10

The Company of Women

Here I met a stormy petrel of the Northwest, Dr. Marie Equi.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, radical labor activist

By spring 1915 Marie Equi achieved prominence in Portland unmatched by few other women. She was intelligent, forthright, good humored, and provocative, but her willingness to risk injury to herself and damage to her career for the rights of others set her apart. Her soapbox advocacy for strikers and the jobless elevated her as a woman of compassion and consequence among socialists, anarchists, and Wobblies nationwide. Yet her new commitment to radicalism upset the balance between her political and personal lives, and her relationship with Harriet Speckart suffered the most.

Speckart was not known to have engaged in the battles for a new social and economic order so important to Equi. She worried about her companion and was protective of her, but she was a private, reserved woman more accustomed to avoiding the limelight, her family’s legal dispute notwithstanding. When Equi remained bruised and battered in jail during the cannery strike, Speckart intervened and agreed to the desperate demands of the authorities to deport Equi from the state in order to secure her release. The arrangement would have been a major disruption of her own life, but she proceeded with the plan nevertheless. She told reporters at the time, however, that she was baffled by Equi’s street scuffling, her picketing with Wobblies, and her rousing homeless men to rush restaurants for free meals. After a year of Equi’s radical pursuits and public exposure, Speckart had reason to question their future together.

Speckart’s uneasiness peaked on March 18, 1915, when she married James F. Morgan, a forty-three-year-old mining engineer. Her reasons for getting married—and to Morgan in particular—remain a mystery. She already enjoyed financial security with her inheritance, and, if she objected to Equi’s radicalism, Morgan was an odd choice. He was a seasoned Wobbly soapboxer himself, known for his cast-iron voice and fire-eating oratory. He had already led strikes and free speech fights on the West Coast, including a walkout near Eugene, Oregon, and another in Salt Lake City that landed him in jail for sixty days. Only six weeks before marrying Speckart, Morgan joined a protest in Roseburg, Oregon.1

If Equi noticed Speckart’s discontent, she did not temper her political work. The day before Speckart’s nuptials, Equi led one hundred jobless men into Portland’s courthouse to see how justice was delivered in the case of Mrs. Marcella Clark, a suffragist and friend of Equi’s. Clark protested the divorce obtained by her husband, A. E. Clark, a former Progressive Party candidate for the US Senate from Oregon. The court was about to decide the basis of Clark’s complaints and whether she was of sound mind. The Oregonian had weighed in earlier with a query, “Are all militant suffragists insane?” Equi sat quietly in the courtroom with “her boys,” as she sometimes called the local Wobblies, while Clark was indeed found insane and placed in the care of a friend of her choosing.²

Speckart’s union with Morgan ended abruptly after eleven days without the couple ever living together. On March 29, she sought a divorce on the grounds that Morgan had verbally abused her, threatened her with battery, and was afflicted with “a chronic and incurable sexual disease.” She won the divorce and was awarded alimony of twenty dollars a month. Julia Ruuttila, a labor activist who was a girl at the time, remembered that Morgan appeared at her parents’ home complaining bitterly that “a damn lesbian” had stolen his wife. But Morgan found no sympathy in the household. Equi’s sexual orientation was well known in working-class and labor circles, and any misgivings over her personal life were far outweighed by appreciation for her generosity with free medical care. Ruuttila’s father told her that anyone with any brains would avoid criticizing Doc.³

Speckart apparently wanted Equi’s attention, but perhaps even more, she longed for a child. At the time, adoptions in Oregon often occurred informally before legal proceedings finalized the arrangements. A doctor sometimes acted as a go-between, matching women unable to care for a child and prospective parents seeking one. Equi facilitated the process frequently, according to one of her confidants, “She did an awful lot of placing children on her own without going through channels, but doctors did that then.” Two weeks after Speckart’s divorce, Equi adopted an infant girl with the assistance of a local judge.⁴

