Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical is an important new biography by University of Texas historian Jacqueline Jones that fact-checks Parsons’ made-up details about her own background, correcting errors existing in virtually every biographical sketch ever written about this amazing woman … Jones has given us a clear sense of who this remarkable woman was, moving well beyond the only previous biography of Parsons … Goddess of Anarchy displays the powers of a master historian, taking the reader to both post-Civil War Texas and to Gilded Age Chicago. While many readers will disagree with Parsons’ politics, they may find themselves admiring her determination and idealism, which were quintessentially American.
With Goddess of Anarchy, prize-winning historian Jacqueline Jones has written the first critical, comprehensive biography of Parsons that seeks to peel back the layers of her complex life. Jones amassed an incredible body of records — local, state and federal government documents; prolific newspapers; organizational and personal correspondence; and Lucy and husband Albert Parsons’s extant writings … Parsons is a remarkable woman who managed to get past many of the barriers that impeded members of her race and sex. She was primarily an autodidact who became a writer and speaker, with eclectic and densely erudite proclivities, of some distinction … Jones’s richly researched and engagingly written biography establishes Parsons’s rightful place in the pantheon of American radicals. Yet it leaves open the question of her legacy among African Americans.
There is much to praise in Goddess of Anarchy, including Jones’s thorough research, which has laid to rest uncertainty about Parsons’s origins, and the ways the book illuminates the rapidly changing economic and political circumstances in which Parsons operated. A work that could easily have descended into a confusing litany of tiny organizations, short-lived publications, and endless speaking tours retains clarity and coherence throughout. Lucy Parsons finally receives her due as a pioneering radical … Jones, however, sometimes seems to measure both Parsonses against an ahistorical ideal—the radical attuned to the intersections of race and class, the nuances of political strategy, and the impact of language, whose private life reflected his or her political principles. Not surprisingly, by this standard Lucy is found wanting. So would almost any human being.
Lucy was a fierce orator and writer who rejected reform and charity (‘hush money to hide the blushes of the labor robbers’) and roused large crowds with revolutionary talk (‘Learn the use of explosives!’) … Goddess of Anarchy is meticulously researched. Yet Parsons, as a character, remains inscrutable. Questions linger. Why did she say so much on behalf of exploited whites and almost nothing about black workers? Why did she tell reporters that she was Mexican and Indian? Why did she have her son, whom she had once paraded before the press, draping him in a red scarf and calling him ‘my brave little anarchist,’ committed to a mental hospital?
Strong words for the impassive wife, mother and dressmaker seen in photos. But Parsons’ life was one of contradiction. Born to an enslaved black mother, she championed the cause of white working classes ... Biographer Jacqueline Jones uses research to give Parsons’ saga epic sweep, recapturing a time that could have reshaped the United States if things had gone differently. She traces the fiery Parsons from antebellum Virginia to post-Reconstruction Texas to Chicago, where the deadly Haymarket affair of 1886 became her defining moment ... Parsons made good copy then, and she does now. Many scenes will have the reader thinking, 'Oh, no, she didn’t.' She did.
Jones uncovers new aspects of Parsons’s story, such as her birth to an enslaved woman in Virginia, which she disguised with tales of Spanish-indigenous origins. Jones also casts a critical eye on the dissonant aspects of Parsons’s life and politics … Despite some dry prose, Jones impresses with this richly detailed and empathic study of a complex figure.
The biographer’s sympathies are clearly with more pragmatic radicals like Mother Jones, who argued that the anarchists’ theatrical tactics and rhetoric were distractions in the struggle for real reforms like the eight-hour working day. Jones also finds distasteful Lucy’s embrace of traditional gender roles … Nonetheless, the author acknowledges Lucy’s gifts as an orator and salutes her refusal to be relegated to a subordinate role by her male comrades … Comprehensive and fair, though a little more warmth toward Parsons would have made the book more engaging.
