Bloor, Ella Reeve

BLOOR, ELLA REEVE (1862–1951). Labor organizer, journalist, and advocate of women’s rights, “Mother” Bloor achieved heroic status within the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA), and served as its model of Communist womanhood. Born on Staten Island, New York, to middle-class parents, she worked her way through the suffrage and temperance movements into the Social Democratic Party of America in 1897 and the Socialist Labor Party in 1898. Throughout her life she maintained her first political concern, the condition of women and their children. As late as 1934 she organized the U.S. delegation to the International Workers’ Conference against War and Fascism, held in Paris. In her seventies she conducted a major lecture tour for International Women’s Day.

In 1902 Bloor joined the Socialist Party and became a devoted follower of Debs. She ran for state office on the Socialist Party ticket, served as a union organizer in the machine, mining, and garment trades, and campaigned militantly for woman suffrage. After the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906, Bloor assisted the author in verifying his descriptions of conditions in Chicago’s stockyards for a government investigating commission. Openly opposed to World War I, she helped to form the Workers Defense Union.

In 1919 Bloor became a founding member of the CPUSA and served on its Central Committee from 1932 to 1948. In 1921 she made her first trip to the Soviet Union as an American delegate to the First Congress of the Third International of Labor Unions. Throughout the 1920s she worked for industrial unions in textiles and mining. At age sixty-three she hitchhiked across the country to distribute the Daily Worker. By the 1930s this venerable radical became known as “Mother” Bloor. She continued to maintain an active schedule, taking part in hunger marches, demonstrating on behalf of unemployed workers, and helping to build the Farmers National Committee for Action. At age seventy-two she was arrested for assault and inciting a riot and imprisoned for a month.

In 1937 Bloor returned to the Soviet Union, this time to be an honored celebrant of the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon her return she wrote Women in the Soviet Union (1938), a short pamphlet extolling its model programs of child care and protection of motherhood.

Married three times, the mother of eight children, Bloor managed a busy schedule throughout her life. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn met her in 1910 and recalled that Bloor, then in her late forties, “moved as if she were flying rather than walking.” In addition to her lecture and organizing tours, Bloor wrote for Left newspapers as well as such mainstream publications as Pearson’s Magazine. During World War II she conducted her final lecture tour to build support for the war against fascism. As a testament to her lifelong work, she left an autobiography, We Are Many (1940), and wrote: “It has been a privilege and joy to carry the torch of socialism....”

Barton, Anna. Mother Bloor: The Spirit of ’76. New York: Workers Library, 1937.

Brown, Kathleen A. “The ‘Savagely Fathered and Un-Mothered World’ of the Communist Party, U.S.A.: Feminism, Maternalism, and "Mother Bloor,"Feminist Studies. Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 537-570

"Ella Reeve Bloor Papers, 1890-1979", Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

Ella Reeve Bloor Papers. University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Research Center), Joseph A. Labadie Collection

Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley. Daughters of America: Ella Reeve Bloor and Anita Whitney. New York: Workers Library, 1942.