The child was born “Mary Everest” on March 15, 1915, at Portland’s Multnomah Hospital to Edwin Elmer Everest, a laborer with no local residence, and Louise Vilandia Hanson, a waitress. Both were twenty-six years old. The attending physician who delivered the baby listed the birth as legitimate, but why the parents chose to place their child for adoption is unknown. Six weeks later, Equi completed the adoption procedures and registered a new name for the child: Mary Equi. The arrangement benefited all parties: the child was placed in a good home, Equi made her companion happy, and Speckart had a child to love and nurture. With her intervention, Equi achieved another distinction. She became a legally recognized unmarried mother known to be in a lesbian relationship.5

Equi and Speckart reached an understanding for childrearing that suited them both. Equi assumed responsibility as the legal parent and financial provider while Speckart promised to perform all hands-on childcare until Mary came of age. For a while the arrangement kept Equi and Speckart together, and Equi pursued her radical interests. As a child, Mary—who everyone called Mary Junior—referred to Equi as “Da” (for Doc, she later explained, since everyone called her that) and to Speckart as “Ma.”⁶

By 1915 Equi had aligned herself with radical women activists who shared her belief in more fundamental political and economic change than what her Progressive colleagues endorsed. Her soapboxing during strikes and marching with the jobless enhanced her credentials in radical circles and introduced her to more experienced radicals, especially women. Prominent among them were Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW leader and organizer, and Emma Goldman, the anarchist reviled by much of America.

Few activists could claim as early an immersion in radical politics as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Her mother was a suffragist; her father, a Wobbly organizer. At the dinner table when she was a child in the early 1890s, her family discussed the work of Socialist leader Eugene Debs and the writings of Marx and Engels. The Flynns were poor, and times were hard for them in Manchester, New Hampshire, one of the dismal textile centers of the Northeast. The family later moved to New York and lived in “a cold-water, unheated, gaslit flat” in the South Bronx, as she remembered it. Flynn was a high-spirited and headstrong girl, and she readily embraced the radical environment of her upbringing. At age sixteen, she delivered her first public talk—titled “What Socialism Will Do for Women”—before the Harlem Socialist Forum in January 1906, and the hearty response she received propelled her into a lifelong career of public speaking. The heady spirit of revolution and bohemianism coursed through New York’s East Side denizens, and Flynn was readily drawn to the militant unionism of the IWW. She likened the radical organization to a “great comet across the horizon of the American labor movement.” Flynn’s appearance on the labor organizing circuit seemed equally bright to the mostly male IWW membership. She had dropped out of high school to become a full-time soapboxer, and in short order mesmerized her audiences with her passionate speech, flashing grey-blue eyes, and long black hair. Flynn brought passion and intensity to her talks, clenching her hands as she spoke and jabbing the air to make a point. Part of her immense appeal, even to more mainstream audiences, was her fresh and clearly “American” appearance that defied the stereotype of hardened immigrant radicals. The novelist Theodore Dreiser extolled Flynn as a “slender, serious girl” and described her in a magazine article as the “East Side Joan of Arc.”7

At seventeen, Flynn joined Wobbly organizer and iron ore miner Jack Jones in the mining towns of the Mesabi Range in northeast Minnesota. In the subzero weather of January 1907, Flynn and Jones organized laborers at the great open-pit mines of the US Steel Corporation. Flushed with the thrill and adventure of radicalism, Flynn married Jones, became pregnant, and then lost the child in a miscarriage. But she did not slow down. She had become enthralled with travel, a wanderlust that held fast all her life. She joined IWW free speech fights—first in Missoula, Montana, and then, in the fall of 1909, in Spokane, Washington. Although she arrived in the Northwest fully pregnant again, Flynn was arrested and jailed on charges of conspiracy to incite a riot. Her account of the “orgy of police brutality” in Spokane was published and dispersed nationwide, gaining her further acclaim. But her impulsive marriage to Jones failed, and Flynn returned to her family in the Bronx where she gave birth to a son, Fred. In a move that typified her passions and priorities, she left her child with her mother and returned to the rails as a seasoned agitator.⁸

