Julia Ruuttila (1907–1991) was a journalist, writer, and union and political activist, who wrote stories, articles, and poems under several pen names.
Her mother was a feminist and suffragette who brought her daughter to demonstrations and sold birth control, which was then illegal, out of their home.
Her story “The Agate Hunter” and her poem “Brotherhood” were published in the 1924 edition of the Eugenean- her high school's yearbook.
Her activism was present in these early works, with “Brotherhood” containing anti-racist metaphors, and “The Agate Hunter” expressing concerns over becoming a wage slave.
Two years later, Julia and Oscar took in her grandson, Shane, after Mike's marriage fell apart, he took off and his wife didn't want him.
After Oscar Ruuttila died of a heart attack in 1962, Julia moved back to Portland with Shane and her mother in tow.
The union was locked out, and Ruuttila, with the help of the women's auxiliary that she founded, ensured that the workers could support themselves and their families during the lockout.
During the first Armistice Day, the first anniversary of the end of World War I, the Wobblies of Centralia defended their hall from an attack by the American Legion and in the process killed four legionnaires.
With the work of the committee and the ACLU, in 1939 Ray Becker was released [5] In 1948, under the pen name Kathleen Cronin, she wrote an article for People's World, a Communist Party USA publication that called out the Portland Housing Authority and the State Public Welfare Commission for its failures to adequately aid the victims of the Vanport Flood.
She also joined a campaign by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom to stop nerve gas from being moved to a chemical depot in Umatilla.
She wrote poetry since she was a girl and published poems in her high school annual and in later years in the Oregonian newspaper.
For example, “The Wolf at the Door” is a love story ruined by class differences set in a fictionalized version of the sawmill company town she lived in in the 1920s and 30s.
Another memoir is the essay “Eggs in Baskets” telling of her mother's distribution of illegal birth control door-to-door in Eugene, Oregon when Julia was a girl.