I was reading today about Rose Pesotta, a veteran unionorganizer with the ILGWU, who in February of 1936 went to Akron, Ohio to helpworkers striking at the Goodyear Rubber factory. She was sent to raise supportfor the strike among the workers' wives and daughters, but she was alsosuccessful in connecting with the workers themselves, ultimately helping to endthe strike with a negotiated settlement.

Pesotta was an effective organizer among workers of many backgrounds,from Mexican dressmakers to Midwestern autoworkers, and a life-long anarchist,like her fellow radical immigrant activist and good friend Emma Goldman. I likethe image of these two little women and their powerhouse politics hanging out together.And I wonder, in these hard economic times, what Rose P. and Emma G. would haveto say to American workers. What would they recommend for the autoworkers andgarment workers of today? What can we learn from their commitment to organizingand to anarchism?

Thinking about these two favorite anarchists of mine remindsme that anarchism gets a bad rap these days. When we talk about Emma'sanarchism, it is usually about her involvement in violent acts, like AlexanderBerkman's botched assassination attempt on Henry Clay Frick. Butthe anarchist ideals that Emma and Rose championed were less about violence anddestruction than about creating the conditions for absolute freedom and whatEmma called "everbody's right to beautiful, radiant things." They pursued theiranarchist ideals mostly through mundane, everyday acts of organizing - likeserving on the Congress of Industrial Organization's general executive board,as Rose did (albeit somewhat ambivalently, feeling that she was the tokenwoman) - not by blowing things up.

Why, I wonder, has this idealistic anarchist perspectivebeen lost in popular conceptions of anarchism? Too many bad-ass, multi-piercedteenagers smashing things and calling that anarchism? The interference of thecurrent take on the late 1960s that calls Bill Ayers a terrorist? Would Obamahave been maligned, I wonder, for associating with Rose Pesotta, a hero to thestriking workers at the Goodyear Rubber factory? Who are the Roses and Emmas oftoday?