Through her associations with the anarchists and socialists of her late teens and early twenties, Flynn developed an eclectic but pragmatic philosophy that served her well. She believed that women had to achieve financial independence to function fully as human beings and citizens, but she recognized that too many women became trapped in low-wage, abusive jobs and felt forced to escape through marriage or, sometimes, prostitution. Flynn believed, as did Equi, that only radical economic change could free men and women, but Flynn launched herself as a radical agitator without a passage through liberal or Progressive work.⁹

By 1913 Equi’s and Flynn’s priorities were aligned. While Equi mounted soapboxes for cannery workers in Portland, Flynn helped organize the legendary Paterson, New Jersey, silk workers strike. Twenty-five thousand laborers from three hundred silk mills and dye houses had walked off the job to protest a steep hike in production quotas. Weavers and dyers picketed together in a collaboration that reflected the IWW’s One Big Union with workers of different trades united to manage and govern workplaces. But the strike ultimately failed, the coalition of workers splintered, and several Wobbly organizers, including Flynn, were charged with inciting to riot. Her first trial ended in a hung jury, and New Jersey authorities held her indictment for more than two years hoping to keep her rabble-rousing out of the state.10

During the interim, Flynn embarked on a cross-country speaking tour. She visited Wobblies who already knew of her as the “Rebel Girl,” the fearless young woman immortalized by IWW songwriter Joe Hill in a ballad of the same name. Flynn was passionate without being domineering or strident. She exhibited the clear-eyed enthusiasm of youth tempered with working-class values that inspired and gave hope to weary workers eager for change. In May 1915 Flynn stopped in San Francisco where she visited labor leader Tom Mooney and the suffragist and Socialist Charlotte Anita Whitney—Flynn described her as a “slender, beautiful” woman—who had befriended Equi. Flynn continued to Portland and later recalled first meeting Equi at Union Station: “Here I met a stormy petrel of the Northwest, Dr. Marie D. Equi, a successful woman doctor, who put me up at the swanky Hotel Multnomah. She entertained all the women speakers who passed through the City of Roses.”

With their radical sentiments, working-class backgrounds, and strike experiences, the two women bonded readily. As girls, they had lived in northeastern textile cities with immigrant parents who struggled to feed their children. They learned of labor disputes at early ages, and they shared the fierce Irish resentment of oppression and determination to be free. But what especially connected Equi and Flynn was their intensity and steely commitment, their ease with working-class men and women, and their open-armed embrace of life.¹¹

Fundamental differences separated the two as well, and these factors illustrate how two generations of women engaged the radicalism that swept the country during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Equi was eighteen years older than Flynn, and her childhood in the 1870s and 1880s coincided with the industrialization taking hold in northeastern cities. During her early years, Flynn, on the other hand, encountered a more thoroughly entrenched and formidable industrialism with its harsh effects readily apparent. In another contrast, Equi was forced to drop out of school and struggled to regain an academic toehold while Flynn abandoned her studies altogether and never looked back. For Equi, medicine became her base, her source of identity and security, but Flynn’s natural abilities drew her to public speaking, labor organizing, and helping lead the organization that first inspired her. Flynn became much more of an organization woman who devoted her life to the IWW as long as it held together. But Equi’s and Flynn’s paths converged in the spring of 1915 when they met in Portland, and their relationship flourished into an alliance of mutual support.12

No woman in America was more notorious that Emma Goldman, and millions of people loathed and feared her. Newspapers, including the Oregonian, referred to her as “Queen of the Anarchists” and claimed she endangered America’s democratic system. By 1915 Goldman had fought for radical causes for more than twenty years. She was punished with a year in prison for urging hungry, jobless people in New York to do anything necessary to get food and housing. With her reputation, Goldman traveled with a target on her back for authorities eager to stifle radical talk.¹³

