16

Nothing Is the Same

When the Armistice spread the black pall of silence over fervid oratory and burning editorials, we felt a deep sense of personal loss, something was missing from our lives.

Kate Richards O’Hare, socialist

An ideal refuge awaited Equi as she ferried across San Francisco Bay from San Quentin Prison. Charlotte Anita Whitney had taken a new apartment on Macondray Lane, a wooded, gardened walkway lined by a serpentine rock outcropping on one side and houses on the other, situated high above the bay on San Francisco’s eclectic Russian Hill. From Whitney’s one-bedroom home, Equi could see the Marin County headlands across the bay, although San Quentin, mercifully, did not mar the view. After months in close concrete quarters, she was just a few steps away from flowers, trees, and garden paths. No longer confined with strangers, she spent her days and nights with an intimate companion of her own choosing, and tried to make sense of her ordeal and what lay ahead.1

First, Equi needed to rest and recover from the health problems that flared in prison. Now on the outside, she also suffered from what prisoners called the “post-prison sweats”—flu-like symptoms with profuse perspiration that continued for several days, sometimes weeks. “I would wake up in the night with a choking feeling and a horrible sense that I was back in prison again,” Equi told a reporter. Once she regained her footing, she visited her family and friends in the Bay Area, including C. E. S. Wood and Sara Bard Field, who were ensconced three blocks from Whitney’s apartment. The longtime lovers were finally on their own—Wood had left his wife in Portland—and relished their perch on a hillside with a rambling garden. For months Equi had longed to talk with Field without the constraints of prison visits and to express how heartsore she was over the indignities she had suffered. She had written, “There is much cruelty in the modern prison system.”²

Equi might have forsaken her activism, figuring she had done her part and had suffered too much as a result. Instead, she used the newsworthiness of her release to push for prison reform. She was convinced that California authorities should transfer the women of San Quentin to another site as soon as possible. The state had already authorized an “industrial farm” for women inmates and had purchased a six-hundred-acre estate with a Victorian mansion outside the Northern California town of Sonoma. But officials first wanted to build a new hospital at the site. Equi felt keenly the empty days that plagued lifers like her former cellmate KT, and she argued there was no time to lose. The state’s plans for a more woman-oriented institution—and Equi’s advocacy for the farm facility—reflected the thrust of prison reform for women since the 1870s. Advocates wanted to avoid the harsh architecture and design of men’s penitentiaries, preferring instead rural locations with cottages and a more domestic, nurturing environment. Yet many of the San Quentin prisoners who Equi befriended did not fit the profile of young, first-time offenders who were considered the best candidates for the new institutions.3

Free of the prison censors, Equi spoke more openly of the conditions at San Quentin, but she calibrated her message for greatest effect. In a series of Bay Area forums, she depicted the dire circumstances that prevailed in prison—the cramped, claustrophobic cells, the inadequate toilet facilities, and the mind-numbing inactivity—to prod audiences to demand changes. But she also affirmed the humanity and dignity of women behind bars, and she challenged stereotypes of the inmates as debased dregs of society. In an Oakland Tribune interview, Equi extolled the liveliness of the inmates, tossing jazz-era talk with a jaunty air. “San Quentin life is ‘snap,’” she said. “The women . . . roll ’em down, wear ’em high, and the sleek silk-clad ankle and high-heeled shoe are always in evidence at the parties.” The women stepped to the latest dances—the Shimmy, the Bunny Hug, and the San Rafael Waddle. Equi also asserted that the “check passers, murderers, women of the street, forgers and narcotic addicts” were just like women on the outside.4

Like many prison reformers influenced by Progressive Era thinking, Equi believed in a wages-and-workplace approach to penal reform rather than assuming that a criminal woman offender needed to be locked away. She urged higher pay and better working conditions outside prison walls as an antidote to crime—a position consistent with her urging a radical restructuring of the nation’s economic system. She understood that fundamental penal reform required an overhaul of America’s criminal justice system, but she pushed for incremental change to benefit the inmates she knew.⁵

