THE ACHIEVEMENTS AND FAILURES OF THE SOCIALIST WOMEN
The Socialist women within the Socialist party of America created the most feminist of contemporary Socialist women's movements. Compared with Clara Zetkin's Gleichheit and the SPD women in Germany, The Socialist Woman placed much more stress on the human rights of women and less on their role within the Socialist movement. Socialist women in Germany emphasized class over gender; few European Socialist parties advocated women's rights even to the limited extent that the SP did.[1] The Socialist women aptly combined social consciousness with individual self-cultivation, and collective struggle with individual fulfillment. Socialism and union activity, they claimed, would generate a new altruism in women, based not on the old self-abnegation in the home, but on public service that simultaneously fulfilled the highest capacities of individual women by creating a society that developed those capacities in everyone. The Socialist women harkened back to Marx's dictum that "the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all."[2]
The Socialist Woman published severe criticisms of men and of the patriarchal family whose tone and content differed markedly not only from those in the mainstream feminist press, but even from critiques in other radical publications. The Masses, a strongly feminist magazine, published little comparable to Parce's articles on marriage and the family; The Industrial Worker and Solidarity, whose bitter, trenchant criticisms of traditional marriage perhaps equalled those of Conger-Kaneko's magazines, published many fewer feminist pieces. And The Socialist Woman's articles, appearing in a magazine published, edited, and mostly written by women and directed towards a predominantly female audience, carried different connotations from feminist articles written and mostly read by men. The Socialist women encouraged servile revolt within the patriarchal household rather than condescending male benevolence towards their social inferiors; they demanded immediate action by individual women in their families and marriages as well as social transformation.
The Socialist Woman sensibly eschewed dogmatizing about the precise nature of the relationships between capitalism and patriarchy. It argued that the two systems of domination and oppression were inextricably related, and asserted that feminism would weaken capitalism. But it also acknowledged that feminism resulted from capitalist development and that capitalism was itself weakening patriarchy. The patriarchal family was only one of the traditional values that capitalism destroyed. But The Socialist Woman denied that Socialism would inevitably end women's oppression, which long predated capitalism and benefitted men as a class more than it did capitalists. In practice, Conger-Kaneko and her associates adopted a common sense attitude that capitalism and patriarchy were both evils and were systematically related in American society. They opposed both, usually without reducing one to the other or asserting that one was primary and the other derivatory. Capitalism and patriarchy, they implied, were not essentialist, unchanging, trans-historical entities which worked together in preordained harmony. Rather, activists could exploit the fissures between them at each specific historical juncture.
The Socialist women also, despite or perhaps even because of their ambivalences and contradictions, straddled the divide between equity and difference feminism. They implicitly recognized that both can stifle women, the one by demanding assimilation to male values, the other by demanding an equally confining conformity to an apotheosized, essentialized feminine personality. Both sometimes demand that each individual woman meet some ideologically-defined standard of behavior. Lena Morris Lewis, however, believed that "our common interest as human beings and our differences as men and women both demand political power and social rights for women the same as for men." The Progressive Woman, stressing capacities rather than rights or interests, editorialized that "for all the differences there are in the woman nature and the man nature, should women vote. And for all their likenesses--their intelligence, their humanness, should they vote."[3]
The Socialist Woman promulgated a sophisticated Socialist-feminist philosophy which combined some of the best insights of later Socialist and radical feminisms. It fused a sound, Socialist structural analysis of the economic causes of women's subordination in private and public life with Emma Goldman's insights into the psychological enslavement of women, and stressed women's need for both a self-liberating redefinition of themselves and a radical transvaluation of values. The Socialist women presciently recognized the relationships between the personal and the political without succumbing to the illusion that women could liberate themselves simply by an act of will. They did not confuse social transformation with self-expression (as Goldman sometimes seemed to do), blame the victim by privatizing liberation struggles, or succumb to the illusion that individual knowledge and effort could liberate humanity without social struggle. They also avoided the opposite illusion, prevalent among male Socialists, that economic change would automatically liberate women (or workers and blacks) independently of the desires, ideas, and activism of the afflicted groups themselves.
The Socialist women recognized that although the material base for both Socialism and feminism already existed (or soon would), neither were inevitable. Consciousness did not automatically change in accordance with circumstances; rather, it would change more readily if the structural changes were themselves purposeful, resulting at least in part from a transformed consciousness. Consciousness, in other words, not only stemmed from material circumstances, but helped shape them. Even if Socialism and/or feminism were achieved, their precise forms would depend on the ideas, values, and activism of those who constructed the new society. By making the system all-powerful, some radicals rendered the individual as merely a victim, incapable of meaningful resistance; but ignoring impersonal structures and relying solely on personal will resulted in blaming the victims, much as the capitalists did, for circumstances beyond their control.
The Socialist women also avoided the absurdities of bourgeois feminists who claimed that mere formal legal equality--the equality of wage slaves--could meaningfully liberate women. The Socialist Woman did not view economic equality with men in an oppressive, competitive society whose very essence was torture and murder, as a worthy goal. They attacked the division of labor within the family as well as in the public sphere, and clearly recognized the relationships between the two. They fully recognized the role of the patriarchal family in repressing women economically, legally, and psychologically.
The Socialist women emphasized, rather than neglecting, other systems of oppression which also devastated women, such as those based upon class, militarism, and imperialism. They deftly acknowledged both the reality, and the severe limitations, of a sisterhood of women in a society sharply divided by race, ethnicity, and class as well as gender. If they largely ignored race (surprisingly, considering Conger-Kaneko's own marriage), they inhabited a society in which most blacks remained confined in the rural South. Theresa Malkiel did bitterly denounce Socialist degradation and exclusion of Southern blacks, but in The New York Call rather than The Socialist Woman; and Lena Morrow Lewis, the first woman member of the National Executive Committee, fruitlessly urged that the SP route at least one Afro-American speaker into areas where blacks retained the vote.[4] For the most part, however, the Socialist women neglected racial issues much as Afro-American Socialists ignored gender oppressions. Indeed, the Kanekos only occasionally and in passing criticized the agitation for exclusion of Asian immigrants--a cause which some powerful SP leaders endorsed.[5] Fighting on two fronts--gender and class (or, for the blacks, race and class) was burden enough.
Although women of all races faced economic, social, and political oppressions greatly resembling those inflicted upon blacks of both sexes, Afro-American women represented an extremely unlikely constituency for a Socialist Feminism which stressed class as well as gender. Most African-American women resided in the South and worked as field hands or domestics, isolating occupations resistant to unionism. Those few privileged with education and leisure comparable to the Socialist women were often teachers whom white school boards could unceremoniously cashier for political activity. Those who secured a toehold in respectable society would not risk their precarious gains by espousing radicalism. The National Association of Colored Women was relentlessly middle-class; its motto, "Lifting as We Climb," evinced slight sympathy for radical doctrines. The mainstream suffrage movement was deeply infected with racism, and repeatedly humiliated black women in a largely fruitless appeal for white Southern support. Socialist-Feminist attacks on the traditional family would not have pleased Afro-American women valiently defending their own homes against the depradations of white racism. Black women, whose fitness for the decorous, respectable life of the white middle class was widely denied, sought integration into conventional society, rather than a revolutionary overthrow of it. Their world and their reform efforts revolved around race and gender, not class. The Socialist Women's neglect of black women, therefore, was rooted in the objective situation of African Americans as well as the subjective values and actual situation of the Socialist women themselves.[6]
The Socialist women's brilliant synthesis of feminism and socialism constituted a vast improvement on both mainstream feminism and Second International Marxist orthodoxy. The Socialist women's position as women and as feminists in an overwhelmingly male Party whose feminism was more theoretical than real militated against the passivity and fatalism of the "inheritor party" and its doctrinal enshrinement of inaction in a policy of "revolutionary waiting."[7] Socialist women blended the activism and volunteerism of the anarchists with the structural class analysis of the Socialists, a combination that, if universalized to the whole of Socialist doctrine and practice, would indeed have revolutionized the SP (and, much more importantly, the SPD). This innovation in doctrine and praxis would have had implications far transcending even the vital issue of women's rights. Had Socialists grappled with the problems presented by nationalism, for example, instead of dismissing it, against all evidence, as a waning epiphenomenum of capitalism, world history might have proceeded far differently. If the Socialists, particularly in Germany, had realized that they must seize power rather than waiting for a reified History to deposit it in their lap, the world might be a much better place today. As it was, almost the only actions that the Socialists of the Second International acknowledged could influence history were those specifically designed to precipitate or wage revolution; these could only retard or defeat the otherwise-inevitable triumph of the working class. The Socialist Woman, a marginal publication in a small Socialist party, had no chance of effecting such epochal changes in an international movement, of course; but the Socialist women in the United States did perceptively analyze important, intractable realities, and were ignored partly because their prescient analysis raised troubling issues and problems which orthodox, class-fixated Marxists dared not confront.
The Socialist women correctly discerned secular trends that facilitated the emergence of class and sex consciousness among workers and women. They perceived that the developments which fostered working-class and feminist consciousness were related and would intensify. But they underestimated capitalist opposition and the endemic structural obstacles that frustrated the development of class consciousness among workers and gender consciousness among women. These structural barriers thwarted both socialism and feminism, and, therefore, rendered any union of the two virtually impossible.
Capitalism soon provided technology which somewhat lightened women's household labors, and made labor-saving devices available to increasing numbers of working-class housewives. More and more women eventually left the home for paid employment. Yet neither of these developments liberated women, as The Socialist Woman had predicted they would not. The new machinery actually meant "more work for mother" as standards of cleanliness rose more quickly than technology's prowess. Advertising imposed higher, and less certain (because always changing), standards upon the mother, whose new honorific title of "scientific household manager" kept her firmly at her domestic tasks. Wives were kept forever off balance, wondering if they were fulfilling the new standards made possible by machinery and demanded by advertising.[8] The new machinery opened up vast new consumer markets, thus further strengthening capitalism, even as women provided ever-increasing sources of surplus value when they worked outside the home. At the cost of women's psychological health, household "labor-saving" equipment thus bolstered patriarchy as well as capitalism, thus illustrating the axiom that social power relations greatly influence what technology is produced and how it is used.
Capitalism, it appears, can live with almost any social system, just as it adapts any political system to its own ends. Capitalism is compatible with fascism, traditional oligarchies, and bourgeois democracy--with almost any political system except a genuine democracy. Similarly, its symbiosis with patriarchy was a marriage of convenience generated by a particular historical juncture, rather than by any essential need. Capitalism matured in a patriarchal world and adapted to it while simultaneously transforming the precise contours of patriarchy in accordance with its own changing needs. Just as capitalism arose upon the foundation of slave labor, only to destroy chattel slavery when its own changing needs required this, so capitalism profited by its temporary and historically contingent alliance with patriarchy. But the bottom line for capitalism is profit, the extraction of surplus value from an exploited class of wage laborers. Nothing else ultimately matters. Patriarchy, as IWW writers had recognized, was only another of the traditional values undermined, even as it was utilized, by capitalism.
Capitalism probably does require, as a requisite for its existence, a fragmented working class. It must divide and rule by hegemony, as well as ruling directly by brute violence. Gender, however, is only one way that capitalists divide the working class (capitalizing on, even as it transforms, traditional gender stereotypes). Race, ethnicity, nationality, and skill are other convenient dividers. Capitalists segment the workforce upon the basis of inherited (although incessantly transformed) cultural fissures, as well as by newly-created and fluctuating differences of skill, job classification, employment status (permanent vs. temporary, "home guard" vs. migratory, unionized vs. non-unionized), and supervisory rank. Segmentation is almost universal, yet its forms are highly variable, just as most societies classify some tasks as particularly suited to women, but enormously vary in their definitions of women's work. Capitalism, therefore, can dispense with a gendered division of work if it creates or utilizes other divisions. Capitalists have effectively used feminism (as well as movements for racial justice) to embitter and divide the working class, just as effectively as it previously (and simultaneously) used patriarchy. In fact, patriarchy and feminism both divide the working class for the same reasons: they are both based upon culturally-defined gender definitions which detract from class-based solidarities. Feminism must so completely abolish patriarchy as to obviate the need for its own existence before capitalists will fail to benefit from gender divisions within the working class.
During the heyday of the Socialist women, the capitalist, patriarchal, and white supremacist state divided the working class into discrete legal categories of race, gender, and nationality. The corporations further divided them into occupational hierarchies on the job, thus reinforcing the differential impact of industrialization and deskilling on different trades. In the experience of most proletarians, there simply was no unified working class with common problems; rather, workers perceived fragmented groups of competing workers, divided by law, job, income, and skill as well as by religion, ethnicity, race, and sex.