Nearly every summer since 1906, Goldman had traveled to Portland and spoke of anarchism as a better way of life and governance, one without the harsh inequities of capitalism and industrialism. In 1908, she advised readers of the Oregonian, “Do not be alarmed, I have no dynamite in my pocket . . . education is the only bomb sanctioned by true anarchism, which stands for freedom in the truest and highest sense.” Goldman presented a vision of people living and working collaboratively while sharing resources, yet, for most Americans, anarchism conjured chaos.¹⁴

Equi and Goldman might easily have met on several occasions given their radical interests, mutual acquaintances, and the frequency of Goldman’s visits. The two women had much in common—they were close in age and both had worked in textile mills as girls and had taken nurse’s training. Violent episodes had radicalized them—the cannery strike for Equi, the Haymarket Affair for Goldman—and both had done jail time for street protests. On a personal basis, each was passionate and quick tempered, intelligent, and sure of herself, although Goldman was more abrasive and flamboyant.¹⁵

Goldman treated women’s health as both a personal and political issue fundamentally linked to social justice and personal liberation. During her August 1915 lecture in Portland, she spoke on “How and Why Small Families Are Best.” The theme alone was controversial, but when Goldman addressed various means of contraception, city police arrested her and Ben Reitman, her companion and agent. Portland attorney C. E. S. Wood paid Goldman’s $500 bail. At her trial, a Portland woman who had complained about Goldman’s talk admitted she had done so at the request of Mayor Albee’s office. Seven days later Circuit Court Judge William Gatens dismissed the charges due to insufficient evidence and remarked, “The trouble with our people today is there is too much prudery.” He added, “We are shocked to hear things uttered that we are familiar with in our everyday life.”16

During her stop in Portland the following year, Goldman decided she must add a discussion of abortion to one of her talks—titled “Free or Forced Motherhood”—and for doing so, she spent two weeks in jail. She believed that the plight of the working class and the ban on birth control information led to a dismaying number of abortions. Although Goldman boldly addressed abortion as contraception when few others would, she would not assume the risks of performing abortions. She was a trained nurse and had delivered babies and assisted with operations for mostly working-class patients. When women asked her to perform an abortion, however, she balked. Later she explained that she wanted to focus on the “entire social problem,” not with one specific aspect. Besides, she wrote, “I would not jeopardize my freedom for that one part of the human struggle.”¹⁷

Talking or writing about sex publicly wasn’t for everyone in the early twentieth century, and Equi and Goldman approached such disclosures differently. Equi is not known to have ever discussed her own sexual preferences—or those of others—in public or in writing, but she lived openly with her partners in lesbian relationships and let those arrangements speak for themselves. Goldman, on the other hand, with a national audience and reputation, lectured about sex and free love. She did so in a matter-of-fact manner largely unprecedented in the United States. She believed that the state or other authority should not interfere with how men and women define their sexual lives. In that sense, she was much more of a sex radical, a woman thoroughly versed in the politics of sexuality and alternative relationships and willing to speak openly about them. Yet she did not acknowledge in her talks or writing her own intimate relationship with another woman, Almeda Sperry, a former prostitute who became a radical organizer after hearing one of Goldman’s lectures on prostitution.18

The very next evening after her arrest for talking about birth control in Portland in 1915, Goldman addressed the topic “most tabooed in polite society, homosexuality.” At the Turn Verein Hall, also known as Scandinavian Socialists Hall, at Fourth and Yamhill Streets, Goldman discussed “The Intermediate Sex, A Discussion of Homosexuality.” She described the everyday realities for people who were variously called “inverts” or “intermediates” by sexologists. She asserted that scientific analysis, not moralizing, should shape an understanding of homosexual relations, and she opposed any regulation of sexual acts between consenting adults. Considering the high-profile, homosexual vice-clique scandal three years earlier, little was reported in the dailies about Goldman’s talk, although the Oregonian published an advertisement for it. No arrest followed.¹⁹

