Background
Mary Eleanor "Fitzi" Fitzgerald was born in Deerfield, Wisconsin and raised in Hancock, Wisconsin, the daughter of James and Ada Fitzgerald.
Mary Eleanor "Fitzi" Fitzgerald was born in Deerfield, Wisconsin and raised in Hancock, Wisconsin, the daughter of James and Ada Fitzgerald.
She worked as a bookkeeper and as a booker and publicist at a speaker agency in Kansas City, Missouri in her twenties. Fitzgerald moved from Chicago to New York City with Ben Reitman in 1913. The two lived with Emma Goldman.
Fitzgerald became assistant editor of Mother Earth alongside Goldman.
In 1914 she was part of the Union Square rallies against unemployment. In 1915 she moved to San Francisco with Alexander Berkman, and edited The Blast with him.
When Goldman and Berkman were arrested in 1917, it was Fitzgerald who raised their bail. She helped to found the Political Prisoners Amnesty League, and was briefly charged with conspiracy in the events surrounding the Mooney-Billings convictions.
During the 1920s she served in various roles with the Provincetown Players, including as executive director
Agnes Boulton recalled, " stayed with the Provincetown Players, giving them everything she had--her health, her time, her warm devotion, her life--up to the very education" Theatre historian Stella Hanau remarked, "They were so closely bound together that Fitzi without the Provincetown would have been a different person, and the Provincetown without Fitzi cannot be imagined."
Later Fitzgerald worked with the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, and with other productions in New York City. Fitzgerald was a tall woman, with striking red hair. She had romantic relationships with Ben Reitman and Alexander Berkman during her decade of political activism, and with Eugene O"Neill during her theatre work.
She lived with fellow activist Pauline Turkel for many years, in Greenwich Village and later in Sherman, Connecticut, where Turkel and Fitzgerald hosted Hart Crane and Djuna Barnes among their many guests.
Eleanor Fitzgerald died from cancer in spring 1955, in Hancock, Wisconsin, at the age of 78. Her papers are at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
She was also a member of Heterodoxy during this time.