Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, like Emma Goldman, was a visionary public speaker, but unlike Goldman she was also skilled at the nuts and bolts of organizing. Whereas Goldman called herself a "free-lancer" unencumbered by any organizational affiliation, Flynn was an organizer; for much of her life, her public speaking was in generally in support of her work in the labor movement.  She grew up in a working-class Irish immigrant family; both of her parents were socialists and, unusual for Irish immigrants, both were atheists. Believing that "socialism was just round the corner," she found radical politics far more interesting than high school and left school during her senior year to become an organizer for the International Workers of the World (IWW). Flynn fought for gender equality within the IWW, demanding that it become sensitive to women’s needs.

Among American socialist feminists, Flynn was one of the first to recognize the need for the socialist movement to aggressively combat racism. She became an organizer for the only union in early 20th century America that was organizing African-American workers and challenging racial segregation. Flynn’s commitment to racial justice was one of the reasons she joined the Communist Party in 1936, seeing the Party as the embodiment of the egalitarian, antiracist ideals of the then defunct Wobblies. Flynn was the among the first American intersectional feminists; she resisted the tendency of many men on the socialist left to focus almost exclusively on class and understood that class oppression was experienced differently by women and racial minorities. 

  Like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Rose Schneiderman began her career as a labor organizer and as a socialist. However, she and Flynn ended up in a very different places—Flynn as the Chair of the American Communist Party and Schneiderman as an administrator in the Labor Department during the Roosevelt administration. Schneiderman became involved in the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), founded by middle- and upper-class women, to improve conditions for working-class women. Initially, Schneiderman shared the socialist distrust of cross-class alliances. Over the years, Schneiderman  lost her ambivalence about working with middle class liberals and eventually became one herself.  She did not explicitly repudiate socialism and may not have changed her core beliefs; however, she clearly feared the association with socialism would damage her career prospects. Her career was aided by Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins. Schneiderman was clearly dazzled by the Roosevelts and eagerly joined the Roosevelt administration.

Within the socialist and communist movements the struggle for racial justice was led by Black women. They were among the first to develop an analysis of the interconnections of gender, race, and class, with Claudia Jones’ “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman,” among the first analyses of what we now call intersectional feminism. By the 1940s, Jones had become the Communist Party’s principal spokesperson on Black women’s issues. In 1951 Jones, and 11 other members of the Communist Party, were charged with advocating the violent overthrow of the government.  There was no evidence that Jones had ever done so; nonetheless, she was sentenced to one year in prison and deportation upon completion of her sentence.

At her request, she was deported to England rather than her native Trinidad. She found the Communist Party of Great Britain much less welcoming than she had expected. Drawing on her connections with London’s West Indian community, Jones founded the West Indian Gazette in 1957; the Gazette’sreporting on Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial struggles resonated with an increasingly politically aware Caribbean community. Jones became a leader in London’s West Indian community and in the international communist movement. At the age of 49, she died of a massive heart attack on December 31, 1964. By the mid 1980s, Jones was largely forgotten. However, in the 21st century there has been renewed interest in Jones and her work to ensure that Black women’s issues are an integral part of the socialist agenda.