A few years ago, one of my students–I think the class was Environmental Literature.–had been reading a labor newspaper before class and gave it to me. It had an article about how often women organized and supported labor movements but that the men took the credit and also took the labor of women for granted. I was a kid at the time, but I remember when my dad, a railroad worker, would be on strike. I remember being scared but was too little to know why. Men would meet on our porch and have dark, threatening conversations. My mom would cook for them and keep the kids away from the porch. So the Anna in the first verse is made-up from that. The irony of the labor movement exploiting the labor of women did not dawn on me for many years.
That was when I read the novel, Ragtime, by the Marxist novelist E.L. Doctorow.* One of the stories addresses early unions in the garment industry. The plot takes the reader to a union hall and a vivid scene of Emma Goldman–the anarchist feminist leader–giving a speech on free love to the male union workers. She asks her lovers who are in the crowd to stand up–and the male union workers don’t like to hear this. Doctorow juxtaposes this speech with the emergence of America’s first sex symbol, Evelyn Nesbit.
Nesbit, like Goldman, a character in the novel as well as a real person, attends the lecture. This scene caused me to read Emma Goldman’s ongoing publication called The Traffic in Women–(early 20th century) — by which she mainly means marriage but other exploited labor as well. So Anna is fictional and a composite; Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit were real people but also fictional characters in Doctorow’s novel. The irony that now seems obvious in these manipulations of mass imagery that can be called “the traffic in women” did not dawn on me for many years.
The third verse tells the story of that guy and those years.
Activist
| Anna was an activist She stood with them And helped them She never wavered In the brotherhood She gave her love Like justiceBut the factory closed When the labor was The struggle of workers Solidarity is someone Emma was an anarchist But revolutions And me— I got lost |
he organized for the men. on the picket lines get home again. in her belief of man to those treacherous dreams and freedom.thirty years ago shipped abroad. happens somewhere else. else’s cause She spoke of love that is free are televised I was an American boy. in the supermarket* |
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Song Writing, guitar – Mike Opitz
Vocals – Kathleen Downes
Bass – Tom Daddesio
Keyboards – Caitlin Brutger
Notes
* E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime. Random House, 1975.
*The Clash, “Lost in the Supermarket,” London Calling (1980).
*Ben E. King, “Stand by Me” was added by Kathee as a vocal improvisation.
Mike Opitz Song Writing and Theory Project 