Corporate practice, traditional gender roles, and the legal structure made working women a distinct threat to working men. Their lower wages and skills and their usually temporary employment for wages outside the home made women even more difficult to organize than men. The police shot and clubbed female strikers with the same relish as males, and the entire legal apparatus of terrorism, violence, and proscription that undercut male unions was visited upon female and mixed-sex unions as well. The Supreme Court's Miller vs. Oregon decision (1908) only enshrined the AFL's belief that working women, inferior to men and a threat to them, were best kept in the home. The AFL favored protective labor legislation for women partly for the reasons given by the Supreme Court: women were an inferior class, in special need of tutelage and protection, and incapable of caring for themselves. (Actually, as the Socialist women pointed out, they did the most dangerous drudge work of society, and in addition cared for everyone else.) For the most part, however, the AFL viewed such legislation as a device to exclude women from the labor force by making them less profitable for the capitalists and hence less competitive with men. This presented feminists within the SP, a party which worked within the AFL and was dependent on the votes of organized male workers, with an almost insoluble dilemma.
Just as the capitalist and patriarchal state divided workers against themselves, the class system divided women. Socialist men proved more realistic than the Socialist women when they adamantly asserted that bourgeois women would not support Socialism out of any supposed natural female affinity for Socialism. The suffrage movement began largely as a middle-class movement with a distinctly ambivalent relationship with organized labor and remained this way for decades; working women entered last. Bourgeois women could win some semblance of dignity, equality, or at least independence within the capitalist order, as Parce and Braverman admitted. Bourgeois women might indeed support ameliorative reforms of the sort which undercut Socialism, but they were a distinctly unnatural constituency for any class-based reconstruction of society. (The lyrical radicals associated with The Masses embarked on an equally chimerical effort to attract male and female bourgeois liberals for the cause of revolutionary socialism.)
In addition, the capitalist press and politicians poisoned the women's movement much as they did the labor movement. By incessantly shouting that feminism led to free love and the dissolution of the family, opponents of women's rights drove the mainstream suffrage movement towards a conservative denial of any ambitions for larger social changes, much as accusations of lawlessness and un-Americanism helped tame the labor movement. In the United States at least, most social movements spend far too much time conciliating their irreconcilable opponents. The drive for suffrage, a distinctly non-class demand, temporarily united most women at the cost of defusing the radicalism explicit in early feminism. But the next logical step, an Equal Rights Amendment, divided women on the basis of class interest and effectively scuttled a unified and powerful women's movement until long after the upheavals of the 1930s had, by legitimizing labor legislation for men, rendered feminist divisions over the ERA largely moot.
Women, like workers, were divided among themselves; and when neither workers nor women could unite in organized, ecumenical movements, it is not surprising that these two disparate groups (hardly existing as coherent or organized social formations) could form no meaningful alliance. Not long after the demise of Conger-Kaneko's publication and the Woman's National Committee, the SP was permanently vitiated by a systematic campaign of state capitalist terrorism and violence, thus ending whatever remote chance for a vibrant Socialist-feminist movement that remained. The failure of the SP's Socialist-feminists, therefore, pointed to larger structural barriers implicit in a capitalist, patriarchal, and racist society--barriers mirrored within the SP itself. Against these massive and endemic social forces, enshrined and buttressed by law, custom, and culture, the Socialist women struggled in vain.
Male Socialists, however, ended the short experiment in an organized feminist presence within the SP before the capitalist state destroyed the Party. Indeed, after seven years of struggle, the Socialist women had not convinced Socialist men of women's importance either in American society or in the SP itself. As late as 1913 one SP leader complained that only 10% of SP men really believed in woman's equality, and advised that the WNC target men, rather than women, for education. Only two women had served on the SP's governing body, the NEC, in the years 1907-1915. Socialist legislators in the states introduced suffrage bills only under pressure. Although fragmentary data suggest that over half of the SP's female membership considered themselves housewives, SP men rarely recruited their wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, or sweethearts into the movement. In 1909 Malkiel had complained that only one in thirty SP men recruited any woman into the SP, "while the others preach the ideals of Socialism and the necessity of party alliance everywhere except within the walls of their own home." Malkiel correctly noted that few women would join the SP in the face of the indifference, masking hostility, of their men. In the next six years, this situation remained unaltered. In the years 1914-1915, Socialist women were still addressing the ignorant male arguments against women's equality which they had long since refuted.[9] The career of The Socialist Woman and the destruction of the WNC, therefore, reveal the severe limits of male Socialist commitment to women's rights.
Kiichi Kaneko and Josephine Conger-Kaneko had, as previously mentioned, started their publication in 1907 with only 26 subscribers, and had steadily increased its circulation. In March 1909 they changed its name to The Progressive Woman because the word "Socialist" intimidated potential subscribers and advertisers. A few months later Kiichi, ill, returned to Japan, where he died later in the year. Josephine struggled along, supported mostly by the subscription price of $0.25 a year. In the spring of 1911, however, The Appeal to Reason, claiming financial difficulties, ceased its subsidized publication of other Socialist periodicals in Girard, Kansas. This forced The Progressive Woman into a hurried move to Chicago, plunging it deeply into debt at the very time its expenses soared.[10]
When the Socialist party created its Woman's National Committee in 1908, the WNC developed a symbiotic relationship with The Socialist Woman. The WNC boosted the magazine and garnered subscribers, while The Socialist Woman reported on WNC activities, advertised WNC leaflets and pamphlets, and printed suggested women's programs for SP locals. Conger-Kaneko also printed special numbers specializing in particular issues that concerned Socialist women, such as suffrage, prostitution, child slavery, and campaigns against militarism, war, and the Boy Scouts. These had a circulation of up to 100,000 copies.[11] The Socialist Woman published short, topical WNC leaflets as well as theoretical articles instructing women in scientific socialism.
Conger-Kaneko hoped that the SP would adapt the magazine, and both subsidize and control it. Ironically, however, the SP, while advocating collective ownership of the means of production, eschewed ownership of its own press. Most Socialist newspapers and magazines were privately owned and financed. This avoided enshrining any particular editorial stance with the official imprimatur of the Party and ensured free debate and the expression of a wide diversity of views. The Party, therefore, refused responsibility for The Progressive Woman. Although in 1910 Conger-Kaneko claimed that the SP's Congress of that year made her paper the WNC's official organ, the SP later repudiated this suggestion because the appellation of official organ implied "party rule and ownership." The WNC eventually did publish its own column in The Progressive Woman, but readers were carefully warned that the publication itself took no responsibility for the opinions expressed therein, just as the WNC did not endorse the particular opinions expressed elsewhere in the paper.[12] This left Conger-Kaneko in a dilemma: how to finance her magazine at a time when subscription prices alone would not support it?
Advertising was a possible source of revenue. Conger-Kaneko disdained patent medicine ads, which paid the most and were easily secured. Twice she told readers that she had rejected such unsolicited adds despite her crying need of funds; but eventually she accepted them as a last resort. She warned her readers that "we do not guarantee all our advertisers" and discontinued disreputable ads when possible, but she resumed them when her financial plight grew desperate. She wooed respectable advertisers and urged her readers to patronize them while frantically pursuing the large circulation that would make The Progressive Woman attractive to legitimate companies. In September 1911 she expanded the size of The Progressive Woman and raised the subscription price to $0.40; a year later, seeking a broader appeal, she inaugurated a column on "The Woman in the Home," featuring household and childrearing tips.[13]
The Woman's National Committee, meanwhile, was charged with recruiting women and developing a literature for that purpose. By 1913 it had published (often in cooperation with The Socialist Woman, in whose pages the shorter pamphlets sometimes appeared) 22 leaflets addressed to women in particular trades, 19 books and pamphlets for women, and 13 compilations of songs, skits, and readings for entertainments and fundraising events. The WNC translated some leaflets into German, Polish, and Yiddish, and estimated that in 1913 alone it printed an estimated 1,500,000 leaflets and roughly twice as many "agitational pieces". It composed suggested women's programs for SP locals each month, complete with lectures, songs, recitations, and skits; these were published in The Progressive Woman. Finding that the demand for women speakers exceeded the supply, the WNC sponsored training classes for female speakers. Thirty-five states adopted the WNC's "Plan of Work Among Women" and appointed a state correspondent to oversee recruitment of women. Although figures are sporadic and imprecise, the absolute number and percentage of women members of the SP apparently increased dramatically. Caroline Nelson claimed in 1910 that the SP had only 1000 female members, half of whom had joined only at the behest of some man; by the fall of 1911 the SP claimed 10,000 women members, and by 1912--when party membership was at an all-time high--women comprised 15% of the party.[14]
These successes did not placate the male majority, and may in fact have engendered suspicion and fear. In 1914 Conger-Kaneko stated that "we have maintained a women's department in the National Office for six years at considerable annual expense, and it is the growing sentiment that we should be making a bigger showing in our woman's work." SP membership had plummeted after the election of 1912 due to the split with the IWW in 1912-13 and the attraction, for some members, of Wilsonian liberalism. Lacking funds and members, the SP curtailed many activities. Perhaps encouraged by the SPD's abolition of its own semi-autonomous woman's department in 1912, the SP destroyed its WNC altogether in 1915.[15] This effectively eliminated the presence of women and of feminists as organized forces within the SP. Even before that occurrence, however, The Progressive Woman, victimized by inner-Party machinations, had fallen silent.
After her move to Chicago, Conger-Kaneko made increasingly desperate efforts to keep her publication afloat. In addition to accepting patent medicine ads, she paid off a substantial portion of the paper's debt with her own funds and increased circulation to 15,000. In a possible attempt to defuse male suspicion and hostility, she reduced the number of articles critical of men, hired a male, Barnet Braverman, as Associate Editor and Circulation Manager (in August 1913) and then as Editor (in November 1913). She had previously made Floyd Dell, editor of The Chicago Evening Post's Friday Literary Supplement, literary editor. (Dell, however, resigned when he moved to New York in 1913). In a final act of desperation she changed the name of her periodical to The Coming Nation (a popular but recently deceased Socialist general-interest magazine). She hired a capitalist subscription agency which doubled her circulation. However, she sold these subscriptions at cost, eschewing immediate revenue in hopes of increasing circulation and therefore advertising. The number of articles and contributors dropped sharply; editorial copy was replaced by ads, including patent medicine ads.[16]
The heart of her difficulties, however, resided in the attitude of the SP. Male opposition to the WNC and a special woman's magazine never subsided; Conger-Kaneko complained that, as far as she knew, only six locals (out of approximately 5,500) used the WNC's monthly program for women. The Appeal to Reason had jettisoned The Progressive Woman ostensibly for financial reasons. But The Appeal belittled women's issues and apparently had made no attempt to reach a mutually beneficial agreement with Conger-Kaneko. Later The National Socialist moved from the District of Columbia to Girard, presumably to take advantage of cheaper publishing facilities there. Why could The Progressive Woman not have remained there as well? When the SP encouraged locals to buy stock in The Progressive Woman, the 5,500 locals, with a membership of approximately 116,000, together purchased only 42 shares.[17]
Conger-Kaneko did secure a paltry $200 from the SP's National Executive Committee and authorization to form a joint-stock company whereby SP locals would buy (on very favorable terms) stock in The Progressive Woman. However, shortly thereafter, Winnie Branstatter, the only opponent of The Progressive Woman on the WNC, became General Correspondent of the WNC when Caroline Lowe resigned. Branstetter effectively undermined The Progressive Woman by sowing doubt about its solvency, opposing any SP subsidies, securing a reversal of the SP's endorsement of the joint-stock project, and falsely accusing its editor, Barnet Braverman, of being an IWW member. Branstetter sabotaged the WNC's policy by sending all SP locals derogatory information--much of it false or exaggerated--about The Progressive Woman and its financial state, thus undermining sales of stock. Denied permission to reply to Branstetter's allegations in the National Bulletin, Conger-Kaneko said that she "could have wept for sheer disgust at the way things were going." Finally, when Conger-Kaneko changed her publication's name to The Coming Nation, Branstetter claimed that the new publication was no longer a woman's magazine, and on this pretense dropped it from the list of publications recommended for education among women--a list that included non-Socialist papers. The Coming Nation then ceased publication. Ironically, shortly before the demise of The Coming Nation the SP finally decided that it should own its own press, and began publication of its official organ, The American Socialist. Had it adopted The Progressive Woman, Conger-Kaneko asserted, "the women of the Socialist movement could have been today the owners of a successful journal with which to carry on their propaganda."[18]
Conger-Kaneko, in short, fell victim to the same sort of dishonest slanders and machinations that had precipitated the recall of Big Bill Haywood from the NEC, and for the same reason: she offended the conservative male leadership of the SP. Like the IWW and its supporters, she won the intellectual argument but lost the political battle. Conger-Kaneko had eagerly contributed her energies, her money, and her loyalty to a male dominated Socialist party. Unappreciative of her efforts, it stifled and throttled her. She never published a Socialist magazine again, and soon retired from political activity altogether.