With their radical positions and courage in presenting them, Flynn and Goldman secured a niche for radical ideas on the nation’s front pages and in public discourse. However controversial their views, they acquainted local readers and audiences with the radical messages that Equi and others might then present. Equi also benefited from the camaraderie and support of these strong-willed women determined to work in political arenas largely defined by men. Yet Equi forged her own radical niche separate from Flynn’s or Goldman’s. Her devotion to medical care represented a defining difference between her life of radicalism and that of other leading women leftists. She remained grounded in medicine with a base in the Pacific Northwest, and she used her professional stature to further radical causes. But no accounts suggest that Equi aspired to lead a national organization, become nationally recognized, or undertake a national lecture tour.

Equi had concluded that woman suffrage promised only limited benefit to society if class disparities and economic injustice prevailed. Labor rights, free speech, and the unemployment problem loomed as far greater concerns for her, but in 1915 she was pulled into yet another suffrage conflict. She might have avoided the matter, but she felt her rights and prerogatives had been trampled.

Women’s struggle to achieve full citizenship with the right to vote had languished for so many years with only occasional spikes of victory. Factionalism, frustration, and generational disputes among suffragists were inevitable. The most straightforward route to achieving full suffrage would have been for Congress to approve a federal amendment to the US Constitution granting women the vote and then forwarding it to the states for ratification. Suffragists had pursued this track since 1878, but the right-to-vote measure stalled in Congress repeatedly, leaving women to pursue laborious, often unsuccessful state campaigns. Once the number of suffrage states reached a critical mass, the veteran suffragists figured, Congress would be forced to act. But by 1914 only twelve states—all but two in the West—had enfranchised women, and neither Congress nor President Wilson was inclined to move on suffrage, especially with the distraction of the looming European War.20

Alice Paul, a bold, impassioned, and highly intelligent woman in her late twenties, decided to break through the logjam with different tactics. Seasoned by a stint working with militant British suffragettes, Paul and her associate, Lucy Jones, sought a bolder, more aggressive campaign for suffrage than what NAWSA, the long-established national suffrage organization, pursued. They launched a new organization, the Congressional Union, in 1914 with the sole intent to force Congress to act on a federal amendment. They scorned NAWSA’s state-by-state strategy and abandoned the older group’s nonpartisanship and cultivation of recalcitrant politicians. Anna Howard Shaw, NAWSA president, at first tried to work with and placate Paul and Jones. She hoped to cultivate younger suffragists, much like Susan B. Anthony had done with her, but she was unwilling to relinquish control to a militant faction that she feared would alienate suffrage supporters.²¹

Equi entered the fray when the Oregon chair of the Congressional Union, Mrs. Emma Carroll, excluded her from the roster of delegates selected to represent the state at the Union-sponsored National Convention of Women Voters, scheduled for mid-September in San Francisco during that city’s world’s fair. No explanation was given, but Carroll later expressed her disgust that the Congressional Union leaders appeared to prefer and need “one element of society only, namely the extreme radicals.” Undeniably radical, Equi was nevertheless a Congressional Union member and a suffrage leader from a suffrage state. By all appearances, she deserved to be a delegate. Equi took offense and alerted the dailies of her intention to attend the convention and boarded a train to San Francisco. The next day Carroll refuted Equi’s claim, and a personal and political tussle stumbled forward.22

Alice Paul convened the San Francisco meeting with a clever strategy in play. She had billed it as a gathering for all women voters, but she packed the halls with Congressional Union members to suggest a national consensus for the group’s federal amendment strategy. On the first day of business, Equi was credentialed and took her seat, but Mrs. Carroll and her allies objected and apparently maneuvered a vote that unseated Equi.²³

