but they couldn’t extinguish the spark she left behind. For every Black woman who has ever been told she is too loud, too angry, or too dangerous, Lucy Parsons is our patron saint. We owe it to ourselves to remember her, not just as Albert Parsons’s widow, but as the brilliant, terrifying, unyielding force she was. We must keep speaking, keep writing, and keep fighting because they are still trying to take our words away.
January 21, 2019
Good, but frustrating; there’s a surprising amount of speculation generally & exploration of people Parsons never met or issues she has no documented opinion of. The pictures are the most striking example of this - why bother including pictures of Ida B. Wells-Barnett or Voltairine de Cleyre if they never crossed paths with or mentioned Lucy Parsons?
September 9, 2022
This was a powerful work detailing the incredible life of Lucy Parsons as well as her role as a speaker and writer in the anarchist movement. This history of radical organizers during the turn of the 19th century is one that I had not learned before and it was well-told with Lucy Parsons at it's center.
December 16, 2018
What a fascinating woman Lucy Parsons was! She had an immensely strong will and sense of herself, I think. This was a thoroughly interesting biography and window on the late 19th and early 20th century in political and labor history. Readers familiar with Chicago (as I am) will enjoy it even more.
July 26, 2021
I don't think this is a fair treatment of Lucy Parsons' tremendous gifts to our society. The author cast her in an unforgiving and less than humane light. I also read Carolyn Ashbaugh's biography and would highly recommend that biography of Lucy Parsons instead of this one by Jacqueline Jones.
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