Equi’s high-profile lobbying complemented the efforts of state reformers, and, five months after her lectures, the Sonoma facility admitted its first inmates. It flourished the first year, and the women spoke highly of their surroundings. But, tragically, fire destroyed the main building soon thereafter, and the legislature withheld funds for new construction. Reformers succeeded in getting a new three-story women’s department built at San Quentin in 1927 to house more than one hundred prisoners. A new facility for women would not open until 1934, when the State Prison for Women at Tehachapi, located in an isolated mountain region of southern California, accepted its first inmates. Equi maintained contact with the women of San Quentin, and for several years after her release, she sent them gifts for Christmas.⁶

Equi remained in the Bay Area for six weeks and became more acclimated to the national mood. A great many Americans embraced President Harding’s pledge for a new, happier era with “one spirit, one purpose, and only one flag, the American flag.” They yearned for calm—for normalcy, in his words—after years of war, labor strife, and the flu pandemic, and political reform was shelved for the most part. For activists, it seemed that years of lobbying and protests for a more just and equitable system had achieved little lasting impact. The US Congress adopted a new fiscal policy that vastly favored upper-income brackets, leaving the people Equi cared about most—poor families, the working class, and the unemployed—shoved further aside. At the same time, the new US attorney general declared that the law of the land still prohibited dissent, and he appealed to the country’s Americanism to justify the restrictions.⁷

On the evening of September 23, 1921, Equi departed San Francisco for Portland, ready with a message for the dailies. “I found myself that the entry into the prison was actually a relief from the persecution on the outside,” she declared. Before she left Union Station for an overnight stay in town with her colleague, Dr. Alys Griff, Equi admitted to reporters that her health had declined in prison and that she needed rest. She hoped to complete a series of articles on prison conditions, she added, but she was uncertain whether she would remain in Portland or return to San Francisco. The next day she traveled to the Oregon coast to reunite with her daughter and Harriet Speckart. Little else is known of their visit, but Equi and Speckart disagreed about their daughter’s education. Equi favored sending Mary Jr. to a private school in northwest Portland, but Speckart insisted on keeping the child with her. Speckart prevailed, and Mary Jr. enrolled that fall at Jewell Preparatory near Seaside. They made no plans to live together as a family again.8

Back in Portland, Equi found little semblance of the radical groups she had left behind the year before. Prosecutions under the Espionage Act and the Criminal Syndicalism Act had decimated IWW ranks across the nation, and Wobbly leaders were hard-pressed to do more than mount legal defenses for indicted and convicted comrades. As early as November 1919, Portland Mayor George Baker declared that the IWW was not a threat in the city because they were not tolerated. He boasted that Wobbly meeting places had been taken from them and they had been driven from outdoor sites. The circumstances of the labor force had changed as well with fewer single and itinerant men seeking work than during the Wobblies’ prewar heyday. Even when labor unrest festered and flared at the end of wartime production contracts—as it did with an unsuccessful 1922 strike by longshoremen and streetcar conductors—no clear and commanding Wobbly leadership channeled discontent into effective organizing and protests.⁹

The Socialist Party fared no better and suffered from rifts between mainstream members and its Left Wing Section. In Oregon, the party was isolated, disillusioned, and ineffective. More radical members split off and formed the Communist Labor Party in the summer of 1919. Communists rejected the idea of the IWW’s One Big Union in favor of a worker’s state with laborers claiming full control of production. In Oregon they recruited from the ranks of disillusioned Socialists and former Wobblies while maneuvering under the strictures of the state’s revised criminal syndicalism law. (Oregon had strengthened the antiradical measure to be one of the most sweeping in the country.)¹⁰

The disarray and demoralization among Equi’s former allies and the restructuring of radical interests made her reentry into radical politics difficult. Kate Richards O’Hare, the Socialist leader imprisoned for sedition, described the despair she and other radicals experienced after the war. “When the Armistice spread the black pall of silence over fervid oratory and burning editorials,” she wrote, “we felt a deep sense of personal loss, something was missing from our lives.” Labor journalist and radical activist Mary Heaton Vorse bemoaned the dour Communists compared to the sparkling verve of the prewar left. “Where will you find today picturesque revolutionists like Jack Reed?” she asked. It seemed like her comrades had been “swept aside by the broom of time.” Equi faced the state of radicalism through the prism of her own diminished energy. Her daughter commented years later that prison had broken her mother’s spirits.11

