18 Facts About Jessie Eden

Jessie Eden was a British trade union leader and communist activist, most famous for leading between 40,000 and 50,000 households during the Birmingham rent-strike of 1939.

Jessie Eden convinced women at Birmingham's Joseph Lucas motor factory to join the 1926 UK General Strike, and led an unprecedented and successful strike of 10,000 factory worker women in 1931.

Jessie Eden was a lifelong supporter of both the Transport and General Workers' Union, and of the Communist Party of Great Britain of which she was a leading member.

Jessie Eden was born on 24 February 1902 at 61 Talbot Street, which was then listed as Birmingham's All Saints sub-district.

Jessie Eden's mother was a 17-year-old suffrage campaigner called Jessie, and her father was a "jeweller journeyman" called William.

Jessie Eden grew up with her family in the Jewellery Quarter of Hockley, Birmingham.

Jessie Eden became a factory worker filling shock absorbers at Birmingham's Lucas Electronics factory and a union steward for the factory's only section of unionised women.

In 1931 Jessie Eden organised another strike, this time leading 10,000 non-unionised women on a week-long strike, during which she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Jessie Eden approached the Amalgamated Engineering Union they did not allow women to join their membership, so she instead approached the Transport and General Workers' Union.

In protest to the factory's plans, Jessie Eden organised a mass walkout of 10,000 women, who refused to work for a week.

One of the communist activists who had encouraged Jessie Eden was raised up upon the shoulders of factory workers at a dinner hour in celebration.

Jessie Eden spent two and a half years in the Soviet Union, although despite her skills in worker organisation, her work did very little to speed up the progress of the Moscow Metro, due largely to language difficulties.

Later in life, Jessie Eden told her daughter-in-law that she had travelled to the Soviet Union in secret, and that most people believed she had disappeared.

In 1939, as a protest against slum-like conditions of housing in the city of Birmingham, Jessie Eden organised a mass rent strike of nearly 50,000 tenants.

Jessie Eden would continue her activism in the field of housing rights and spend nearly three decades as the leader of Birmingham city's federation of council house tenants.

Nor can I see any young woman during the 1920s gratuitously going into a gents' toilets, as Jessie Eden is shown doing, for any reason at all other than life or death.

Jessie Eden had one sibling Noreen, was married twice, once briefly in 1923 to Albert Jessie Eden who she quickly broke up with, citing his differing political views.

In 1948, Jessie Eden married fellow communist party activist Walter McCulloch, and they stayed together until his death in 1978.