Industrial Workers of the World

Poet and rebel. The IWW never published her work in her lifetime but then she did not submit it either. It was not what was being looked for and that is a bit of a shame. For she wrote about love and sexuality and loss as well as class. Much of her work was love poems but the major injustices of class society, never pointed out or underlined, always whisper in the background. As they always did, and do, for working people – admit it or not. Lesbia quite properly felt that “poetry and fiction should not be consciously propagandised”. Her style was hardly that of the bush/worker ballad or of the satirical/comic type the other Wobbs of the period made such a run with. Yet her poems often reflect the real women and girls she worked with. Their oppression and resilience are there, like the sky, a part of the scenery.

Fellow Worker Harford had a legal training but her horror at being part of the parasite class caused her to work and organise for many years in the clothing industry – an oftimes brutally exploitative industry then and becoming so again now with our new industrial relations laws. Born with a serious heart condition that prevented her blood oxygenating, she also threw herself into the fight against conscription and spoke against it night after night until “her exhausted heart and throat landed her in hospital”. Some in the IWW may have disparaged because she joined our class and union by choice rather than necessity. In this they were doing her and themselves an injustice. F.W. Lesbia held nothing back. She was a true rebel.She died in 1927, aged just thirty-six.

Fellow workers wishing to read Lesbia's poems can download them from the University of Sydney 'Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service' (SETIS): Harford, Lesbia (1891-1927) - The Poems Of Lesbia Harford (PDF File) http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/id/v00033

Takver's "Radical Tradition" has a good article about her at Lesbia Harford- The Rebel Girl