The discouragement among radicals—and Progressives as well—was compounded with the rise of a protest organization that thrived in the United States. The Ku Klux Klan exploited Americans’ anxiety over fundamental changes that seemed to tumble forth, including the direct democracy reforms in places like Oregon. Comprised largely of middle- and lower-class white Protestants, the KKK maligned the influence of those they despised: African Americans, Japanese, Catholics, Jews, and radicals. In Oregon the KKK reached its peak of influence in the early 1920s with an estimated twenty thousand members, and by end of the decade there were as many as fifty thousand. In 1922 the state organization helped elect twelve Republicans to the state legislature and nearly blocked the incumbent Republican governor from his party’s nomination. The group managed to pass a compulsory school bill that required children, eight to sixteen years old, to attend public schools. The anti-Catholic measure was never implemented, and the US Supreme Court later ruled it unconstitutional. Another KKK-sponsored effort barred Japanese residents from owning property.¹²

Independent of her radical affiliations, Equi left prison with unfinished political business. She vowed to go after the “character assassinators” who had portrayed her as an amoral woman to Washington officials. She held former US Attorney Bert Haney most responsible, but she also set her sights on District Court Judge Robert Bean, federal agent W. R. Bryon, and Colonel Brice Disque, director of the US Army’s Spruce Division in the region’s forests. Even more than she knew, federal officials had maligned Equi’s womanhood and her basic humanity. But with so little access to government documents or reports of internal conversations, she failed to uncover sufficient evidence of bias or of a frameup to use against them. The US Supreme Court’s dismissal of the Albers case had embarrassed Haney and Bean, but neither suffered professionally. Haney, ironically, was later appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth District, and Bean remained on the federal bench until his death. Disque was criticized for mismanagement and hostility to workers’ rights during the war, but he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. Only the vindictive Bryon was knocked from his position leading the city’s FBI office. He was forced to resign the month Equi returned to Portland—ostensibly to trim the bureau’s budget, but mostly for his abrasive relations with colleagues and his role in the wartime sedition cases. Mayor Baker offered the former agent an investigative post with the city police force, but Bryon took a position as a special agent for Northern Pacific Railroad at Union Station.13

The prospects for Equi becoming a fulltime prison advocate were discouraging as well. Kate Richards O’Hare had already achieved national status as an authority on the subject in her own lecture tours. She had appeared in Portland in June of 1921, as did Louise Olivereau, the poet and anarchist from Seattle who had also been imprisoned for her antiwar protests. Another factor for Equi was her debilitated health after prison. The physical rigors of the lecture circuit would likely have been too much for her.¹⁴

Nor could Equi expect a state or local post, given her reputation and her prison record. At a time when women-oriented prisons had become more commonplace and the need for penal reform remained strong, there were few, if any, opportunities for Equi. She resorted to, or perhaps preferred all along, her medical practice, and she shared an office with her longtime friend Alys Griff. At San Quentin, Equi had pushed thoughts of her medical work from her mind to maintain her equilibrium, she wrote to a friend, but medicine remained her primary interest and her most ready means for a livelihood. But remaining in Portland could not have been easy for her. When she walked downtown, shopped at Meier & Frank’s department store, or stopped at the Portland Hotel, she did so as a woman with a record, and she crossed paths with those who had helped send her to San Quentin. She found that many Portlanders, like other Americans after the war, turned away from anyone who reminded them of the troubles of the past.¹⁵

The Roaring Twenties became a mad dash from the suffering and strife of the previous decade. In movies, books, and magazines, Americans seemed to revel in prosperous times and everyone’s life appeared on the upswing. The reality was far different with severe economic disparities. Six million families in the United States struggled with annual incomes below $1,000, while one-tenth of one percent of families enjoyed incomes equal to that of the six million. A few critics tried to pierce the illusion. In Echoes of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “It was borrowed time anyway—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of a grand duc and casualness of chorus girls.”16

Although the conservative interests of the moneyed classes prevailed during the successive Republican administrations of the 1920s, a resurgence of progressivism eventually appeared. In the early postwar period, civil libertarians as well as conservatives pushed back against the erosion of civil rights, and together they demanded limits to the wartime vigilantism. In the following years, New Progressives, as they were called, rejected the massive consumerism in the country. They developed alliances with rural reformers and factory workers that endured until the Democratic administrations of the 1930s ushered in strong labor legislation and economic reforms.¹⁷

