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Was Genora a professional agitator? Emphatically, yes! Within the context of political, social, and economic conditions in the United States and the world, her life was one long reform movement. She had detractors, not limited to the Kraus faction of the workers’ movements. They included the intellectuals with advanced degrees who look down on someone who proposed to contribute to their fields without what they considered the proper credentials. Many times, especially in later life, she was accused of inconsistency, of saying something, for example, in 1990 that negated her words of 1940. Apart from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement that “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” one can argue that creative people are frequently inconsistent, especially over a long span of years. As famed historian Richard Hofstadter puts it, “Any man who makes written commitment year after year on difficult public questions, will live to find some of his views evanesced and embarrassing and to see his own words quoted with telling effect against himself.”29 Besides, Genora could fire right back at the experts, becoming, as it were, an intellectual bully. “You’re the one with the degree,” she told some of her detractors, especially if their opinions turned out to be incorrect on a significant question. She was not, however, an anti-intellectual. On the contrary, her reading list was longer than that of many who denigrated her. She sometimes expressed an interest, even after reaching an elevated position in the labor-feminist movement, of going back to high school and getting a diploma or acquiring a General Equivalency Diploma (GED).

Genora Dollinger’s life was a statement of ideals and ideologies that—in her own thoughts at least—put her into an underdog status. This caused her to support programs to end racism and poverty and elevate the lives of working men and women to a level of comfort and dignity. The nobility of work was an idea she pushed most of her life, believing that workers deserved better than they usually received. These are the main thoughts and philosophies that propelled Genora on her pathway to a lifetime of revolutionary activities and accomplishments:

She opposed capital punishment and argued that it did little to prevent homicides; instead she believed in long or lifetime incarceration. She believed in the right to die with dignity, supporting Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who argued that states frequently impose a painful death on the terminally ill. She favored a woman’s right to choose and objected to the damage and destruction of abortion clinics throughout the country.

She believed in freedom of religion, which included opting out if one so chose. As noted in chapter 4, she went from being a devout Methodist to an ideological Marxist. She favored women’s rights, believing that women’s accomplishments over the years had been scandalously ignored. She continued to criticize male historians who neglected women, but at the same time, inconsistently, argued that men could not really understand women; thus she strongly supported female historians when it came to writing histories of the feminist movements in the United States. She supported—as seen by her longtime work with the NAACP and the ACLU—all those she considered to be downtrodden, whether they were African American, immigrant workers, or unskilled laborers.

She sought causes to fight within a Socialistic context and found plenty of them, all the way from unionism to feminism and the connection between the two movements, to the Citizen’s Party, and beyond. Genora Dollinger, in any way one wishes to view her, positively or negatively, truly did live a revolutionary life.

Appendix A Chronology of

Genora Dollinger’s Life

1913

Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

1914

Moves with mother and father to Flint, Michigan.

1920s

Attends elementary and junior high school in Flint. Attends Central High School. Active in the Methodist Church.

1929