In 1976, Life magazine marked the US bicentennial with a special report on “Remarkable American Women.” I was thirteen years old at the time and I remember thumbing eagerly through the pages of the magazine, a gift from my mother to nurture my budding feminism.

Among the 166 women profiled was the Rebel Girl, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (also known as the IWW or the Wobblies), free speech fighter, co-founder of the ACLU, and first female secretary of the Communist Party USA. Her bio and photo appeared in the section titled “Noble Causes,” along with seventeen other “Crusaders for the Sick, Poor and Oppressed,” including Angela Davis, Dorothy Day, Dolores Huerta, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, and Harriet Tubman.

In 2017, were a magazine of Life’s stature to publish an updated report, Flynn almost certainly would not be deemed worthy of inclusion. That’s too bad, because the Rebel Girl is an especially apt role model for our own times.