Ella Reeve Bloor, popularly known as "Mother Bloor," was noted for her energetic organizing work on behalf of labor, communism, socialism, and radical causes from the 1910s to the 1930s. "Mother Bloor" was born in 1862 on Staten Island, New York. She married Lucien Ware in 1881 and gave birth to six children between 1882 and 1892. In 1895, Bloor published Three Little Lovers of Nature. The following year, she divorced Ware and in 1897, she married Louis Cohen. In the brief span of her second marriage, Bloor had two sons and published Talk about Authors and Their Works for young adults. Bloor was an activist in the suffrage movement during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1901, she joined the Socialist Party and approximately a year later she divorced Cohen. Partnered with Richard Bloor in 1906 to investigate Chicago's meat packing industry, Bloor took her colleague's name despite the fact that they were never married. Throughout the 1910s-30s, Bloor was an advocate for political prisoners and conscientious objectors as well as an organizer of mining, textile, and farming strikes. She ran for Lieutenant Governor of New York on the socialist ticket in 1918 and participated in the formation of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. in 1919. Two years later, she served as a union delegate to the Second International. Upon her return from the Soviet Union, Bloor hitchhiked throughout the United States while writing articles for the Daily Worker. In 1930, she married Andrew Omholt, her third husband. Seven years later, Bloor returned to the Soviet Union for the twentieth anniversary celebration of the October Revolution. When Bloor returned to the United States she retired to April Farm, Pennsylvania in 1937. Three years later, she published her autobiography, We Are Many. In her early eighties, Bloor undertook a campaign against fascism between 1942 and 1945. In 1951, Bloor died at the age of 89.

For more information, please refer to the biographical essay by Thomas and Richard Edwards in Notable American Women: The Modern Period.

The Ella Reeve Bloor Papers consist of 5.5 linear feet of personal and professional correspondence, pamphlets, clippings, memorabilia, and printed ephemera. The documents span the years 1896 to 1979 and are particularly strong from the late 1910s through the early 1940s. This collection documents most major events of her life except those of her very early career and the investigation of the Chicago meat-packing industry for Upton Sinclair.

There is material throughout the collection related to both her family and many notable colleagues such as Earl Browder, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Bross Lloyd, William Foster, Lem Harris, Bill Haywood, Paul Robeson and many others.

This collection is organized into six series:

• I. BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL
• II. CORRESPONDENCE
• III. SPEECHES AND WRITINGS
• IV. ORGANIZATIONS
• VI. PHOTOGRAPHS
• V. SUBJECT FILES
• OVERSIZE MATERIALS
• MICROFILM

Please use the following format when citing materials from this collection:

Ella Reeve Bloor Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.