A year after the demise of Conger-Kaneko's publication, the overwhelmingly male SP abolished both the Woman's National Committee and the Woman's Department in the National Office. The debate over this action took place, ironically enough, in the new party-owned weekly, The American Socialist. The abolition of the women's groups occurred at a time of retrenchment, demoralization, and doubts about the ultimate triumph of Socialism caused by the exodus of pro-IWW party members in the United States, the disillusioning outbreak of war in Europe, and the consequent decline in membership and near-bankruptcy of the SP. Although we cannot know how representative of member opinion the letters printed in the SP's official organ are, they do illuminate sources of female opposition to the WNC.
In early 1915 the National Executive Committee proposed amending the SP's constitution to abolish both the WNC and the Woman's Department. Although Debs, a staunch supporter of women's interests, complained that many male Socialists belittled women's issues and dismissed women's suffrage "as a mere incident in the social revolution," the NEC justified abolition on the grounds of financial exigencies and the alleged inefficiency of the WNC. Men who had opposed Conger-Kaneko's publication and the WNC seldom if ever admitted any bias against women or women's issues. Indeed, the men who wrote The American Socialist in support of abolition all claimed that they staunchly supported a strong female presence within the party; one proposed proportionate representation for women in offices throughout the party machinery, while another advocated reserving two of the five NEC posts for women.[19]
Some women (none of whom were nationally prominent, and none of whom had written for Conger-Kaneko's publications) indignantly supported abolition, complaining that separate women's institutions both implied and re-enforced women's inferiority. Emma Denney claimed that the needs, education, environment and problems of the men and women of the working class were identical, so the WNC was unnecessary. The problems of the husband who could not feed his family were fully intelligible to his wife, even if SP leaflets addressed him. Denney found it "unbelievable" that Socialists, supposedly progressive and broad-minded, "advocate and actually have in existence a sort of kindergarten to educate the women." The SP had always claimed that women were men's equals, who deserve equal opportunity and pay because they can perform the same jobs as men; "but at the same time [it is] insisting that we must have a special piece of literature with woman written all over it before she can come to a comprehensive understanding that it is of interest to her as a member of the working class." Denney said that "What we want is class consciousness, not sex consciousness. Let us abolish the Women's Department and prove that we can work shoulder to shoulder for both men and women through our organization."[20]
Janet Korngold agreed that anyone who effectively argued Socialism was "doing work for women, as well as for men" because the two sexes shared the same interests and the same psychology. "All the Party's work is for women"; those claiming that the SP's best speakers and writers did not address women's concerns insulted the intelligence of women. Mrs. De Roy Welsh voted for abolition of the WNC so that women may be "as free to work whenever the work is needed, as is man.... Why fetter her hands so that she may not carry the good news of FREEDOM TO ALL, regardless of sex." Welsh claimed that she had, as New Mexico state women's correspondent, she had sent the WNC a circular addressing a group male professionals, but was rebuffed on the grounds that "we women were expected to confine our official work to women." This incident is undoubtedly exaggerated if not invented--the WNC obviously concerned itself with strictly women's recruitment and issues, but heartily encouraged full women's participation in every aspect of party work--but Welsh concluded that the abolition of the WNC lost women nothing "except our--perhaps invisible--fetters."[21]
Florence Wattles, a National "Committeeman" from Indiana, demanded that the SP energetically address women's issues and deplored "the hysteria we have always known in the movement whenever we have discussed the woman question." Yet she opposed the WNC because separate work "defeats its own purpose; creates the antagonism which is supposed to have called it into existence." Wattles said that the women's movement was "more significant than the protest of the working class."
Always she has been the conservative.... Revolutionary changes have been made in the world's relationships. But so long as she could work out her love in her home woman has borne the burdens placed upon her uncomplainingly. Today she is at war with society. From thousands of women there comes a cry against a social system that has disturbed the home.... The strongest indictment that can be drawn against the existing order is that woman has ventured from the silence of her home and is making demands upon society. Today her protest is shaking the social structure to its deepest foundation.[22]
Wattles said that "the attitude of Socialists toward this movement should be our first concern. Yet we quibble." However, Wattles counselled that women wait with their traditional patience until men perceived the vital importance of women's issues.
Rosa Anderson, however, belittled agitation over the WNC for the exact opposite reason: rather than patiently awaiting male approval, women should simply act autonomously on their own. Quoting one woman who claimed that in Iowa women received scant attention because some men "do not want women in the party," Anderson exclaimed that if women in Iowa or elsewhere "haven't got more backbone than to let a few men keep them out of a movement, such as ours is, then these same women haven't got backbone enough to take any responsible part in party affairs."
I am as strong a believer in woman's rights as any one could be, but we will never get those rights by sitting down, folding our hands and waiting for the men of the party to put us in some high position. We must first show them that we are capable of holding high positions, and above all, that we cannot be 'bluffed'....
The very fact that we, the women, are 'sore' over the way the men in the party have treated us is in itself an admission that we have not done our duty. It is our duty to make women Socialists and thereby increase our strength and power in the party and equal rights. Don't expect the men of the party to get out and convert women to Socialism, do it yourself.[23]
In an inflammatory remark outrageously inapplicable to the activist women who supported the WNC, Anderson said that if women displayed "as much interest in this movement as you do in your sewing clubs and aid societies... we will soon have as strong a voice in the party as the men." Anderson advised that women form their own local women's committee, study Socialist writings such Mary Marcy's Shop Talks, and sponsor informal social events for their friends at which a short lecture on Socialism would be delivered. Anderson appealed for "harmony in our ranks," and condemned discord over "the equal rights question" in a party which stands for equal rights for all as "a disgrace."[24]
Many women, however, vigorously supported the WNC. Freda Hogan, for example, used arguments against separate women's activism as an argument for the party-controlled WNC. Despite the ideal of a sex-neutral, class-based propaganda, Hogan asserted, the standard Socialist arguments did not resonate with women; otherwise, why would women constitute only 17% of SP members? "On this point the party faces a condition--not a theory; a fact--not an ideal." Mothers raised the next generation of voters; and soon all women would themselves vote. That the NEC frivolously and with scant thought or debate abolished the WNC indicated that women could not trust the NEC for work among women. Hogan perceived a danger that Socialist women would create a separate, non-Party women's organization.
I am not a feminist, nor a suffragist any more than any good socialists. I do not want what is best for the women--but what is best for the Socialist party, and, as a party member, I am opposed to a separate organization, which the party could not control and which might not conform to socialist principles and practices. Neither is there any good reason why I, or any woman, should go outside the party to do work which concerns us as men and women equally.[25]
Hogan concluded that if the SP ignored women, and if ignorant women therefore voted against the SP, "then every socialist man is affected just as much as I am." Hogan condemned condescending male SP "tolerance" of women in the party as insufferable and self-defeating.[26]
Voicing a complaint that would recur within SDS in the 1960s, Mary Axtell said that too many Socialist men felt that if women appeared "in a public capacity" at all
they are better fitted either to do the light (?) jobs around offices or odd jobs of baking for banquets or at most if they must organize let it be a sort of "ornamental" or auxiliary which serves perhaps as a good social setting for the men's organization.... Until the feeling of Woman's incompetency is quite dispelled from the befogged minds of both men and women--perhaps we may need this Woman's National Committee as it is.[27]
Axtell complained that the world did not yet believe "that women are people"; when it acknowledged the personhood of women, separate organizations would become unnecessary.[28]
Agnes Downing, a regular writer for Conger-Kaneko's publications, condemned the "dullness and stagnation in the Socialist women's work" because of WNC impotence and the suspension of Conger-Kaneko's paper. Although individual Socialist women did excellent work, their efforts hardly benefitted the Party as an organization. "Socialist women, as a body, have no influence in the social mass." Socialists had materially aided the suffrage campaign and would enter the Women's Peace Party, but could not as individuals inject into these movements "the program that alone can make either [suffrage or peace] effective in the best sense." The WNC should have its own secure base of funding, and the power to establish and implement its own policy without NEC approval.[29]
Theresa Malkiel, another Socialist Woman regular, wrote The American Socialist twice in support not only of retaining the WNC, but of strengthening its powers and finances. The NEC and the WNC had been at loggerheads for quite some time, Malkiel said, causing "a complete cessation of agitation among the workingwomen of the country" except where local committees valiantly carried on. The NEC had feared and therefore completely controlled the WNC, which lacked both an independent base of funds and the power of autonomous action; the WNC had therefore remained only "an expensive ornament of the Party, a sop to the women, a blind for the suffragists." During the last two years the NEC had throttled the WNC, denying it necessary funds. Although women's importance at the workplace and the polling both was vastly increasing, the NEC did not view woman as important in the quest for social justice, value women's work within the SP, or acknowledge the fact that "we cannot, for the present, convert the women through the same methods as we are trying to convert the men." Malkiel warned that capitalists and the church actively wooed women and insisted that the SP desperately need "counter agitation." Ridiculing those who asserted that the abolition of the WNC would benefit women, Malkiel scornfully said that "the abolition of special agitation among women will not bring about greater agitation" but that "work for Socialism among women will absolutely stagnate."[30]
Conger-Kaneko herself wrote The American Socialist twice, also demanding increased funding and powers for the WNC. Conger-Kaneko said that the experiment in subordinating the WNC beneath the NEC had failed, and the NEC responded by demanding the WNC's abolition. "Certainly we cannot expect a great deal for our women's work if left entirely to men's committees," she said. "No organization on earth runs this risk with its woman's work." Even the churches had special women's organizations.[31]
Conger-Kaneko reminded the SP membership that Socialist women throughout the nation had created their own independent clubs before 1908, when the SP's national convention substituted the WNC for those autonomous clubs, therefore "officially discrediting all other forms" of women's organization and largely destroying "the work already accomplished by the women." Conger-Kaneko quoted a cynical women activist who had in 1908 called the creation of a WNC under direct Party auspices "a move to kill the woman's activity in the Socialist party." Conger-Kaneko disdained belief in any such conspiratorial intent, yet said that the abolition of the WNC, emphatically supported by the very men who had originally proposed the WNC, would officially kill "every avenue of woman's work within the party." Conger-Kaneko asked how SP women could progress "if we must depend upon official (and prejudiced) sanction for our every move?" She ended on an optimistic note, however, claiming (falsely, as it turned out) that women in the SP would prevail. Those who had worked for women's rights within the SP before and during the WNC phase of organization would remain "active in the future, no matter what is done to us officially." She bravely said that "truth is hard to kill, and a woman full of Socialist truth is hard to be quieted."[32]
The American Socialist also printed resolutions by Local Bridgeport and by the Women's Committees of Local New York and the Bronx opposing the WNC's abolition. Moreover, Eugene Debs, who rarely intervened in intra-Party disputes, weighed in with his own support for strengthening the WNC, calling abolition "worse than a mistake." Debs also reiterated his strong support for women's work generally. Complaining of tepid SP support for women's suffrage and asserting that women for the most part fought alone, Debs demanded that the SP energetically join the suffrage movement. Deploring male indifference and hostility towards women's issues, he proclaimed that women's fight for citizenship and human equality "is a vital issue of itself." Every socialist must help win that "distinct advance toward democracy and freedom" which would "mean quite as much for men in its results as it will for women themselves." Anyone not actively helping woman suffrage was effectively opposing it. Women suffrage would be debated and voted on in numerous states within the next two years, and the SP "will either be in this agitation to our very decided advantage or we will be out of it to our equally decided disadvantage. As socialists we ought to be at the head and front of it. Our party was the first to declare for equal rights and it is an essential part of the socialist program and the socialist mission." Hundreds of women socialists in suffrage states had entered the SP via the suffrage struggle, and it was only a question of time before suffrage triumphed everywhere. "It would be sheer betrayal of our party to let this great opportunity go by unimproved," Debs concluded. "The socialist propaganda can be made to throb with new life and progress as never" if the SP took advantage of "greatest opportunity" in strongly backing this winning movement.[33]
Despite the strong support for the WNC evinced in The American Socialist debate, the SP membership abolished the WNC and the Woman's Department by referendum vote. Sophia Salkover, a member from Cincinnati, thanked WNC opponent John Work for his soothing words in favor of women's equality, but said that fine phrases could not heal the wound inflicted by abolition. Salkover said that the position of women in the SP had been deteriorating for the last several years; women speakers and articles by women in leading Socialist publications were increasingly rare. If "scatteration"--John Work's word--was feared, "why not abolish the language federations that are but loosely connected with the party?" Salkover concluded that "the ban put on the woman's activities can bring only one result--their exodus from the movement."[34]
The SP surely did not need further defections. Indeed, its fear of diversity, of specifically appealing for the support of especially oppressed groups, had already substantially weakened the party. In 1912-1913 the SP anathematized the IWW and its supporters by making advocacy of sabotage or illegal methods an offense meriting expulsion, thus causing a hemorrhaging of membership and bitter infighting in many locals. At that same time the SP alienated brilliant Afro-American intellectual Hubert H. Harrison, who had demanded that the SP specifically tailor its message towards blacks as the WNC had towards women. Harrison had shown promise of catalyzing a mass Socialist movement among blacks in New York; he was suspended from the party (and therefore quit in disgust) ostensibly for advocating pro-IWW positions, but partly, Harrison suspected, because of party racism. The same NEC which killed the WNC also demanded that the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) totally subordinate itself in all matters to the main party and its Locals, thereby alienating young members who felt mistrusted and deprived of self-government. Furthermore, rumblings of discontent and dissension over the SP's war policy became increasingly widespread in the pages of The American Socialist, presaging more bitterness and division when the United States entered World War I.