Throughout the twenties, Equi kept to her medical practice although her reputation had suffered over the years. She spent a greater proportion of her time providing abortions, according to her daughter, but she had less reason to worry about prosecutions as public interest in abortion control and prosecution had waned. Sensational incidents still occurred, however, such as the case of Dr. Andre Ausplund who was well known to Equi. In 1921, Ausplund began serving time in the state penitentiary after exhausting court appeals of a manslaughter conviction for a botched abortion in 1915. Within two years he was paroled by the acting Oregon governor, and he reestablished his practice in Portland’s Lafayette Building, the same location used by Equi. He became familiar enough in Equi’s circles for her daughter to refer to him as Uncle Andre. In the years ahead when Equi closed her practice, Ausplund treated many of her abortion-seeking clients.¹⁸

Equi’s patients experienced just as much difficulty obtaining birth control information and devices as when she spent a night in jail with Margaret Sanger in 1916. Portland officials remained adamantly opposed to contraception, and in July 1922 Mayor Baker rejected out of hand a proposed international birth control convention for the city. Portland had been selected as a convenient East-West site since the movement had embraced Asia-Pacific countries as well as the United States. “I don’t know what’s the matter with those people,” Baker told the press, referring to the convention leaders. “Of all the cities in the world, Portland would be the least receptive to them and their doctrines.”¹⁹

The birth control movement shifted during the 1920s with more professionalism and support from wealthy donors. Margaret Sanger, and the American Birth Control League she led, lobbied Congress to drop the restrictions that had hampered their work for so many years. In many ways the strategy succeeded, especially with a surge in acceptability during the hard times of the Great Depression. Condoms became more readily available, and the number of birth control clinics soared from fifty-five in 1930 to more than five hundred by 1938. Oregon became the first state, in 1935, to regulate the manufacture and sale of birth control devices and information, thus signaling the end of the Comstock Law. Two years later the American Medical Association finally dropped its opposition to birth control.20

Equi relied on her women friends to help her settle into postprison life, yet, for the first time in fifteen years, she lived alone and without a companion. She had carried a torch for Kitty O’Brennan ever since their parting the previous year, and she greatly anticipated O’Brennan’s lecture stop in Portland in November 1921. From her new base in New York, O’Brennan worked as a top organizer for Irish independence. The previous year she had helped organize longshoremen in a refusal to unload British ships at the New York docks. On her tour O’Brennan was eager to talk about conditions in Ireland. Equi extended her usual robust welcome, but she was soon disappointed that O’Brennan spent little time with her.

Equi chided her in a letter after she departed, “Even if you do love a New Yorker, you might have been good to your prison bird a few days longer.” She added, “Two nights away from me too in Portland. Takes real friendship to forget that hurt, after months of constant heart aches.” O’Brennan returned to Ireland after her tour and in time set aside her political work. She devoted the rest of her life to literature and journalism.²¹

In February 1923, Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington stopped in Portland on her own national fundraising tour. After World War I, Sheehy-Skeffinton undertook prison reform and the release of political prisoners, and she sought donations for the families of the thirteen thousand Irish activists imprisoned by the British government. During a talk at the venerable Portland Hotel, Sheehy-Skeffington learned that her home in Dublin had been firebombed and destroyed. She took the incident in stride once she learned her young son, Owen, was safe.²²

Parts of Equi’s professional and personal life began to slip away as two close friends took their own lives. In October 1922, Janina Constance Klecan, a respected physician and pathologist in Portland, swallowed a vial of morphine to end her life. Equi had rushed to her friend’s office after receiving a suicide note from her, and she had found Klecan lying on a couch unconscious. With two other doctors’ help, Equi finally revived her, but Klecan died later in the hospital. Equi knew her friend suffered from depression and that she had experienced “soul torture” after C. E. S. Wood ended an affair with her. Wood had pursued a relationship with Klecan while also seeing Sara Bard Field.23

