(1822–1900) and the radical feminist Hannah Jackson Hunt (1825–1903), an occasional contributor to the free love journal Lucifer, the Light-Bearer. When Lizzie Hunt was four years old, her family moved to a "free love" commune in Berlin Heights, Ohio, which is where she spent her remaining childhood years. Holmes received a relatively early and advanced education, which allowed her to start teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Ohio by the time she was fifteen. At the age of 17, Holmes married her first husband, Hiram J. Swank. Holmes continued teaching despite her marriage, insisting at an early age on some form of economic independence. Lizzie gave birth to two children by Swank, a son in 1868, and a daughter in 1873. The Swank family remained in Ohio for 12 years before Lizzie left for Chicago in 1879, inspired to get involved in the labor movement after reading about the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. According to Holmes, Hiram Swank died after five years of marriage, and Holmes left for Chicago accompanied only by her mother, her two brothers, and her children. The census records at the time do not confirm Swank's death, and it is possible that Holmes left Swank in Ohio and constructed a new public persona as a widow in Chicago. In either case, Swank does not play a role in the remainder of Lizzie's life. Organizing in Chicago Upon her arrival in Chicago, Holmes began working as a seamstress in a cloak factory. She expressed some frustration at her inability to find work as a music teacher, but she ultimately viewed her seamstress job as formative for her politics, explaining in a later interview with the Chicago Times that she had a "desire to know the [working class] intimately" and that she learned "all the struggles, the efforts of genteel poverty, the pitiful pride with which working girls hide their destitution and drudgery from the world." After little more than a year in Chicago, Lizzie joined the Working Women's Union, which at the time was an arm of the Socialist Labor Party of America. The Working Women's Union at the time was launching a campaign for an eight-hour work day, and Holmes became heavily involved in the effort. She was subsequently fired from her work as a seamstress due to her efforts to unionize her workplace, but Holmes remained undeterred in her affiliation with the union. She