SP members debated the reasons and remedies for the membership decline at the same time they decided the fate of the WNC. One member epitomized the widespread concern when he said that everyone was asking what was the problem with Socialism, and whether the movement was disintegrating. "A few years ago, even up to 1913, we were filled with the militancy and enthusiasm born of hope of speedy victory," McCrillis said. But now that "circumstances have arisen that have at least temporarily dashed the hope of speedy victory and punctured the bubble of superficial optimism," the SP was searching for answers. McCrillis himself believed that more efficient organization, and a renewed emphasis on recruiting genuine Socialists rather than lukewarm reformers, was crucial. Others claimed that minor reforms, such as revamping the SP's dues-collection system or the SP's lecture bureau would solve the party's problems. Another, complaining that "we organize locals and nine in ten die in a few months, we get members and not more than one in ten stay two years," advocated better organization.[35] But two members wrote in with suggestions that not only revealed the impossible predicament of the SP, but indirectly commented on the impending debacle with the SP women's movement.
George Downing complained that the SP must place itself on a more realistic basis, and affiliate more closely with organized workers. "Our philosophers must become scientists," he said, and the SP ally itself with the actually existing labor movement. Quoting Marx's dictum that "one movement is worth a dozen programs," Downing urged that "everywhere in the world, where the movement has become powerful, its backbone is organized labor; and nowhere is our movement a real force where it is separated from labor." He hailed England's Labor party as an exemplar of action rather than idle theorizing.[36] However, Downing ignored the peculiar nature of the American labor movement, which was viciously anti-Socialist and, in its exclusion of the vast majority of workers (blacks, women, the unskilled, immigrants), not only reactionary but vastly unrepresentative of the American working class. The SP's de facto and one-sided alliance with the AFL, and its consequent repudiation of the IWW, already boded ill for any large-scale recruitment of female (or black) workers.
Charles Rogers, a SP member of five years' standing, argued that if the SP changed its name it would enhance its prospects at the polls. He observed that "the average voter will cast his ballot for any ticket in preference to the Socialist ticket" because voting SP "means ostracism among WORKING PEOPLE." The working class, Rogers stated, detested the words "Socialism" and "Socialist," which the capitalists had associated with every imaginable evil. The SP expended enormous energy convincing workers "that Socialism is not this or that."
Isn't it silly to leave this obstacle in our path to divide the WORKING CLASS, which is the only class that can be fooled by it? We are not fighting for the term Socialism, but for what it represents. Therefore, why should we battle against the stream? Ours is a workingman's party. Why not call it the Workingman's party, and thereby enlist the sympathy of the workers?[37]
One reason, of course, is that such a name would alienate working women, an increasingly important group. Even more fundamentally, the capitalists could (and did, when this experiment was tried by various other progressive groups) equate any new organization with Socialism, or simply slander the new organization and its name as they had Socialism and the Socialist party. Conger-Kaneko's changing her magazine's name from The Socialist Woman to the more innocuous The Progressive Woman had not saved it from eventual oblivion. Later, in the 1970s, conservatives so poisoned the term "feminist" that many women who fully support women's equality eschew the word when describing their own beliefs.
By the year 1915, the capitalists had poisoned many words besides "Socialism." In fact, the SP frantically distanced itself from "sabotage," "anarchism," "atheism" and "social equality" among races for fear of voter retaliation. The fear of female dominion was also instilled in male psyches. One member wrote that "We men have become so accustomed, by centuries of capitalistic misrule, to being the 'head of the house' and are so prejudiced against being put under anything that can be distorted by our minds into what we call 'petticoat rule,' that we forget or deny our equality" with women and demand that they serve in subordinate positions "instead of recognizing her comradeship and full fellowship as a partner in the building of our party."[38] Indeed, an SP focus on feminist issues would surely have alienated many millions of the culturally conservative working class of both sexes, whom the party targeted for recruitment. The SP did energetically champion women suffrage, and contributed mightily towards its watershed New York victory in 1917. Individual women and men continued to advocate full female equality within the SP as well as within the larger society. But the SP would no more countenance full gender equality than it would unambiguously champion racial equality, officially attack organized religion, or directly confront the capitalist system of traditional morality which impeded every progressive struggle. The electoral path to power mandated a cautious cultural conservatism which would not offend majority sensibilities, or open the SP to slanderous capitalist attacks.
The SP embraced a policy of capitalist legality and peaceful, electoral reform, and staunchly upheld the SPD's utopian policy of "revolutionary waiting" embodied in an "inheritor party". The SP never recognized that a particular historical juncture might give it an unprecedented opportunity. Nor would it shed its Marxist orthodoxy and involve itself in the struggles of all oppressed peoples--African Americans, women, and unskilled workers outside the AFL. The Socialist party destroyed the organized feminist presence within its ranks within two years of its purge of the IWW. By that time, the SP was itself nearing the end of its effective existence. In 1917-1919 the capitalist, white supremacist, and patriarchal state in whose democratic nature the SP had reposed so much trust, destroyed the SP and other radical organizations in a reign of terror. The Socialist movement, the unions, and the feminists all emerged from World War I fragmented and weakened; the Socialists themselves never revived.
A few years before this denouement, Conger-Kaneko, in the final issue of The Coming Nation, composed an epitaph appropriate for the SP as well as for the Socialist-feminist movement she had helped found within it.
It is this sort of needless failure which is enough to break the hearts of those who have seen the vision of solidarity, of united, perfect achievement of the working class!
"There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to victory!" This applies also to organizations. But some individuals never see the tide; and, being blind and unable, stand with desperate determination in the way of those who do see, who ARE able to grasp the opportunities. And the possibilities break; the tide recedes and nothing but a shadow of what might have been remains. The Socialist movement is filled with these shadow pitiful remains of great promises needlessly destroyed.[39]
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] Evans, Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism, and Pacifism in Europe, 1870-1945 (Sussex, 1987); Jean Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917 (Princeton, 1979). Quataert says that "Since familial equality was seen as an inevitable byproduct of ongoing economic transformation, socialist ideology interfered with a thorough critique of actual family life in the working class. In the socialist subculture, then, the working class family did not face a feminist onslaught." Reluctant feminism, therefore, "was the implicit condition for effective participation in the socialist world." [102-104, 231]
[2] Karl Marx, "The Communist Manifesto," last sentence of Part II.
[3] Lewis, "Suffrage Experiences and Observations," PW September 1911; "Women and the Ballot," PW September 1912.
[4] Malkiel wrote a scathing indictment of Socialist practices which she had personally witnessed during a speaking tour in Tennessee and Arkansas; her first-hand account appeared in The New York Call, August 21, 199, as reported in Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans, 246-247. For Lewis's motion, see Miller, Race, Ethnicity and Gender, 7.
[5] Kiichi Kaneko in passing criticized SP nativists in "Here and Now," SW November 1907. JCK, in "Notes on the Congress," PW June 1910, hit discussion of immigration restriction as "wasting valuable time in methods that never will pay." In "Random Shots," PW May 1911, she opposed exclusion of Asians on the same reasons the IWW opposed exclusion. First, the United States was not the workers' country because it did not belong to them; second, American workers inevitably faced Japanese competition because capitalists would build or relocate factories in Japan if Japanese workers were barred from the United States.
[6] Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Laod: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York, 1999); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1988); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985). The Afro-American Socialist movement of the years 1917-1928 was an almost exclusively masculine affair.
[7] For these concepts, see the discussions in the chapters on Max Eastman, the IWW, and Emma Goldman. Quataert has more information on pp. 123-4 and in her notes for these pages.
[8] Ruth Cowan Schwartz, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, (New York, Basic Books, 1983); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream Berkeley, UC Press, 1985.
[9] Sally Miller, Race, Ethnicity, 97-118. "Women in the Party Bureaucracy: Subservient Functionaries" was reprinted from Miller's earlier book, Flawed Liberation: Socialism and Feminism (1981). TM, "Where Do We Stand on the Woman Question?", ISR, August 1909, 159-162. Mary White Ovington, a Socialist who had helped found the NAACP, complained of male indifference and ignorance in an article in The New Review for March, 1914. "Socialism and the Feminist Movement" answered the same, tired male objections that The Socialist Woman had been refuting for seven years; some of those hackneyed old arguments had recently appeared in The New Review itself.
[10] jck, "A Party-Owned Press: Being the Story of This Journal and Why it is not Party-Owned, CN July 1914.
[11] Buhle, 156.
[12] JCK, "Why the Movement Has a Woman's Paper," PW July 1011; "Report of General Correspondent," PW June-July 1913; "Socialist Party Organization Department," PW June-July 1913; JCK, "In This Our World," PW June-July 1913.
[13] "From Factory to Buyer," PW September 1911. The very month after the inauguration of the "Woman in the Home" department, however, this column vehemently denounced traditional women who worked themselves to death at their old-fashioned chores and nevertheless complained about women who rejected such a drudge life. This was hardly of comfort to the "woman in the home."
[14] "Report of General Correspondent," PW June-July 1913; Buhle, p. 155; Nelson, "The Peculiar Attitude of the American Woman Toward Socialism," PW August 1911; "Solidarity Among Women as Shown by the Garment Strike in Chicago," PW August 1911.
[15] JCK, "In This Our World," CN March 1914; Buhle, 288-313.
[16] JCK, "A Party Owned Press," CN July 1914.
[17] JCK, "Woman's Day," PW March 1912; JCK, "A Party-Owned Press," CN July 1914. A.W. Ricker, the associate editor of The Appeal to Reason, referring to women's issues, claimed that "The Appeal to Reason has not the time or the space to give to this side of the Socialist movement. It fights the sterner and stormier side of the battle." Ricker, "The Thing for You to Do," PW February 1911. PW noted the move of The National Socialist to Girard in June 1913.
[18] JCK, "A Party-Owned Press," CN July 1914. We lack Branstetter's side of this conflict.
[19] "Would be Great Mistake," Eugene Debs, The American Socialist, July 24, 1915; "Constitutional Changes," Allan Baker, The American Socialist, July 10, 1915; "That Woman Question," S. Parks, The American Socialist, July 24, 1915.
[20] Letter from Emma Denney, The American Socialist, July 3, 1915, title and beginning not in my copy.
[21] "Work for Women," Janet Korngold, The American Socialist, July 10, 1915; "Woman's Work in the Socialist Party," Mrs. De Roy Welsh, The American Socialist, October 23, 1915.
[22] "Abolishing the Woman's Committee," Florence Wattles, The American Socialist, June 19, 1915.
[23] "Activity of Women," Rosa Anderson, The American Socialist, May 1, 1915.
[24] "Activity of Women," Rosa Anderson, The American Socialist, May 1, 1915.
[25] "The Woman's National Committee," Freda Hogan, The American Socialist, July 10, 1915.
[26] "The Woman's National Committee," Freda Hogan, The American Socialist, July 10, 1915.
[27] "Serious or Funny," Mary Axtell, The American Socialist, March 27, 1915.
[28] "Serious or Funny," Mary Axtell, The American Socialist, March 27, 1915.
[29] "Woman's Work," Agnes Downing, The American Socialist, June 12, 1915.
[30] "More Serious Than Funny," Theresa Malkiel, The American Socialist, April 24, 1915; "Propaganda Among Women," Theresa Malkiel, The American Socialist, June 5, 1915.
[31] "Anent the Woman's Committee," Conger-Kaneko, The American Socialist, May 8, 1915.
[32] "Abolishing the Women's Department," Conger-Kaneko, The American Socialist, July 10, 1915.
[33] "Would Be Great Mistake," Eugene Debs, The American Socialist July 24, 1915; "Women and Their Fight for The Franchise," Debs, The American Socialist, July 24 1915. Debs's first contribution to this issue, his letter in support of the WNC, was placed relatively inconspicuously on the letters page; his article supporting suffrage was a major article on page one.
[34] "Women in the Party," Sophia Salkover, The American Socialist, September 11, 1915.
[35] "Holding the Members," F.W. Cotton, The American Socialist, August 14, 1915; "Organize for 1916," I.S. McCrillis, The American Socialist, September 11, 1915; "Is the Best Possible Work Being Done For Socialism," Howard Caldwell, The American Socialist, July 8, 1915; "True Mission of the Socialist Party," E. Francis Atwood, The American Socialist, September 25, 1915.