NAWSA members demanded an accounting of who could vote at the convention, and forced Paul to announce what might have been apparent all along: voting would be limited to Congressional Union members. When a vote on the federal amendment was later called, eligible women supported it wholeheartedly. Paul’s strategy had prevailed with the “purr of the steamroller,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.”²⁴

The suffrage skirmishes hardly overshadowed San Francisco’s extravagant Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The city trumpeted its resurgence since the 1906 calamity, and the vast fairgrounds spread its temporary opulence across the tracts of land where the Oregon doctors had set up emergency wards for earthquake victims. The women’s conference closed with an evening gala and a sendoff for two envoys—one from Oregon, the other from California—on a cross-country road trip to the nation’s capital. Upon arrival, they would present a three-mile-long petition signed by more than five hundred thousand women urging adoption of the federal amendment. Despite the show of unity, the Oregon delegation continued to bicker and feud. Alice Paul tried to make peace, but Carroll and another state leader resigned over the affair. Then Charlotte Anita Whitney, the chair of the California chapter of the Congressional Union, resigned her position to protest the “rank injustice” done to Equi. She also complained that the Congressional Union had become “an autocratic organization with its controls entirely in the hands of one woman.” Paul decided to cut her losses. She dismissed Whitney’s complaints and closed the Oregon office a few weeks later.²⁵

Equi sued Carroll for $20,000 for slander and libel, accusing her of telling associates in Portland and San Francisco that she was “an immoral woman” who “conducts an illegal business.” The charges in the suit were one of the few public references to Equi’s lesbianism since the peak of the Speckart affair and the first to target Equi’s abortion services. The case was dismissed when Equi neglected, or was unable, to provide details for her accusations, but she had taken a principled stand demanding a voice even for radical suffragists. As for her further engagement with suffrage, Equi had already become disillusioned with NAWSA, and now she had reason to distrust the Congressional Union as well.26

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s upcoming trial in Paterson, New Jersey, drew Equi to the East Coast in late October 1915. On board a train from New York to Paterson, Equi did her best with other women friends to disguise Flynn as a society woman dressed in a mix of furs, hat, and a muff so she could slip by the ban on her return to the city. The local police, however, spotted her and kept her outside the assembly hall. Earlier that day Flynn was permitted to speak with President Wilson about the plight of the Wobbly prisoner Joe Hill—he was executed by firing squad a week later—but she was barred from addressing the women of Paterson. Instead, Equi and the others spoke to the restless audience.²⁷

In the late afternoon of November 30, 1915, Equi awaited the jury’s verdict in the Paterson courtroom with Flynn and Rose Pastor Stokes, the radical socialist leader. She had earlier told the press that she traveled the long distance from Oregon “to see that the defendant got a fair deal.” Flynn faced a jail sentence for allegedly urging strikers to get remaining workers out of the mills even if they had to “club them out, beat them out, or kick them out.” The question before the jury was whether or not Flynn had uttered those words. The jurors entered and, in a solemn gesture, stood behind Flynn, Stokes, and Equi. The foreman intoned the verdict: Not guilty. Flynn flashed a smile, Stokes seized Flynn’s hands and kissed her on each cheek, and Equi followed suit. Flynn told the press she was elated to be vindicated and then posed with Equi and others on the courthouse steps before departing for supper in New York.28

Equi later called on Flynn and her sister in their Bronx home, only to receive a jolt from an unexpected quarter. Elizabeth Gardiner, the medical student involved in the office brawl with Equi in 1912, had traveled to New York with Equi as her intimate companion. Little is known about their relationship, but the two women were involved enough for Gardiner to consider a future together. According to Flynn’s later recollections, however, Gardiner delivered an ultimatum to Equi—either abandon her Wobbly protests and her involvement with Harriet Speckart’s legal dispute or continue on alone without her. Equi would not comply, and Gardiner remained in the East alone to complete her medical studies. She lived the remainder of her life as a single, professional woman who later served with distinction as director of the Maternal and Childhood Health Division of the New York State Department of Health.²⁹