Reviews for Lucy Parsons

The average rating for Lucy Parsons based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-07 00:00:00 Rachel Hausmann Once you get past the glittery introduction, the rest is incredible, gritty, brilliant source material. Parsons' speeches and writings should be included in all American history texts. Her writings describe not just social ideals and specific calls to action, but describe the reality of the time--the coarseness of the working class struggle for humane working conditions. Moreover, each essay runs a mere 2-3 pages, making it incredibly easy to digest the history in small, dense, vivid pieces.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-14 00:00:00 Rosalie Snow A good introduction to an activist, orator, and speaker who seems to be shockingly understudied/appreciated, even among the American left. In a weird way, this collection itself and its critical introduction/afterword sort of point to why. The speeches and articles of Parson's presented here are a reflection of her orientation towards action - working more to propagandize (in a good way!) and organize than theorize. While you can certainly get a taste for her steady commitment to anarchism in the period it was being most militantly repressed, it's hard to discern too much about the nuances of her political philosophy, her thoughts about splits within the left (other than her sort of endearing contempt for the early 20th c trade union tendencies exemplified by the AFL), and so on, from a series of speeches and very short articles designed more for mass appeal and mobilizing. There's some rather clunky editing here too, perhaps born of limitations in the archive/source materials, such that you get Parson's sort of "stump speech" describing the Haymarket police riot several times in roughly identical terms. I feel like a more capable historian could have addressed these "problems in the archive" in a more nuanced way than the critical commentators here, with their sort of generalized hagiographies, are able to. Maybe I've just been reading too much Hartman, though.