[36] "What Can We Do?," George Downing, The American Socialist, August 14, 1915. Downing was a member of the California legislature. The quotes in this paragraph were capitalized in Downing's letter.
[37] "Wants to Change Name," Charles Rogers, The American Socialist, October 23, 1915.
[38] "That Woman Question," S. Parks, The American Socialist, July 24, 1915.
[39] JCK, "A Party-Owned Press," CN July 1914.
The Socialist Woman published severe criticisms of men and of the patriarchal family whose tone and content differed markedly not only from those in the mainstream feminist press, but even from critiques in other radical publications. The Masses, a strongly feminist magazine, published little comparable to Parce's articles on marriage and the family; The Industrial Worker and Solidarity, whose bitter, trenchant criticisms of traditional marriage perhaps equalled those of Conger-Kaneko's magazines, published many fewer feminist pieces. And The Socialist Woman's articles, appearing in a magazine published, edited, and mostly written by women and directed towards a predominantly female audience, carried different connotations from feminist articles written and mostly read by men. The Socialist women encouraged servile revolt within the patriarchal household rather than condescending male benevolence towards their social inferiors; they demanded immediate action by individual women in their families and marriages as well as social transformation.
The Socialist Woman sensibly eschewed dogmatizing about the precise nature of the relationships between capitalism and patriarchy. It argued that the two systems of domination and oppression were inextricably related, and asserted that feminism would weaken capitalism. But it also acknowledged that feminism resulted from capitalist development and that capitalism was itself weakening patriarchy. The patriarchal family was only one of the traditional values that capitalism destroyed. But The Socialist Woman denied that Socialism would inevitably end women's oppression, which long predated capitalism and benefitted men as a class more than it did capitalists. In practice, Conger-Kaneko and her associates adopted a common sense attitude that capitalism and patriarchy were both evils and were systematically related in American society. They opposed both, usually without reducing one to the other or asserting that one was primary and the other derivatory. Capitalism and patriarchy, they implied, were not essentialist, unchanging, trans-historical entities which worked together in preordained harmony. Rather, activists could exploit the fissures between them at each specific historical juncture.
The Socialist women also, despite or perhaps even because of their ambivalences and contradictions, straddled the divide between equity and difference feminism. They implicitly recognized that both can stifle women, the one by demanding assimilation to male values, the other by demanding an equally confining conformity to an apotheosized, essentialized feminine personality. Both sometimes demand that each individual woman meet some ideologically-defined standard of behavior. Lena Morris Lewis, however, believed that "our common interest as human beings and our differences as men and women both demand political power and social rights for women the same as for men." The Progressive Woman, stressing capacities rather than rights or interests, editorialized that "for all the differences there are in the woman nature and the man nature, should women vote. And for all their likenesses--their intelligence, their humanness, should they vote."[3]
The Socialist Woman promulgated a sophisticated Socialist-feminist philosophy which combined some of the best insights of later Socialist and radical feminisms. It fused a sound, Socialist structural analysis of the economic causes of women's subordination in private and public life with Emma Goldman's insights into the psychological enslavement of women, and stressed women's need for both a self-liberating redefinition of themselves and a radical transvaluation of values. The Socialist women presciently recognized the relationships between the personal and the political without succumbing to the illusion that women could liberate themselves simply by an act of will. They did not confuse social transformation with self-expression (as Goldman sometimes seemed to do), blame the victim by privatizing liberation struggles, or succumb to the illusion that individual knowledge and effort could liberate humanity without social struggle. They also avoided the opposite illusion, prevalent among male Socialists, that economic change would automatically liberate women (or workers and blacks) independently of the desires, ideas, and activism of the afflicted groups themselves.
The Socialist women recognized that although the material base for both Socialism and feminism already existed (or soon would), neither were inevitable. Consciousness did not automatically change in accordance with circumstances; rather, it would change more readily if the structural changes were themselves purposeful, resulting at least in part from a transformed consciousness. Consciousness, in other words, not only stemmed from material circumstances, but helped shape them. Even if Socialism and/or feminism were achieved, their precise forms would depend on the ideas, values, and activism of those who constructed the new society. By making the system all-powerful, some radicals rendered the individual as merely a victim, incapable of meaningful resistance; but ignoring impersonal structures and relying solely on personal will resulted in blaming the victims, much as the capitalists did, for circumstances beyond their control.
The Socialist women also avoided the absurdities of bourgeois feminists who claimed that mere formal legal equality--the equality of wage slaves--could meaningfully liberate women. The Socialist Woman did not view economic equality with men in an oppressive, competitive society whose very essence was torture and murder, as a worthy goal. They attacked the division of labor within the family as well as in the public sphere, and clearly recognized the relationships between the two. They fully recognized the role of the patriarchal family in repressing women economically, legally, and psychologically.
The Socialist women emphasized, rather than neglecting, other systems of oppression which also devastated women, such as those based upon class, militarism, and imperialism. They deftly acknowledged both the reality, and the severe limitations, of a sisterhood of women in a society sharply divided by race, ethnicity, and class as well as gender. If they largely ignored race (surprisingly, considering Conger-Kaneko's own marriage), they inhabited a society in which most blacks remained confined in the rural South. Theresa Malkiel did bitterly denounce Socialist degradation and exclusion of Southern blacks, but in The New York Call rather than The Socialist Woman; and Lena Morrow Lewis, the first woman member of the National Executive Committee, fruitlessly urged that the SP route at least one Afro-American speaker into areas where blacks retained the vote.[4] For the most part, however, the Socialist women neglected racial issues much as Afro-American Socialists ignored gender oppressions. Indeed, the Kanekos only occasionally and in passing criticized the agitation for exclusion of Asian immigrants--a cause which some powerful SP leaders endorsed.[5] Fighting on two fronts--gender and class (or, for the blacks, race and class) was burden enough.
Although women of all races faced economic, social, and political oppressions greatly resembling those inflicted upon blacks of both sexes, Afro-American women represented an extremely unlikely constituency for a Socialist Feminism which stressed class as well as gender. Most African-American women resided in the South and worked as field hands or domestics, isolating occupations resistant to unionism. Those few privileged with education and leisure comparable to the Socialist women were often teachers whom white school boards could unceremoniously cashier for political activity. Those who secured a toehold in respectable society would not risk their precarious gains by espousing radicalism. The National Association of Colored Women was relentlessly middle-class; its motto, "Lifting as We Climb," evinced slight sympathy for radical doctrines. The mainstream suffrage movement was deeply infected with racism, and repeatedly humiliated black women in a largely fruitless appeal for white Southern support. Socialist-Feminist attacks on the traditional family would not have pleased Afro-American women valiently defending their own homes against the depradations of white racism. Black women, whose fitness for the decorous, respectable life of the white middle class was widely denied, sought integration into conventional society, rather than a revolutionary overthrow of it. Their world and their reform efforts revolved around race and gender, not class. The Socialist Women's neglect of black women, therefore, was rooted in the objective situation of African Americans as well as the subjective values and actual situation of the Socialist women themselves.[6]
The Socialist women's brilliant synthesis of feminism and socialism constituted a vast improvement on both mainstream feminism and Second International Marxist orthodoxy. The Socialist women's position as women and as feminists in an overwhelmingly male Party whose feminism was more theoretical than real militated against the passivity and fatalism of the "inheritor party" and its doctrinal enshrinement of inaction in a policy of "revolutionary waiting."[7] Socialist women blended the activism and volunteerism of the anarchists with the structural class analysis of the Socialists, a combination that, if universalized to the whole of Socialist doctrine and practice, would indeed have revolutionized the SP (and, much more importantly, the SPD). This innovation in doctrine and praxis would have had implications far transcending even the vital issue of women's rights. Had Socialists grappled with the problems presented by nationalism, for example, instead of dismissing it, against all evidence, as a waning epiphenomenum of capitalism, world history might have proceeded far differently. If the Socialists, particularly in Germany, had realized that they must seize power rather than waiting for a reified History to deposit it in their lap, the world might be a much better place today. As it was, almost the only actions that the Socialists of the Second International acknowledged could influence history were those specifically designed to precipitate or wage revolution; these could only retard or defeat the otherwise-inevitable triumph of the working class. The Socialist Woman, a marginal publication in a small Socialist party, had no chance of effecting such epochal changes in an international movement, of course; but the Socialist women in the United States did perceptively analyze important, intractable realities, and were ignored partly because their prescient analysis raised troubling issues and problems which orthodox, class-fixated Marxists dared not confront.
The Socialist women correctly discerned secular trends that facilitated the emergence of class and sex consciousness among workers and women. They perceived that the developments which fostered working-class and feminist consciousness were related and would intensify. But they underestimated capitalist opposition and the endemic structural obstacles that frustrated the development of class consciousness among workers and gender consciousness among women. These structural barriers thwarted both socialism and feminism, and, therefore, rendered any union of the two virtually impossible.
Capitalism soon provided technology which somewhat lightened women's household labors, and made labor-saving devices available to increasing numbers of working-class housewives. More and more women eventually left the home for paid employment. Yet neither of these developments liberated women, as The Socialist Woman had predicted they would not. The new machinery actually meant "more work for mother" as standards of cleanliness rose more quickly than technology's prowess. Advertising imposed higher, and less certain (because always changing), standards upon the mother, whose new honorific title of "scientific household manager" kept her firmly at her domestic tasks. Wives were kept forever off balance, wondering if they were fulfilling the new standards made possible by machinery and demanded by advertising.[8] The new machinery opened up vast new consumer markets, thus further strengthening capitalism, even as women provided ever-increasing sources of surplus value when they worked outside the home. At the cost of women's psychological health, household "labor-saving" equipment thus bolstered patriarchy as well as capitalism, thus illustrating the axiom that social power relations greatly influence what technology is produced and how it is used.
Capitalism, it appears, can live with almost any social system, just as it adapts any political system to its own ends. Capitalism is compatible with fascism, traditional oligarchies, and bourgeois democracy--with almost any political system except a genuine democracy. Similarly, its symbiosis with patriarchy was a marriage of convenience generated by a particular historical juncture, rather than by any essential need. Capitalism matured in a patriarchal world and adapted to it while simultaneously transforming the precise contours of patriarchy in accordance with its own changing needs. Just as capitalism arose upon the foundation of slave labor, only to destroy chattel slavery when its own changing needs required this, so capitalism profited by its temporary and historically contingent alliance with patriarchy. But the bottom line for capitalism is profit, the extraction of surplus value from an exploited class of wage laborers. Nothing else ultimately matters. Patriarchy, as IWW writers had recognized, was only another of the traditional values undermined, even as it was utilized, by capitalism.
Capitalism probably does require, as a requisite for its existence, a fragmented working class. It must divide and rule by hegemony, as well as ruling directly by brute violence. Gender, however, is only one way that capitalists divide the working class (capitalizing on, even as it transforms, traditional gender stereotypes). Race, ethnicity, nationality, and skill are other convenient dividers. Capitalists segment the workforce upon the basis of inherited (although incessantly transformed) cultural fissures, as well as by newly-created and fluctuating differences of skill, job classification, employment status (permanent vs. temporary, "home guard" vs. migratory, unionized vs. non-unionized), and supervisory rank. Segmentation is almost universal, yet its forms are highly variable, just as most societies classify some tasks as particularly suited to women, but enormously vary in their definitions of women's work. Capitalism, therefore, can dispense with a gendered division of work if it creates or utilizes other divisions. Capitalists have effectively used feminism (as well as movements for racial justice) to embitter and divide the working class, just as effectively as it previously (and simultaneously) used patriarchy. In fact, patriarchy and feminism both divide the working class for the same reasons: they are both based upon culturally-defined gender definitions which detract from class-based solidarities. Feminism must so completely abolish patriarchy as to obviate the need for its own existence before capitalists will fail to benefit from gender divisions within the working class.
During the heyday of the Socialist women, the capitalist, patriarchal, and white supremacist state divided the working class into discrete legal categories of race, gender, and nationality. The corporations further divided them into occupational hierarchies on the job, thus reinforcing the differential impact of industrialization and deskilling on different trades. In the experience of most proletarians, there simply was no unified working class with common problems; rather, workers perceived fragmented groups of competing workers, divided by law, job, income, and skill as well as by religion, ethnicity, race, and sex.
Corporate practice, traditional gender roles, and the legal structure made working women a distinct threat to working men. Their lower wages and skills and their usually temporary employment for wages outside the home made women even more difficult to organize than men. The police shot and clubbed female strikers with the same relish as males, and the entire legal apparatus of terrorism, violence, and proscription that undercut male unions was visited upon female and mixed-sex unions as well. The Supreme Court's Miller vs. Oregon decision (1908) only enshrined the AFL's belief that working women, inferior to men and a threat to them, were best kept in the home. The AFL favored protective labor legislation for women partly for the reasons given by the Supreme Court: women were an inferior class, in special need of tutelage and protection, and incapable of caring for themselves. (Actually, as the Socialist women pointed out, they did the most dangerous drudge work of society, and in addition cared for everyone else.) For the most part, however, the AFL viewed such legislation as a device to exclude women from the labor force by making them less profitable for the capitalists and hence less competitive with men. This presented feminists within the SP, a party which worked within the AFL and was dependent on the votes of organized male workers, with an almost insoluble dilemma.
Just as the capitalist and patriarchal state divided workers against themselves, the class system divided women. Socialist men proved more realistic than the Socialist women when they adamantly asserted that bourgeois women would not support Socialism out of any supposed natural female affinity for Socialism. The suffrage movement began largely as a middle-class movement with a distinctly ambivalent relationship with organized labor and remained this way for decades; working women entered last. Bourgeois women could win some semblance of dignity, equality, or at least independence within the capitalist order, as Parce and Braverman admitted. Bourgeois women might indeed support ameliorative reforms of the sort which undercut Socialism, but they were a distinctly unnatural constituency for any class-based reconstruction of society. (The lyrical radicals associated with The Masses embarked on an equally chimerical effort to attract male and female bourgeois liberals for the cause of revolutionary socialism.)
In addition, the capitalist press and politicians poisoned the women's movement much as they did the labor movement. By incessantly shouting that feminism led to free love and the dissolution of the family, opponents of women's rights drove the mainstream suffrage movement towards a conservative denial of any ambitions for larger social changes, much as accusations of lawlessness and un-Americanism helped tame the labor movement. In the United States at least, most social movements spend far too much time conciliating their irreconcilable opponents. The drive for suffrage, a distinctly non-class demand, temporarily united most women at the cost of defusing the radicalism explicit in early feminism. But the next logical step, an Equal Rights Amendment, divided women on the basis of class interest and effectively scuttled a unified and powerful women's movement until long after the upheavals of the 1930s had, by legitimizing labor legislation for men, rendered feminist divisions over the ERA largely moot.
Women, like workers, were divided among themselves; and when neither workers nor women could unite in organized, ecumenical movements, it is not surprising that these two disparate groups (hardly existing as coherent or organized social formations) could form no meaningful alliance. Not long after the demise of Conger-Kaneko's publication and the Woman's National Committee, the SP was permanently vitiated by a systematic campaign of state capitalist terrorism and violence, thus ending whatever remote chance for a vibrant Socialist-feminist movement that remained. The failure of the SP's Socialist-feminists, therefore, pointed to larger structural barriers implicit in a capitalist, patriarchal, and racist society--barriers mirrored within the SP itself. Against these massive and endemic social forces, enshrined and buttressed by law, custom, and culture, the Socialist women struggled in vain.
Male Socialists, however, ended the short experiment in an organized feminist presence within the SP before the capitalist state destroyed the Party. Indeed, after seven years of struggle, the Socialist women had not convinced Socialist men of women's importance either in American society or in the SP itself. As late as 1913 one SP leader complained that only 10% of SP men really believed in woman's equality, and advised that the WNC target men, rather than women, for education. Only two women had served on the SP's governing body, the NEC, in the years 1907-1915. Socialist legislators in the states introduced suffrage bills only under pressure. Although fragmentary data suggest that over half of the SP's female membership considered themselves housewives, SP men rarely recruited their wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, or sweethearts into the movement. In 1909 Malkiel had complained that only one in thirty SP men recruited any woman into the SP, "while the others preach the ideals of Socialism and the necessity of party alliance everywhere except within the walls of their own home." Malkiel correctly noted that few women would join the SP in the face of the indifference, masking hostility, of their men. In the next six years, this situation remained unaltered. In the years 1914-1915, Socialist women were still addressing the ignorant male arguments against women's equality which they had long since refuted.[9] The career of The Socialist Woman and the destruction of the WNC, therefore, reveal the severe limits of male Socialist commitment to women's rights.
Kiichi Kaneko and Josephine Conger-Kaneko had, as previously mentioned, started their publication in 1907 with only 26 subscribers, and had steadily increased its circulation. In March 1909 they changed its name to The Progressive Woman because the word "Socialist" intimidated potential subscribers and advertisers. A few months later Kiichi, ill, returned to Japan, where he died later in the year. Josephine struggled along, supported mostly by the subscription price of $0.25 a year. In the spring of 1911, however, The Appeal to Reason, claiming financial difficulties, ceased its subsidized publication of other Socialist periodicals in Girard, Kansas. This forced The Progressive Woman into a hurried move to Chicago, plunging it deeply into debt at the very time its expenses soared.[10]
When the Socialist party created its Woman's National Committee in 1908, the WNC developed a symbiotic relationship with The Socialist Woman. The WNC boosted the magazine and garnered subscribers, while The Socialist Woman reported on WNC activities, advertised WNC leaflets and pamphlets, and printed suggested women's programs for SP locals. Conger-Kaneko also printed special numbers specializing in particular issues that concerned Socialist women, such as suffrage, prostitution, child slavery, and campaigns against militarism, war, and the Boy Scouts. These had a circulation of up to 100,000 copies.[11] The Socialist Woman published short, topical WNC leaflets as well as theoretical articles instructing women in scientific socialism.
Conger-Kaneko hoped that the SP would adapt the magazine, and both subsidize and control it. Ironically, however, the SP, while advocating collective ownership of the means of production, eschewed ownership of its own press. Most Socialist newspapers and magazines were privately owned and financed. This avoided enshrining any particular editorial stance with the official imprimatur of the Party and ensured free debate and the expression of a wide diversity of views. The Party, therefore, refused responsibility for The Progressive Woman. Although in 1910 Conger-Kaneko claimed that the SP's Congress of that year made her paper the WNC's official organ, the SP later repudiated this suggestion because the appellation of official organ implied "party rule and ownership." The WNC eventually did publish its own column in The Progressive Woman, but readers were carefully warned that the publication itself took no responsibility for the opinions expressed therein, just as the WNC did not endorse the particular opinions expressed elsewhere in the paper.[12] This left Conger-Kaneko in a dilemma: how to finance her magazine at a time when subscription prices alone would not support it?
Advertising was a possible source of revenue. Conger-Kaneko disdained patent medicine ads, which paid the most and were easily secured. Twice she told readers that she had rejected such unsolicited adds despite her crying need of funds; but eventually she accepted them as a last resort. She warned her readers that "we do not guarantee all our advertisers" and discontinued disreputable ads when possible, but she resumed them when her financial plight grew desperate. She wooed respectable advertisers and urged her readers to patronize them while frantically pursuing the large circulation that would make The Progressive Woman attractive to legitimate companies. In September 1911 she expanded the size of The Progressive Woman and raised the subscription price to $0.40; a year later, seeking a broader appeal, she inaugurated a column on "The Woman in the Home," featuring household and childrearing tips.[13]
The Woman's National Committee, meanwhile, was charged with recruiting women and developing a literature for that purpose. By 1913 it had published (often in cooperation with The Socialist Woman, in whose pages the shorter pamphlets sometimes appeared) 22 leaflets addressed to women in particular trades, 19 books and pamphlets for women, and 13 compilations of songs, skits, and readings for entertainments and fundraising events. The WNC translated some leaflets into German, Polish, and Yiddish, and estimated that in 1913 alone it printed an estimated 1,500,000 leaflets and roughly twice as many "agitational pieces". It composed suggested women's programs for SP locals each month, complete with lectures, songs, recitations, and skits; these were published in The Progressive Woman. Finding that the demand for women speakers exceeded the supply, the WNC sponsored training classes for female speakers. Thirty-five states adopted the WNC's "Plan of Work Among Women" and appointed a state correspondent to oversee recruitment of women. Although figures are sporadic and imprecise, the absolute number and percentage of women members of the SP apparently increased dramatically. Caroline Nelson claimed in 1910 that the SP had only 1000 female members, half of whom had joined only at the behest of some man; by the fall of 1911 the SP claimed 10,000 women members, and by 1912--when party membership was at an all-time high--women comprised 15% of the party.[14]
These successes did not placate the male majority, and may in fact have engendered suspicion and fear. In 1914 Conger-Kaneko stated that "we have maintained a women's department in the National Office for six years at considerable annual expense, and it is the growing sentiment that we should be making a bigger showing in our woman's work." SP membership had plummeted after the election of 1912 due to the split with the IWW in 1912-13 and the attraction, for some members, of Wilsonian liberalism. Lacking funds and members, the SP curtailed many activities. Perhaps encouraged by the SPD's abolition of its own semi-autonomous woman's department in 1912, the SP destroyed its WNC altogether in 1915.[15] This effectively eliminated the presence of women and of feminists as organized forces within the SP. Even before that occurrence, however, The Progressive Woman, victimized by inner-Party machinations, had fallen silent.
After her move to Chicago, Conger-Kaneko made increasingly desperate efforts to keep her publication afloat. In addition to accepting patent medicine ads, she paid off a substantial portion of the paper's debt with her own funds and increased circulation to 15,000. In a possible attempt to defuse male suspicion and hostility, she reduced the number of articles critical of men, hired a male, Barnet Braverman, as Associate Editor and Circulation Manager (in August 1913) and then as Editor (in November 1913). She had previously made Floyd Dell, editor of The Chicago Evening Post's Friday Literary Supplement, literary editor. (Dell, however, resigned when he moved to New York in 1913). In a final act of desperation she changed the name of her periodical to The Coming Nation (a popular but recently deceased Socialist general-interest magazine). She hired a capitalist subscription agency which doubled her circulation. However, she sold these subscriptions at cost, eschewing immediate revenue in hopes of increasing circulation and therefore advertising. The number of articles and contributors dropped sharply; editorial copy was replaced by ads, including patent medicine ads.[16]
The heart of her difficulties, however, resided in the attitude of the SP. Male opposition to the WNC and a special woman's magazine never subsided; Conger-Kaneko complained that, as far as she knew, only six locals (out of approximately 5,500) used the WNC's monthly program for women. The Appeal to Reason had jettisoned The Progressive Woman ostensibly for financial reasons. But The Appeal belittled women's issues and apparently had made no attempt to reach a mutually beneficial agreement with Conger-Kaneko. Later The National Socialist moved from the District of Columbia to Girard, presumably to take advantage of cheaper publishing facilities there. Why could The Progressive Woman not have remained there as well? When the SP encouraged locals to buy stock in The Progressive Woman, the 5,500 locals, with a membership of approximately 116,000, together purchased only 42 shares.[17]
Conger-Kaneko did secure a paltry $200 from the SP's National Executive Committee and authorization to form a joint-stock company whereby SP locals would buy (on very favorable terms) stock in The Progressive Woman. However, shortly thereafter, Winnie Branstatter, the only opponent of The Progressive Woman on the WNC, became General Correspondent of the WNC when Caroline Lowe resigned. Branstetter effectively undermined The Progressive Woman by sowing doubt about its solvency, opposing any SP subsidies, securing a reversal of the SP's endorsement of the joint-stock project, and falsely accusing its editor, Barnet Braverman, of being an IWW member. Branstetter sabotaged the WNC's policy by sending all SP locals derogatory information--much of it false or exaggerated--about The Progressive Woman and its financial state, thus undermining sales of stock. Denied permission to reply to Branstetter's allegations in the National Bulletin, Conger-Kaneko said that she "could have wept for sheer disgust at the way things were going." Finally, when Conger-Kaneko changed her publication's name to The Coming Nation, Branstetter claimed that the new publication was no longer a woman's magazine, and on this pretense dropped it from the list of publications recommended for education among women--a list that included non-Socialist papers. The Coming Nation then ceased publication. Ironically, shortly before the demise of The Coming Nation the SP finally decided that it should own its own press, and began publication of its official organ, The American Socialist. Had it adopted The Progressive Woman, Conger-Kaneko asserted, "the women of the Socialist movement could have been today the owners of a successful journal with which to carry on their propaganda."[18]
Conger-Kaneko, in short, fell victim to the same sort of dishonest slanders and machinations that had precipitated the recall of Big Bill Haywood from the NEC, and for the same reason: she offended the conservative male leadership of the SP. Like the IWW and its supporters, she won the intellectual argument but lost the political battle. Conger-Kaneko had eagerly contributed her energies, her money, and her loyalty to a male dominated Socialist party. Unappreciative of her efforts, it stifled and throttled her. She never published a Socialist magazine again, and soon retired from political activity altogether.
A year after the demise of Conger-Kaneko's publication, the overwhelmingly male SP abolished both the Woman's National Committee and the Woman's Department in the National Office. The debate over this action took place, ironically enough, in the new party-owned weekly, The American Socialist. The abolition of the women's groups occurred at a time of retrenchment, demoralization, and doubts about the ultimate triumph of Socialism caused by the exodus of pro-IWW party members in the United States, the disillusioning outbreak of war in Europe, and the consequent decline in membership and near-bankruptcy of the SP. Although we cannot know how representative of member opinion the letters printed in the SP's official organ are, they do illuminate sources of female opposition to the WNC.
In early 1915 the National Executive Committee proposed amending the SP's constitution to abolish both the WNC and the Woman's Department. Although Debs, a staunch supporter of women's interests, complained that many male Socialists belittled women's issues and dismissed women's suffrage "as a mere incident in the social revolution," the NEC justified abolition on the grounds of financial exigencies and the alleged inefficiency of the WNC. Men who had opposed Conger-Kaneko's publication and the WNC seldom if ever admitted any bias against women or women's issues. Indeed, the men who wrote The American Socialist in support of abolition all claimed that they staunchly supported a strong female presence within the party; one proposed proportionate representation for women in offices throughout the party machinery, while another advocated reserving two of the five NEC posts for women.[19]
Some women (none of whom were nationally prominent, and none of whom had written for Conger-Kaneko's publications) indignantly supported abolition, complaining that separate women's institutions both implied and re-enforced women's inferiority. Emma Denney claimed that the needs, education, environment and problems of the men and women of the working class were identical, so the WNC was unnecessary. The problems of the husband who could not feed his family were fully intelligible to his wife, even if SP leaflets addressed him. Denney found it "unbelievable" that Socialists, supposedly progressive and broad-minded, "advocate and actually have in existence a sort of kindergarten to educate the women." The SP had always claimed that women were men's equals, who deserve equal opportunity and pay because they can perform the same jobs as men; "but at the same time [it is] insisting that we must have a special piece of literature with woman written all over it before she can come to a comprehensive understanding that it is of interest to her as a member of the working class." Denney said that "What we want is class consciousness, not sex consciousness. Let us abolish the Women's Department and prove that we can work shoulder to shoulder for both men and women through our organization."[20]
Janet Korngold agreed that anyone who effectively argued Socialism was "doing work for women, as well as for men" because the two sexes shared the same interests and the same psychology. "All the Party's work is for women"; those claiming that the SP's best speakers and writers did not address women's concerns insulted the intelligence of women. Mrs. De Roy Welsh voted for abolition of the WNC so that women may be "as free to work whenever the work is needed, as is man.... Why fetter her hands so that she may not carry the good news of FREEDOM TO ALL, regardless of sex." Welsh claimed that she had, as New Mexico state women's correspondent, she had sent the WNC a circular addressing a group male professionals, but was rebuffed on the grounds that "we women were expected to confine our official work to women." This incident is undoubtedly exaggerated if not invented--the WNC obviously concerned itself with strictly women's recruitment and issues, but heartily encouraged full women's participation in every aspect of party work--but Welsh concluded that the abolition of the WNC lost women nothing "except our--perhaps invisible--fetters."[21]
Florence Wattles, a National "Committeeman" from Indiana, demanded that the SP energetically address women's issues and deplored "the hysteria we have always known in the movement whenever we have discussed the woman question." Yet she opposed the WNC because separate work "defeats its own purpose; creates the antagonism which is supposed to have called it into existence." Wattles said that the women's movement was "more significant than the protest of the working class."
Always she has been the conservative.... Revolutionary changes have been made in the world's relationships. But so long as she could work out her love in her home woman has borne the burdens placed upon her uncomplainingly. Today she is at war with society. From thousands of women there comes a cry against a social system that has disturbed the home.... The strongest indictment that can be drawn against the existing order is that woman has ventured from the silence of her home and is making demands upon society. Today her protest is shaking the social structure to its deepest foundation.[22]
Wattles said that "the attitude of Socialists toward this movement should be our first concern. Yet we quibble." However, Wattles counselled that women wait with their traditional patience until men perceived the vital importance of women's issues.
Rosa Anderson, however, belittled agitation over the WNC for the exact opposite reason: rather than patiently awaiting male approval, women should simply act autonomously on their own. Quoting one woman who claimed that in Iowa women received scant attention because some men "do not want women in the party," Anderson exclaimed that if women in Iowa or elsewhere "haven't got more backbone than to let a few men keep them out of a movement, such as ours is, then these same women haven't got backbone enough to take any responsible part in party affairs."
I am as strong a believer in woman's rights as any one could be, but we will never get those rights by sitting down, folding our hands and waiting for the men of the party to put us in some high position. We must first show them that we are capable of holding high positions, and above all, that we cannot be 'bluffed'....
The very fact that we, the women, are 'sore' over the way the men in the party have treated us is in itself an admission that we have not done our duty. It is our duty to make women Socialists and thereby increase our strength and power in the party and equal rights. Don't expect the men of the party to get out and convert women to Socialism, do it yourself.[23]
In an inflammatory remark outrageously inapplicable to the activist women who supported the WNC, Anderson said that if women displayed "as much interest in this movement as you do in your sewing clubs and aid societies... we will soon have as strong a voice in the party as the men." Anderson advised that women form their own local women's committee, study Socialist writings such Mary Marcy's Shop Talks, and sponsor informal social events for their friends at which a short lecture on Socialism would be delivered. Anderson appealed for "harmony in our ranks," and condemned discord over "the equal rights question" in a party which stands for equal rights for all as "a disgrace."[24]
Many women, however, vigorously supported the WNC. Freda Hogan, for example, used arguments against separate women's activism as an argument for the party-controlled WNC. Despite the ideal of a sex-neutral, class-based propaganda, Hogan asserted, the standard Socialist arguments did not resonate with women; otherwise, why would women constitute only 17% of SP members? "On this point the party faces a condition--not a theory; a fact--not an ideal." Mothers raised the next generation of voters; and soon all women would themselves vote. That the NEC frivolously and with scant thought or debate abolished the WNC indicated that women could not trust the NEC for work among women. Hogan perceived a danger that Socialist women would create a separate, non-Party women's organization.
I am not a feminist, nor a suffragist any more than any good socialists. I do not want what is best for the women--but what is best for the Socialist party, and, as a party member, I am opposed to a separate organization, which the party could not control and which might not conform to socialist principles and practices. Neither is there any good reason why I, or any woman, should go outside the party to do work which concerns us as men and women equally.[25]
Hogan concluded that if the SP ignored women, and if ignorant women therefore voted against the SP, "then every socialist man is affected just as much as I am." Hogan condemned condescending male SP "tolerance" of women in the party as insufferable and self-defeating.[26]
Voicing a complaint that would recur within SDS in the 1960s, Mary Axtell said that too many Socialist men felt that if women appeared "in a public capacity" at all
they are better fitted either to do the light (?) jobs around offices or odd jobs of baking for banquets or at most if they must organize let it be a sort of "ornamental" or auxiliary which serves perhaps as a good social setting for the men's organization.... Until the feeling of Woman's incompetency is quite dispelled from the befogged minds of both men and women--perhaps we may need this Woman's National Committee as it is.[27]
Axtell complained that the world did not yet believe "that women are people"; when it acknowledged the personhood of women, separate organizations would become unnecessary.[28]
Agnes Downing, a regular writer for Conger-Kaneko's publications, condemned the "dullness and stagnation in the Socialist women's work" because of WNC impotence and the suspension of Conger-Kaneko's paper. Although individual Socialist women did excellent work, their efforts hardly benefitted the Party as an organization. "Socialist women, as a body, have no influence in the social mass." Socialists had materially aided the suffrage campaign and would enter the Women's Peace Party, but could not as individuals inject into these movements "the program that alone can make either [suffrage or peace] effective in the best sense." The WNC should have its own secure base of funding, and the power to establish and implement its own policy without NEC approval.[29]
Theresa Malkiel, another Socialist Woman regular, wrote The American Socialist twice in support not only of retaining the WNC, but of strengthening its powers and finances. The NEC and the WNC had been at loggerheads for quite some time, Malkiel said, causing "a complete cessation of agitation among the workingwomen of the country" except where local committees valiantly carried on. The NEC had feared and therefore completely controlled the WNC, which lacked both an independent base of funds and the power of autonomous action; the WNC had therefore remained only "an expensive ornament of the Party, a sop to the women, a blind for the suffragists." During the last two years the NEC had throttled the WNC, denying it necessary funds. Although women's importance at the workplace and the polling both was vastly increasing, the NEC did not view woman as important in the quest for social justice, value women's work within the SP, or acknowledge the fact that "we cannot, for the present, convert the women through the same methods as we are trying to convert the men." Malkiel warned that capitalists and the church actively wooed women and insisted that the SP desperately need "counter agitation." Ridiculing those who asserted that the abolition of the WNC would benefit women, Malkiel scornfully said that "the abolition of special agitation among women will not bring about greater agitation" but that "work for Socialism among women will absolutely stagnate."[30]
Conger-Kaneko herself wrote The American Socialist twice, also demanding increased funding and powers for the WNC. Conger-Kaneko said that the experiment in subordinating the WNC beneath the NEC had failed, and the NEC responded by demanding the WNC's abolition. "Certainly we cannot expect a great deal for our women's work if left entirely to men's committees," she said. "No organization on earth runs this risk with its woman's work." Even the churches had special women's organizations.[31]
Conger-Kaneko reminded the SP membership that Socialist women throughout the nation had created their own independent clubs before 1908, when the SP's national convention substituted the WNC for those autonomous clubs, therefore "officially discrediting all other forms" of women's organization and largely destroying "the work already accomplished by the women." Conger-Kaneko quoted a cynical women activist who had in 1908 called the creation of a WNC under direct Party auspices "a move to kill the woman's activity in the Socialist party." Conger-Kaneko disdained belief in any such conspiratorial intent, yet said that the abolition of the WNC, emphatically supported by the very men who had originally proposed the WNC, would officially kill "every avenue of woman's work within the party." Conger-Kaneko asked how SP women could progress "if we must depend upon official (and prejudiced) sanction for our every move?" She ended on an optimistic note, however, claiming (falsely, as it turned out) that women in the SP would prevail. Those who had worked for women's rights within the SP before and during the WNC phase of organization would remain "active in the future, no matter what is done to us officially." She bravely said that "truth is hard to kill, and a woman full of Socialist truth is hard to be quieted."[32]
The American Socialist also printed resolutions by Local Bridgeport and by the Women's Committees of Local New York and the Bronx opposing the WNC's abolition. Moreover, Eugene Debs, who rarely intervened in intra-Party disputes, weighed in with his own support for strengthening the WNC, calling abolition "worse than a mistake." Debs also reiterated his strong support for women's work generally. Complaining of tepid SP support for women's suffrage and asserting that women for the most part fought alone, Debs demanded that the SP energetically join the suffrage movement. Deploring male indifference and hostility towards women's issues, he proclaimed that women's fight for citizenship and human equality "is a vital issue of itself." Every socialist must help win that "distinct advance toward democracy and freedom" which would "mean quite as much for men in its results as it will for women themselves." Anyone not actively helping woman suffrage was effectively opposing it. Women suffrage would be debated and voted on in numerous states within the next two years, and the SP "will either be in this agitation to our very decided advantage or we will be out of it to our equally decided disadvantage. As socialists we ought to be at the head and front of it. Our party was the first to declare for equal rights and it is an essential part of the socialist program and the socialist mission." Hundreds of women socialists in suffrage states had entered the SP via the suffrage struggle, and it was only a question of time before suffrage triumphed everywhere. "It would be sheer betrayal of our party to let this great opportunity go by unimproved," Debs concluded. "The socialist propaganda can be made to throb with new life and progress as never" if the SP took advantage of "greatest opportunity" in strongly backing this winning movement.[33]
Despite the strong support for the WNC evinced in The American Socialist debate, the SP membership abolished the WNC and the Woman's Department by referendum vote. Sophia Salkover, a member from Cincinnati, thanked WNC opponent John Work for his soothing words in favor of women's equality, but said that fine phrases could not heal the wound inflicted by abolition. Salkover said that the position of women in the SP had been deteriorating for the last several years; women speakers and articles by women in leading Socialist publications were increasingly rare. If "scatteration"--John Work's word--was feared, "why not abolish the language federations that are but loosely connected with the party?" Salkover concluded that "the ban put on the woman's activities can bring only one result--their exodus from the movement."[34]
The SP surely did not need further defections. Indeed, its fear of diversity, of specifically appealing for the support of especially oppressed groups, had already substantially weakened the party. In 1912-1913 the SP anathematized the IWW and its supporters by making advocacy of sabotage or illegal methods an offense meriting expulsion, thus causing a hemorrhaging of membership and bitter infighting in many locals. At that same time the SP alienated brilliant Afro-American intellectual Hubert H. Harrison, who had demanded that the SP specifically tailor its message towards blacks as the WNC had towards women. Harrison had shown promise of catalyzing a mass Socialist movement among blacks in New York; he was suspended from the party (and therefore quit in disgust) ostensibly for advocating pro-IWW positions, but partly, Harrison suspected, because of party racism. The same NEC which killed the WNC also demanded that the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) totally subordinate itself in all matters to the main party and its Locals, thereby alienating young members who felt mistrusted and deprived of self-government. Furthermore, rumblings of discontent and dissension over the SP's war policy became increasingly widespread in the pages of The American Socialist, presaging more bitterness and division when the United States entered World War I.
