Tag Archives: famous progressive women

This is the fourth article in my series on Famous Progressive Women.

Dorothy Day was the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

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I am continuing my series of Famous Progressive Women. Read the two posts prior to this on
The Ultimate Activist:Harriet Tubman and
Petra Kelly, Founder of the Green Party.

In rememberance of the November 30 anniversary of her death, today I’m focuing on Mother Jones. Mother Jones was born in Ireland Mary Harris Jones on August 1, 1837. She died on November 30, 1930. She was raised in Canada, became a teacher in Michigan and then a dressmaker in Chicago. She married George Jones in 1861 and they had four children.
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I have decided to write articles on inspiring women as often as I can. Last week I posted information on Harriet Tubman (See 9th-Aug-2005 07:08 am – The ultimate activist: Harriet Tubman). Today I shall provide information on one of the founders of the Green Party, Petra Kelly.

The account below is based on facts that I derived from various sources and I have provided links to information on Petra Kelly below the account and photos.

My reading has led me to conclude that Petra Kelly was a woman of action and one who truly “walked the talk”. In her later years she apparently alientated herself from the Green Party, while continuing to work on the campaigns that reflected Green values, because of internal in-fighting within the party as it grew. Ironically, Kelly was a victim of violence which resulted in her death, an incident whose motive remains a mystery to date.

Petra Kelly

1947-1992

“There is not a little bit of cancer or a little bit of malnutrition or a little bit of death or a little bit of social injustice or a little bit of torture. It does not help us in any way if we begin accepting lower and safer levels of, for example, radioactivity or lower and safer levels of … lead or dioxin. We must speak out clearly, loudly and courageously, if we know that there are no safe levels.” — Petra Kelly.

Kelly lived in Germany and in the U.S. during her life. She studied in the U.S. and in Europe. During the 1968 presidential elections she worked on the campaign of John F. Kennedy.

Kelly participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and racial discrimination. She was also interested in the women’s movement and citizen’s rights. Her models were Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Rosa Luxemburg, the women of Greenham Common, Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, Andrej Sacharow, and Vaclav Havel.

She was active in the peace movement, anti-uranium movement, environmental movement, human right’s movement, violence-free movement, citizen’s rights movement, and the women’s movement. Kelly hoped that some day we could attain a weapon-free world. She also founded an organization in 1973 dedidated to cancer research for children.

In 1979 she co-founded the West German Green Party, which Kelly described as ‘a non-violent ecological and basic-democratic anti-war coalition of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary grassroots oriented forces within the Federal Republic of Germany’
She served as one of the party’s national Chairpersons from 1980 to 1982 and achieved international noteriety as the German Greens put green politics on the European political agenda in the early 1980s. In 1983 she was elected to the German Parliament as one of 28 Green MPs, was speaker of the Green Parliamentary Group until 1984 and was a member of the Foreign Relations Committee from 1983. She
was re-elected to the Bundestag in 1987.

‘The vision I see is not only a movement of direct democracy, of self- and
co-determination and non-violence, but a movement in which politics
means the power to love and the power to feel united on the spaceship
Earth. … In a world struggling in violence and dishonesty, the further
development of non-violence not only as a philosophy but as a way of life,
as a force on the streets, in the market squares, outside the missile bases,
inside the chemical plants and inside the war industry becomes one of
the most urgent priorities. . .. The suffering people of this world must
come together to take control of their lives, to wrest political power from
their present masters pushing them towards destruction. The Earth has
been mistreated and only by restoring a balance, only by living with the
Earth, only by emphasizsing knowledge and expertise towards soft
energies and soft technology for people and for life, can we overcome the
patriarchal ego.’

PETRA K KELLY

Bundeshaus
5300 Bonn 1
West Germany

“We, the generation that faces the next century, can add the solemn injunction ”If we don’t do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.””
~ Petra Kelly

References and for further reading:
Wikpedia – provides biographical information
In memory of Petra Kelly
Who killed Petra Kelly?1993 Mother Jones article
Web Guide on Petra Kelly – an anthology of sites
Biography of Petra Kelly – provided by The Metropolitan State College of Denver. Written in english and in german.
Petra Kelly, 1947-1992 – an article posted on Green Left
Petra Kelly
The Right Livelihood Award

There are many people throughout history who are revered for their bravery and deserve to be honored for their activism in standing up for their principles and the preservation of what is right in this world. Harriet Tubman was one such person.

While I was in Maryland on vacation, Tom and I traveled to Cambridge, Maryland for a 3 day mini-vacation with my dad, my brother and his wife and two sons, my son and my daughter.