Two years later another tragedy took the life of Kathryn “Kitty” Beck Irvine, who had been a fervent correspondent to Equi during her months at San Quentin. Prior to Equi’s trial, Irvine had led the local defense committee for the Wobblies charged with sedition. Irvine had also suffered from a breakup with C. E. S. Wood, her longtime employer and lover, who continued to see Field as his mistress. Seemingly doomed to troubled relationships, Irvine later married IWW attorney George Vanderveer, who wrestled with insolvency, alcoholism, and despair after the loss of Equi’s case and that of the mass trial of Wobblies in Chicago. Once Irvine suspected her husband of seeing another woman, she started drinking excessively, and, in October 1924, she inhaled chloroform and suffocated herself. Equi grieved the loss of her friends, and she was appalled that Wood appeared to dote on his own emotional needs at the expense of the women he drew into his life. At one point she threatened to expose Wood’s exploits, although it appears she did not do so.²⁴

Between the deaths of her friends, Equi lost her father at age eighty-three in February 1924. Her sister Kate recalled in the local New Bedford paper that their father retained his reputation among neighborhood children as “Uncle Sam” for his full white beard and friendly manner. His survivors included four daughters, three sons, fifteen grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. Equi wrote an obituary that appeared in the Oregonian and described her father as “a character in his home and a decidedly picturesque figure.” Perhaps due to her failing health or the general weariness of her postprison life, Equi did not attend her father’s burial services, held in the New Bedford church he had helped build.²⁵

Six years after her release from prison, a series of events further disrupted Equi’s personal and professional life and shaped her next decade. In December 1926, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Rebel Girl of Wobbly fame, stopped in Portland to rally support for her causes. She spoke with the passion and commitment audiences anticipated, but below the surface she was emotionally battered and physically exhausted.

Throughout the war years, Flynn had led the Workers Defense Union and undertook nearly constant travel to raise money and organize protests for the release of political prisoners. She especially invested herself in the defense of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, accused of robbery and murder in Massachusetts, as well as her longtime lover, Carlo Tresca, arrested for disseminating birth control pamphlets. After Tresca was released, Flynn was staggered when he terminated their thirteen-year relationship. Soon thereafter she learned that Tresca had simultaneously romanced her sister, Bina, who gave birth to his child.26

Flynn dealt with the demands and losses in her life by assuming more obligations. She agreed to manage publicity for the Passaic, New Jersey, textile strike and then thrust herself into a massive relief effort to support the families of more than fifteen thousand strikers. She also undertook a demanding national tour to benefit Sacco and Vanzetti and the Passaic strikers.²⁷

When Flynn reached Portland in December, she was already experiencing what she described as sharp pains in her spine, breathlessness, and a feeling that her heart was “as large as a football.” She persisted with a half-dozen more stops in Oregon and Washington before she could do no more. She returned to Portland and sought medical care from Equi, who settled her in the two-level house in the Goose Hollow neighborhood she had purchased three years earlier.²⁸

Equi arranged for Flynn to consult a heart specialist first. They were told her heart was normal, except for a few irregularities. The doctor advised complete bed rest and warned that Flynn risked an untreatable “heart lesion” if she did not end her excessive workload and stress. The diagnostician in Equi led her to seek another opinion, this time from a dental radiologist who identified an impacted molar that had triggered a streptococcal infection throughout her body. He pulled the tooth, but the extraction caused more rapid dissemination of the infection and a worsening of her condition. Penicillin and other antibacterial compounds had yet to be discovered, and Equi resorted to giving Flynn bootleg whiskey to ease her condition. Flynn’s status worsened to the point that Equi summoned a “Bishop Brown,” presumably a priest, to give a blessing. Flynn slipped into a periodic delirium that she later described as “bordering on madness.” Mary Jr. remembered sitting with Flynn during her illness when the older woman “cried for the moon.”²⁹

In late February 1927, Equi wrote to Flynn’s friends and colleagues and advised them that her condition did not permit a return to work. For Flynn to stop everything—lectures, organizing, meetings, and conferences—was a shock for the organizations depending on her, but they expressed immense gratitude for Equi’s assistance. More than a month passed before Flynn left Equi’s house for a ride in town. By early April, Equi sent another “Dear Friend” letter to report limited improvement. She also enlisted the help of another physician who had treated strep infections during World War I. He told Flynn that she needed complete rest and that she would not recover for at least five years. Equi could afford the best specialists in town, and their assessments reflected the limits of medical technology and therapeutics of the time.30

