In 1906, fifteen-year old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn mounted a soapbox in Times Square to denounce capitalism and proclaim a new era for women’s freedom. Quickly recognized as an outstanding public speaker and formidable organizer, she devoted her life to creating a socialist America, “free from poverty, exploitation, greed and injustice.” Flynn became the most important female leader of the Industrial Workers of the World and of the American Communist Party, fighting tirelessly for workers’ rights to organize and to express dissenting ideas.
Speaker Lara Vapnek, a former writer in residence in the Library’s Frederick Lewis Allen Room, teaches at St. John’s University. She specializes in the history of gender, labor, and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States.
Midtown,