Jessie Ashley


Jessie Ashley was an American lawyer, socialist, and feminist. A founder of the National Birth Control League, Ashley served on the editorial board for Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review during the 1910s. As an attorney, she worked on behalf of radical labor activists and was a regular activist for the Industrial Workers of the World, being involved in the 1913 Paterson silk strike. She served as the treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and wrote a series of articles in the 1911 arguing for the inclusion of working-class women in the suffrage movement. She and Bill Haywood were lovers. She died of pneumonia on January 20, 1919.