She convinced women at Birmingham's Joseph Lucas motor factory to join the UK General Strike , and led an unprecedented and successful strike of 10, factory worker women in This district of Birmingham was close to the Lucas Electrics factory, where Eden later become a worker, and would become famous for due to her trade union activism. A brief marriage in the summer of in Kings Norton to a man called Albert Eden would see Jessie change her last name from Shrimpton to Eden, [ 8 ] the name for which she would become most known.
Later in life, she described her short marriage to Eden as a "folly", and that she was unsatisfied with being married to somebody who did not share her political beliefs.
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. During the United Kingdom general strike , she convinced these same unionised worker women to walk out of the factory and join the strike. They were telling me to go home, but the crowd howled β¦ 'Hey, leave her alone'β¦ and some men came and pushed the policemen away. They didn't do anything after that.
I think they could see there would have been a riot. I was never frightened of the police or the troops because I had the people with me, you see. In Eden organised another strike, this time leading 10, non-unionised women on a week-long strike, during which she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain CPGB. In protest to the factory's plans, Eden organised a mass walkout of 10, women, who refused to work for a week.
The strike was successful and the Lucas Electrics factory management was forced to back down. After the strike the Communist Party of which she was a lifelong member arranged for her to travel to the Soviet Union to help rally women workers to help build the Moscow Metro in Later in life, Eden told her daughter-in-law that she had travelled to the Soviet Union in secret, and that most people believed she had disappeared.
