For seventy years, Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor was a union organizer and women’s rights activist in left-wing political parties in the United States. Peripatetic in her search for the organizational path to socialism, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I, she joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). In the 1920s and 1930s, Bloor became the party’s most prominent female leader.

Largely forgotten today due to America’s ongoing anticommunist crusade, Bloor remained committed to women’s equality and uplifting working people — both of which she believed only could happen by advancing beyond capitalism. Her life story is as fascinating as it is educational.

Ella Reeve was born on Staten Island in 1862 during the Civil War. She grew up in middle-class suburbs but when her mother died during her twelfth childbirth, the seventeen-year-old Ella took over the care of her four youngest siblings. Bloor first became interested in political reform as a teenager, influenced by her great-uncle, who was an abolitionist, freethinker, and Unitarian.