Back in the days when women, lumped together with criminals and the insane, were disenfranchised and mounted police rode down legal pickets, bonds were formed between the growing women's movement and expanding labor movements. After 1900, nationalist-progressive policies threatened the ordered society. The career of Florence Luscomb, who suceeded radical feminists such as Charlotte Gilman, Jane Addams and Alice Paul, was closely intertwined with both movements. Luscomb has devoted most of her life to jabbing plump and comfortable consciences. She began campaigning for votes for women before World War I, and continued to do so even after the suffrage had been gained nationwide with the 1920 19th Constitutional Amendment.
In the late '30s there was a strike of stevedores in Everett, Mass. The police broke up the peaceful picket line with tear gas. Those were the lean years for unions in America, and these members of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO), protesting against conditions in the maritime industry, were banned from further picketing. But the police had arrived on a windy day and there was a school playground to the side of the dock. That day it wasn't only workers who were taken to hospitals; the children also choked and wept as the stinging cloud hit them.
The citizens of Everett were no more amused with the actions of the law than the strikers had been. But the workers' protest came sooner. That evening they got in touch with Luscomb and Sara DuPont, known as champions of progressive causes since before historians dignified those years as an "era." Luscomb and DuPont had shared the days when advocating reform often meant speaking from soapboxes to mangy dogs and small boys on universal suffrage, civil rights for Americans of every race and color, and the claim each man or woman had to earning a decent wage.
The two women readily agreed to help the labor union. They proclaimed the positions the CIO were forced to surrender and formed a new, solitary picketline of two the next day, protesting the police action. Both women wore gas masks; they were a curious sight. The newspapers quickly reported the story of the 75-year-old DuPont, a member of one of the wealthiest industrial families in America, protesting a management decision, and the publicity bore fruit. An enquiry was held, unearthing the information that the police, with the approval of their Chief, had been accepting money not only from the city whose children they had accidentally gassed but also from the striking seamen's employers. The Chief of Police was subsequently fired and the two women's actions had added the initial theatrical touch that brought the story into the open.
Today, Luscomb is 90 years old. She lives on a quiet, tree-lined Cambridge street in a turquoise-grey house with a white front porch, an 11-member commune. Luscomb opens the door to visitors, a smiling grandmotherly figure wearing baggy black cords, a cream silk blouse and turquoise-and-silver jewelry. She peers rather hesitantly through clear pale-pink-rimmed spectacles but she moves quickly and lightly, even on a summery afternoon when the heat seems to slow every movement.
This spring Luscomb was one of the Seven Grand Bostonians Mayor Kevin H. White honored for their services to the City of Boston. At the black-tie, champagne reception this woman who has worked against the tide in most of the progressive movements of her times stood in a receiving line accepting compliments and handshakes from strangers, trying to avoid stumbling over cables and milling photographers recording the event. Two days later the corsage of flame-colored roses Luscomb had worn at the dinner was in a vase on the coffee table next to the Washington Spectator.
Luscomb regales a visitor with a wealth of anecdotes and political prophesying about people and places far away in space and time yet, as she speaks, it is all vivid. Luscomb recalls the struggles of the early women's movement with compassion and sometimes with humor. There was, for example, a time in the summer of 1909 when Luscomb was stumping for the suffrage and spoke at a small town near Haverell, Mass. It was an evening meeting in a town hall and, after the speaker had finished, a basket filled with yellow "Votes for Women" buttons was passed around the room. They cost one cent but the audience was gently reminded, "We wouldn't refuse more." Luscomb reached a burly, balding man in the sixth aisle who solemnly handed her double the requested amount. "It was worth two cents to hear you speak tonight, ma'am."
Later, Luscomb recalled the drama that attended the 1919 passage of the amendment by Congress of the Federal Constitution that would have extended the right to vote to all Americans, regardless of sex. Three-quarters of the state legislatures had to ratify the amendment and time was running out. The women were anxious to ratify it by 1920--the year of a presidential election--but they had to win 36 states, and they had 35. Only five states hadn't voted, two did not hold a session that year, and two were in the far South and "very reactionary," Luscomb remembers ruefully. Tennessee was the last chance. Passions rose as the deadline neared, rhetoric and belief tangling until they were inseparable. One legislator, tainted with the self-righteousness that always seems to attend those threatened by reform, cried out:
"Women are the best thing God ever made, and I would not pollute them by allowing them to wade through the filthy waters of politics."
At last, though, the amendment was ratified with the vote of Harry T. Burns, the youngest member of the Tennessee legislature following his mother's advice and helping vote in democracy for the women of America.
Luscomb conjures up images with little regard for continuity (from 1920 in Tennessee, her conversation turns to the 1848 conference on the condition of women at Seneca Falls, N.Y.). And her discourses reminded one of the plot of an old movie, full of flashbacks and straying off on tangents.
Luscomb's recollections are the stuff of which the most absorbing memoirs are made, but she has never written down the story of her life in full. Her first contact with feminism was at the age of five in 1892 when her mother took her to a suffragette convention. In 1909 Luscomb was one of the few women graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a degree in architecture. In 1910, the editors of The Woman's Journal (founded in 1840 by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell as the news bulletin of the women's movement) decided to reach out to the general public. Luscomb became one of many vendors hawking the journal on street corners. Every Saturday she stood on the corner of Tremont and "the well-named" Winter St. through the bitter chill of late 1910 and beginning of 1911. She still has the license as a "hawker and peddlar" (record #955) that she used at that time. And, in a battered leather documents folder she found a picture of herself on an old magazine cover: the clothes were old-fashioned and demure, her expression assured and smiling as she carried a bag over her shoulder full of newspapers. Always, she has maintained this kind of composure and conviction in the face of, at best, grudging tolerance or, more usually, as in the days when democracy for women was still opposed, when she felt herself unpopular, radical and ridiculed.
Luscomb visited mainland China in 1962, more than a decade before the United States government made any attempt to normalize relations with that country. And, only seven years before, during the McCarthy era, she was summoned to appear before the Massachusetts Commission to Investigate Communism and Subversion and interrogated about her organizational activities. These had included, since 1920, executive secretaryships of the Boston League of Women Voters, the Mass. Civic League, the Joint Board of Sanitary Control supervising health and safety conditions in garment factories, and for seven years, the Mass. branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She was a charter member (and at one time the president) of the local union of the United Office and Professional Workers Union of America.
Luscomb was an early adherent of the Civil Liberties Union from its inception in 1920 and for many years she was vice-chairman of its Massachusetts branch. She also joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People just after it was organized and served as the Boston branch vice-chairman, working extensively with Melnea Cass (another honored grand Bostononian known today as "The First Lady of Roxbury").
All in all, she is hardly a woman who would take a trial meekly. She addressed the Massachusetts Commission in 1955 when McCarthyism slithered over the land and she remained undaunted. She replied that she was not acquainted with any so-called subversives but that:
