Ella Reeve Bloor

Ella Reeve Bloor was married three times, but none of her husbands was named Bloor. Nevertheless, while organizing workers in Chicago as a socialist, she assumed the name “Mrs. Richard Bloor” and spent the rest of her life being affectionately called “Mother Bloor.” Thrown out of the socialist party for being too radical even for them, she served on the Central Committee of the Communist Party for twelve years and even ran for governor of Pennsylvania in 1938 as a Communist candidate. An in-your-face woman to the end, “Mother Bloor” pointed proudly to her hundreds of arrests for labor organizing, the last of which was in 1936 in Nebraska at the age of seventy-four!