In the midst of the tumult of caring for Flynn, Equi assisted a woman doctor at the Oregon Coast, who was stricken with grief over the disappearance of her adopted six-year-old son. While being held in the Multnomah County jail for a minor offense, the frantic, overwrought woman undertook a hunger strike. Her story was reported in the dailies, and Equi sent the woman $160 to cover treatment in a sanitarium. The Oregon Daily Journal later remarked that Equi was the only Portlander who had helped the unfortunate doctor. The editor observed that “in many a humble home where Dr. Equi has ministered to the sick and from her own means bought and carried provisions to the hungry that name is blessed.”³¹

Just as Equi had developed a daily routine for Flynn’s care at home, she was shaken by news that Harriet Speckart had taken ill with symptoms of a cerebral hemorrhage. Equi arranged medical care for Harriet on the Oregon Coast and brought Mary Jr., now twelve years old, to live with her in Portland. Equi juggled crisis care for Speckart and nursing attention for Flynn in cities eighty miles apart—while also comforting a frightened daughter. Speckart’s condition worsened rapidly, and she died at her home on May 26, 1927, at age forty-four. Her obituary in the Morning Astorian, an Oregon coast newspaper, identified her brother, Joseph, and her half-sister, Mrs. Emily Mailand, as Harriet’s sole survivors. Equi handled all the arrangements, including a funeral service, cremation, and placement of remains at Lincoln Memorial Park in east Portland.³²

Speckart’s last six years are less well known than the ten months when she wrote almost daily to Equi in prison. She had lived a modest life in Seaside with simple pleasures. She had relinquished her family bonds in pursuit of justice, and she remained devoted through discord and disruption to her lesbian relationship. She shared twenty-one years with Equi in what she once called “our little friendship.” No one else had been as intimately involved in Equi’s life for so long a period.

At age fifty-five Equi assumed the role of sole parent with concerns and duties she never wanted and was ill equipped to perform. A few months after Mary Jr. arrived in Portland, Equi asked Charlotte Anita Whitney to take her daughter into her Oakland, California, home. The arrangement had to have been difficult for Mary Jr. so soon after Speckart’s death. Yet Whitney’s circumstances were perhaps the better alternative: she had remained single and her family’s wealth provided for her own livelihood.

Whitney’s life had become more settled with the threat of imprisonment lifted. In May 1927 the US Supreme Court upheld her conviction under the California criminal syndicalism law even while it restored free speech protections declared illegal under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Ironically, Equi’s wartime resistance would have been protected under the standards set in Whitney v. California. Whitney did not seek clemency from the governor of California. She worried she would receive special treatment due to her class, wealth, and prominence. Intense pressure from the Bay Area’s civic, religious, and corporate leaders, however, persuaded the state’s newly elected governor, Clement C. Young, to grant Whitney a full and unconditional pardon in June 1927.33

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn continued to improve through that summer under Equi’s care, but she sorely missed her son, Buster, who she had frequently left behind to travel to one emergency after another. Equi intervened and paid for Buster to visit his mother and then for the two of them to vacation at Crater Lake National Park in southwest Oregon. Events continued to batter Flynn’s emotional well being, however. In late August 1927, the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, sparking violent protests worldwide. Flynn’s seven years of defense work on their behalf had failed, and she sank into further despair and depression. Only after several more months did her health improve, allowing her to return to New York in November of that year. Evidently her strep infection, and not her heart, had been the primary cause of her difficulty, and the symptoms had lessened during her long period of rest.³⁴

The year 1927 held one more upset for Equi. In December she developed pneumonia, after a years-long history of tuberculosis, pleurisy, and a back injury. In a sequence of events not entirely clear, Mary Jr. wired Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from Oakland and asked her to return to Oregon to care for her mother. Once again Flynn left her mother and son, after first relocating them in a new home in Brooklyn. After she assessed Equi’s condition, Flynn urged Mary Jr. to return immediately to Portland with Whitney. And so, in the winter of 1927, Flynn and Whitney gathered with Equi to help each other recover from illnesses, legal defeats, and personal setbacks. They represented more than sixty years of political activism, two free-speech cases taken to the US Supreme Court, dozens of strikes and arrests, and jail and prison time. In the weeks ahead, Equi regained her health, and Whitney returned to Oakland to initiate a new, more radical phase of her life. Equi and Flynn, however, were about to take an extended leave from their activism, together in Portland. Flynn later wrote in her journal, “Should have stayed home and never gone back.”³⁵