In all my growing up in Maryland and learning about slavery and Harriet Tubman, I had forgotten that she had been born in Dorchester County, Maryland and that her birthplace was just outside of Cambridge, just 130 miles from my Middletown home. This area had been rich in tobacco plantations during the civil war. Before we left Cambridge to return to Middletown, we visited Tubman’s birthplace, a farmhouse set far off a windy country road on Maryland’s eastern shore, the lane to which was gated off to cars, in the middle of cornfields surrounding the property. It looked like no one had visited the two-story brick structure in awhile. We also visited a memorial garden honoring her life. Here are some photos:

I cannot help but think that, as we struggle with our internal issues in trying to decide how to grow the peace movement and build the Green Party, actions are what matter. We can talk and argue and plot and vision. Those things all have their place. The bottom line in this world is that when something needs to be rectified, only action will do the trick. We can start in our personal lives with our consumer power and daily habits and writing letters to our representatives and newspapers. From there we can move to larger, more visible actions, such as standing on a street corner with a sign displaying a prominent message. Then moving on to larger actions such as boycotts, mass rallies, organizing, and civil resistance.

Tubman did not have the luxury of being able to appeal to the masses. She took action on her own accord, displaying courage and conviction. We should use her, and others’, actions as an example of “walking the talk”.

Here is an account of Tubman’s life, found on the PBS site, Africans in Amercia.

Harriet Tubman
c.1820 – 1913
Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most well-known of all the Underground Railroad’s “conductors.” During a ten-year span she made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom. And, as she once proudly pointed out to Frederick Douglass, in all of her journeys she “never lost a single passenger.”

Tubman was born a slave in Maryland’s Dorchester County around 1820. At age five or six, she began to work as a house servant. Seven years later she was sent to work in the fields. While she was still in her early teens, she suffered an injury that would follow her for the rest of her life. Always ready to stand up for someone else, Tubman blocked a doorway to protect another field hand from an angry overseer. The overseer picked up and threw a two-pound weight at the field hand. It fell short, striking Tubman on the head. She never fully recovered from the blow, which subjected her to spells in which she would fall into a deep sleep.

Around 1844 she married a free black named John Tubman and took his last name. (She was born Araminta Ross; she later changed her first name to Harriet, after her mother.) In 1849, in fear that she, along with the other slaves on the plantation, was to be sold, Tubman resolved to run away. She set out one night on foot. With some assistance from a friendly white woman, Tubman was on her way. She followed the North Star by night, making her way to Pennsylvania and soon after to Philadelphia, where she found work and saved her money. The following year she returned to Maryland and escorted her sister and her sister’s two children to freedom. She made the dangerous trip back to the South soon after to rescue her brother and two other men. On her third return, she went after her husband, only to find he had taken another wife. Undeterred, she found other slaves seeking freedom and escorted them to the North.

Tubman returned to the South again and again. She devised clever techniques that helped make her “forays” successful, including using the master’s horse and buggy for the first leg of the journey; leaving on a Saturday night, since runaway notices couldn’t be placed in newspapers until Monday morning; turning about and heading south if she encountered possible slave hunters; and carrying a drug to use on a baby if its crying might put the fugitives in danger. Tubman even carried a gun which she used to threaten the fugitives if they became too tired or decided to turn back, telling them, “You’ll be free or die.”

By 1856, Tubman’s capture would have brought a $40,000 reward from the South. On one occasion, she overheard some men reading her wanted poster, which stated that she was illiterate. She promptly pulled out a book and feigned reading it. The ploy was enough to fool the men.

Tubman had made the perilous trip to slave country 19 times by 1860, including one especially challenging journey in which she rescued her 70-year-old parents. Of the famed heroine, who became known as “Moses,” Frederick Douglass said, “Excepting John Brown — of sacred memory — I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than [Harriet Tubman].”
And John Brown, who conferred with “General Tubman” about his plans to raid Harpers Ferry, once said that she was “one of the bravest persons on this continent.”

Becoming friends with the leading abolitionists of the day, Tubman took part in antislavery meetings. On the way to such a meeting in Boston in 1860, in an incident in Troy, New York, she helped a fugitive slave who had been captured.

During the Civil War Harriet Tubman worked for the Union as a cook, a nurse, and even a spy. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she would spend the rest of her long life. She died in 1913.

Harriet Tubman’s days as a conductor for the Underground Railroad had long past when this photograph was taken, believed to be sometime around 1880.

Image Credit: Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University