SP members debated the reasons and remedies for the membership decline at the same time they decided the fate of the WNC. One member epitomized the widespread concern when he said that everyone was asking what was the problem with Socialism, and whether the movement was disintegrating. "A few years ago, even up to 1913, we were filled with the militancy and enthusiasm born of hope of speedy victory," McCrillis said. But now that "circumstances have arisen that have at least temporarily dashed the hope of speedy victory and punctured the bubble of superficial optimism," the SP was searching for answers. McCrillis himself believed that more efficient organization, and a renewed emphasis on recruiting genuine Socialists rather than lukewarm reformers, was crucial. Others claimed that minor reforms, such as revamping the SP's dues-collection system or the SP's lecture bureau would solve the party's problems. Another, complaining that "we organize locals and nine in ten die in a few months, we get members and not more than one in ten stay two years," advocated better organization.[35] But two members wrote in with suggestions that not only revealed the impossible predicament of the SP, but indirectly commented on the impending debacle with the SP women's movement.
George Downing complained that the SP must place itself on a more realistic basis, and affiliate more closely with organized workers. "Our philosophers must become scientists," he said, and the SP ally itself with the actually existing labor movement. Quoting Marx's dictum that "one movement is worth a dozen programs," Downing urged that "everywhere in the world, where the movement has become powerful, its backbone is organized labor; and nowhere is our movement a real force where it is separated from labor." He hailed England's Labor party as an exemplar of action rather than idle theorizing.[36] However, Downing ignored the peculiar nature of the American labor movement, which was viciously anti-Socialist and, in its exclusion of the vast majority of workers (blacks, women, the unskilled, immigrants), not only reactionary but vastly unrepresentative of the American working class. The SP's de facto and one-sided alliance with the AFL, and its consequent repudiation of the IWW, already boded ill for any large-scale recruitment of female (or black) workers.
Charles Rogers, a SP member of five years' standing, argued that if the SP changed its name it would enhance its prospects at the polls. He observed that "the average voter will cast his ballot for any ticket in preference to the Socialist ticket" because voting SP "means ostracism among WORKING PEOPLE." The working class, Rogers stated, detested the words "Socialism" and "Socialist," which the capitalists had associated with every imaginable evil. The SP expended enormous energy convincing workers "that Socialism is not this or that."
Isn't it silly to leave this obstacle in our path to divide the WORKING CLASS, which is the only class that can be fooled by it? We are not fighting for the term Socialism, but for what it represents. Therefore, why should we battle against the stream? Ours is a workingman's party. Why not call it the Workingman's party, and thereby enlist the sympathy of the workers?[37]
One reason, of course, is that such a name would alienate working women, an increasingly important group. Even more fundamentally, the capitalists could (and did, when this experiment was tried by various other progressive groups) equate any new organization with Socialism, or simply slander the new organization and its name as they had Socialism and the Socialist party. Conger-Kaneko's changing her magazine's name from The Socialist Woman to the more innocuous The Progressive Woman had not saved it from eventual oblivion. Later, in the 1970s, conservatives so poisoned the term "feminist" that many women who fully support women's equality eschew the word when describing their own beliefs.
By the year 1915, the capitalists had poisoned many words besides "Socialism." In fact, the SP frantically distanced itself from "sabotage," "anarchism," "atheism" and "social equality" among races for fear of voter retaliation. The fear of female dominion was also instilled in male psyches. One member wrote that "We men have become so accustomed, by centuries of capitalistic misrule, to being the 'head of the house' and are so prejudiced against being put under anything that can be distorted by our minds into what we call 'petticoat rule,' that we forget or deny our equality" with women and demand that they serve in subordinate positions "instead of recognizing her comradeship and full fellowship as a partner in the building of our party."[38] Indeed, an SP focus on feminist issues would surely have alienated many millions of the culturally conservative working class of both sexes, whom the party targeted for recruitment. The SP did energetically champion women suffrage, and contributed mightily towards its watershed New York victory in 1917. Individual women and men continued to advocate full female equality within the SP as well as within the larger society. But the SP would no more countenance full gender equality than it would unambiguously champion racial equality, officially attack organized religion, or directly confront the capitalist system of traditional morality which impeded every progressive struggle. The electoral path to power mandated a cautious cultural conservatism which would not offend majority sensibilities, or open the SP to slanderous capitalist attacks.
The SP embraced a policy of capitalist legality and peaceful, electoral reform, and staunchly upheld the SPD's utopian policy of "revolutionary waiting" embodied in an "inheritor party". The SP never recognized that a particular historical juncture might give it an unprecedented opportunity. Nor would it shed its Marxist orthodoxy and involve itself in the struggles of all oppressed peoples--African Americans, women, and unskilled workers outside the AFL. The Socialist party destroyed the organized feminist presence within its ranks within two years of its purge of the IWW. By that time, the SP was itself nearing the end of its effective existence. In 1917-1919 the capitalist, white supremacist, and patriarchal state in whose democratic nature the SP had reposed so much trust, destroyed the SP and other radical organizations in a reign of terror. The Socialist movement, the unions, and the feminists all emerged from World War I fragmented and weakened; the Socialists themselves never revived.
A few years before this denouement, Conger-Kaneko, in the final issue of The Coming Nation, composed an epitaph appropriate for the SP as well as for the Socialist-feminist movement she had helped found within it.
It is this sort of needless failure which is enough to break the hearts of those who have seen the vision of solidarity, of united, perfect achievement of the working class!
"There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to victory!" This applies also to organizations. But some individuals never see the tide; and, being blind and unable, stand with desperate determination in the way of those who do see, who ARE able to grasp the opportunities. And the possibilities break; the tide recedes and nothing but a shadow of what might have been remains. The Socialist movement is filled with these shadow pitiful remains of great promises needlessly destroyed.[39]
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] Evans, Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism, and Pacifism in Europe, 1870-1945 (Sussex, 1987); Jean Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917 (Princeton, 1979). Quataert says that "Since familial equality was seen as an inevitable byproduct of ongoing economic transformation, socialist ideology interfered with a thorough critique of actual family life in the working class. In the socialist subculture, then, the working class family did not face a feminist onslaught." Reluctant feminism, therefore, "was the implicit condition for effective participation in the socialist world." [102-104, 231]
[2] Karl Marx, "The Communist Manifesto," last sentence of Part II.
[3] Lewis, "Suffrage Experiences and Observations," PW September 1911; "Women and the Ballot," PW September 1912.
[4] Malkiel wrote a scathing indictment of Socialist practices which she had personally witnessed during a speaking tour in Tennessee and Arkansas; her first-hand account appeared in The New York Call, August 21, 199, as reported in Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans, 246-247. For Lewis's motion, see Miller, Race, Ethnicity and Gender, 7.
[5] Kiichi Kaneko in passing criticized SP nativists in "Here and Now," SW November 1907. JCK, in "Notes on the Congress," PW June 1910, hit discussion of immigration restriction as "wasting valuable time in methods that never will pay." In "Random Shots," PW May 1911, she opposed exclusion of Asians on the same reasons the IWW opposed exclusion. First, the United States was not the workers' country because it did not belong to them; second, American workers inevitably faced Japanese competition because capitalists would build or relocate factories in Japan if Japanese workers were barred from the United States.
[6] Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Laod: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York, 1999); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1988); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985). The Afro-American Socialist movement of the years 1917-1928 was an almost exclusively masculine affair.
[7] For these concepts, see the discussions in the chapters on Max Eastman, the IWW, and Emma Goldman. Quataert has more information on pp. 123-4 and in her notes for these pages.
[8] Ruth Cowan Schwartz, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, (New York, Basic Books, 1983); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream Berkeley, UC Press, 1985.
[9] Sally Miller, Race, Ethnicity, 97-118. "Women in the Party Bureaucracy: Subservient Functionaries" was reprinted from Miller's earlier book, Flawed Liberation: Socialism and Feminism (1981). TM, "Where Do We Stand on the Woman Question?", ISR, August 1909, 159-162. Mary White Ovington, a Socialist who had helped found the NAACP, complained of male indifference and ignorance in an article in The New Review for March, 1914. "Socialism and the Feminist Movement" answered the same, tired male objections that The Socialist Woman had been refuting for seven years; some of those hackneyed old arguments had recently appeared in The New Review itself.
[10] jck, "A Party-Owned Press: Being the Story of This Journal and Why it is not Party-Owned, CN July 1914.
[11] Buhle, 156.
[12] JCK, "Why the Movement Has a Woman's Paper," PW July 1011; "Report of General Correspondent," PW June-July 1913; "Socialist Party Organization Department," PW June-July 1913; JCK, "In This Our World," PW June-July 1913.
[13] "From Factory to Buyer," PW September 1911. The very month after the inauguration of the "Woman in the Home" department, however, this column vehemently denounced traditional women who worked themselves to death at their old-fashioned chores and nevertheless complained about women who rejected such a drudge life. This was hardly of comfort to the "woman in the home."
[14] "Report of General Correspondent," PW June-July 1913; Buhle, p. 155; Nelson, "The Peculiar Attitude of the American Woman Toward Socialism," PW August 1911; "Solidarity Among Women as Shown by the Garment Strike in Chicago," PW August 1911.
[15] JCK, "In This Our World," CN March 1914; Buhle, 288-313.
[16] JCK, "A Party Owned Press," CN July 1914.
[17] JCK, "Woman's Day," PW March 1912; JCK, "A Party-Owned Press," CN July 1914. A.W. Ricker, the associate editor of The Appeal to Reason, referring to women's issues, claimed that "The Appeal to Reason has not the time or the space to give to this side of the Socialist movement. It fights the sterner and stormier side of the battle." Ricker, "The Thing for You to Do," PW February 1911. PW noted the move of The National Socialist to Girard in June 1913.
[18] JCK, "A Party-Owned Press," CN July 1914. We lack Branstetter's side of this conflict.
[19] "Would be Great Mistake," Eugene Debs, The American Socialist, July 24, 1915; "Constitutional Changes," Allan Baker, The American Socialist, July 10, 1915; "That Woman Question," S. Parks, The American Socialist, July 24, 1915.
[20] Letter from Emma Denney, The American Socialist, July 3, 1915, title and beginning not in my copy.
[21] "Work for Women," Janet Korngold, The American Socialist, July 10, 1915; "Woman's Work in the Socialist Party," Mrs. De Roy Welsh, The American Socialist, October 23, 1915.
[22] "Abolishing the Woman's Committee," Florence Wattles, The American Socialist, June 19, 1915.
[23] "Activity of Women," Rosa Anderson, The American Socialist, May 1, 1915.
[24] "Activity of Women," Rosa Anderson, The American Socialist, May 1, 1915.
[25] "The Woman's National Committee," Freda Hogan, The American Socialist, July 10, 1915.
[26] "The Woman's National Committee," Freda Hogan, The American Socialist, July 10, 1915.
[27] "Serious or Funny," Mary Axtell, The American Socialist, March 27, 1915.
[28] "Serious or Funny," Mary Axtell, The American Socialist, March 27, 1915.
[29] "Woman's Work," Agnes Downing, The American Socialist, June 12, 1915.
[30] "More Serious Than Funny," Theresa Malkiel, The American Socialist, April 24, 1915; "Propaganda Among Women," Theresa Malkiel, The American Socialist, June 5, 1915.
[31] "Anent the Woman's Committee," Conger-Kaneko, The American Socialist, May 8, 1915.
[32] "Abolishing the Women's Department," Conger-Kaneko, The American Socialist, July 10, 1915.
[33] "Would Be Great Mistake," Eugene Debs, The American Socialist July 24, 1915; "Women and Their Fight for The Franchise," Debs, The American Socialist, July 24 1915. Debs's first contribution to this issue, his letter in support of the WNC, was placed relatively inconspicuously on the letters page; his article supporting suffrage was a major article on page one.
[34] "Women in the Party," Sophia Salkover, The American Socialist, September 11, 1915.
[35] "Holding the Members," F.W. Cotton, The American Socialist, August 14, 1915; "Organize for 1916," I.S. McCrillis, The American Socialist, September 11, 1915; "Is the Best Possible Work Being Done For Socialism," Howard Caldwell, The American Socialist, July 8, 1915; "True Mission of the Socialist Party," E. Francis Atwood, The American Socialist, September 25, 1915.
[36] "What Can We Do?," George Downing, The American Socialist, August 14, 1915. Downing was a member of the California legislature. The quotes in this paragraph were capitalized in Downing's letter.
[37] "Wants to Change Name," Charles Rogers, The American Socialist, October 23, 1915.
[38] "That Woman Question," S. Parks, The American Socialist, July 24, 1915.
[39] JCK, "A Party-Owned Press," CN July 1914.