THE FEMINIST-SOCIALIST PROJECT
During the years 1907-1914, roughly contemporaneous with the Socialist party's imbroglio with the IWW, the SP faced another challenge by an organized group of party members intent on deepening, expanding, and radicalizing the party's critique of American life. In those years, a brilliant group of Socialist women propounded a far-reaching synthesis of socialism and feminism in the pages of The Socialist Woman (later renamed The Progressive Woman)[1] and, despite their protestations of party loyalty and doctrinal orthodoxy, called for a cultural revolution within the Socialist party as well as within mainstream society. Responding to their arguments (and also seeking Party control over a burgeoning movement), the overwhelmingly male Socialist party briefly sustained a Woman's National Committee, charged with recruiting women into the party and with creating a socialist literature which addressed women's specific concerns.[2]
This Socialist women's movement, the debates it generated, and the theories it explored, defy all conventional generalizations about both the conservatism of Progressive Era feminism and the conservative Marxist orthodoxy of the Debsian Socialist movement. The activists grouped around The Socialist Woman (whom I will call "the Socialist women") propounded a feminist socialism and a socialist feminism which analyzed events, as Lida Parce said, "from the standpoint of a class conscious Socialist and a sex conscious woman."[3] Their sophisticated and nuanced philosophy explicitly addressed many of the intractable philosophical dilemmas which still bedevil socialist feminists--social versus biological constructions of gender, difference versus equity feminism, the symbiotic yet contradictory relationships between capitalism and patriarchy, and the difficulties of either allying with men for feminist transformation of society or forging a cross-class (and trans-race) sisterhood of all women. They also confronted many of the practical obstacles that beset later socialist-feminists.[4]
The opposition of male Socialists and the destruction of the Socialist party by ruling-class terrorism and violence soon consigned these pioneering efforts to historical oblivion. Many historians of feminism have ignored this vibrant movement. In the late 1970s, Heidi Hartmann, in a brilliant and widely-discussed essay, compared the marriage of marxism and feminism to "the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism."[5] It was not always so. The writers for The Socialist Woman, in advocating a socialism which incorporated feminism as an equal partner, enlarged and transformed their vision of socialism itself. In those years mainstream suffragists downplayed structural injustices in American society in their single-minded pursuit of the vote; the Socialist party, itself pursuing a narrowly electoral strategy, utilized traditional values and symbols while repudiating revolutionary cultural transformation. The Socialist Woman, on the contrary, propounded a radical critique of American society that linked issues of gender and class, adapted the initial radicalism of early feminism to the realities of modern industrial capitalism, and more fully realized the revolutionary implications of a truly humanistic socialism.
In contrast to both mainstream suffragism and electoral Socialism, the Socialist women vociferously repudiated traditional values, symbols, and ideas. Rather than enlisting feminism and socialism in defense of threatened institutions and ways of life, they explicitly rejected venerable concepts of family, home, marriage, religion, motherhood, work, and patriotism (among others). Socialism, they claimed, should not preserve these institutions in their traditional forms; nor would it automatically transform them, independently of the will of Socialists themselves.
Moreover, although the Socialist women loudly proclaimed their loyalty to their Party and its orthodox Marxist doctrine, they boldly challenged hoary socialist orthodoxies such as exclusive reliance on class and the class struggle, blind faith in an automatic transition to socialism, and the belittling of cultural issues implicit in the base/superstructure dogma. Indeed, Socialist women applied Marxist theories and categories to their own struggle for equality within the Socialist party and within mainstream society, thereby transforming Marxism itself. They rejected all claims that socialism would automatically liberate women or that women could rely on men for their freedom; they posited a "sex struggle" concurrent with and as important as the class struggle. Women, they insisted, must liberate themselves and forge a socialism good for their sex.
The Socialist women also translated Marxist materialism and the its demand for economic freedom into feminist terms by demanding economic equality and independence for women in the family and the workplace as the cornerstone of women's liberation. They solidly confronted the idea and reality of hegemony (while not using its not-yet-coined Gramscian term), recognized patriarchy as a separate system of oppression related to but not reducible to capitalism, and perceived culture as a semi-autonomous reality not subsumed beneath class or economic terms. Rejecting an obsessive and monocausal focus on economic determinism, they posited a pluralistic universe characterized by multiple causes reciprocally interacting upon one another. Finally, the Socialist women, experiencing marginality and male belittlement and resistance within the SP, challenged male supremacy within the Party and within the patriarchal Socialist family itself. They therefore demanded personal changes among male and female Party members and called for a cultural revolution within the Socialist party and within its male and female members.
In a manner customary among radicals, the Socialist women underestimated the obstacles confronting their enterprise. Despite their efforts, they neither converted mainstream feminists to socialism, or socialist men to feminism. Indeed, by the end of 1915 The Socialist Woman and the Woman's National Committee were both defunct, casualties of male indifference and hostility. Many of those who had written for The Socialist Woman and served on the WNC remained members of the Socialist party and continued writing and agitating for both socialism and feminism. But they spoke henceforth as isolated individuals within overwhelmingly male institutions and publications, and increasingly emphasized class over gender. Socialist women now lacked an institution that gave them a distinctive voice, a base from which they could agitate for feminism within and outside of the party. They could no longer formulate distinctively feminist-socialist or socialist-feminist positions, share common experiences, recruit female members, and debate important issues independently of the watchful tutelage of skeptical, uncomprehending, or hostile men.
This loss of an independent base impoverished the left intellectually and organizationally. Many of the trenchant, bitter articles in The Socialist Woman would have seemed far out of order in most radical publications, even in staunchly feminist ones such as The Masses or The Industrial Worker. Kate Richards O'Hare, the most prominent female SP member after the demise of The Progressive Woman, favored class over gender issues despite (or perhaps because of) her acute personal experiences with male chauvinism within the Party. Other prominent women, such as Anita Block, editor of the "Woman's Sphere" page for the Sunday magazine section of the New York Call, wrote women's columns for important Socialist publications which likewise downplayed distinctively women's grievances against the Party and its men, instead stressing gender and class oppressions within capitalist society. Crystal Eastman fought for her version of a radical socialist feminism without an institutional female base within the SP itself.[6]
Like the IWW in its concurrent dispute with the SP, the Socialist women won the philosophical argument, but lost the power struggle within the SP. They were defeated by factionalism and intrigue. They could not create a feminist space within patriarchal society, even within a Socialist party formally committed to women's equality. They achieved equally scant success within the mainstream feminist movement. For fifty years, women combining the insights of Marxism and feminism lacked an independent voice within a major social movement, a voice dedicated to transforming both the radical movement itself and, through it, mainstream society. The achievements and failure of the Socialist women eerily adumbrate those of their successors later in the century, and offer insight into the configurations of gender and class that have persisted in twentieth century American society.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] Conger-Kaneko changed the name, starting in March 1909, to win wider circulation. Her editorial policy remained unchanged; The Progressive Woman remained staunchly Socialist and commented extensively on SP affairs. Conger-Kaneko changed the name a final time, to The Coming Nation, in November 1913, in a futile effort to save the magazine by giving it a more general appeal. When speaking in general terms I will refer to the magazine by its original title, The Socialist Woman; when citing a particular issue, I will use the name in use at the time.
[2] The best account of the Socialist women's movement in the United State is Mari Jo Buhle's Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, 1983).
[3] Parce referred to her own column, but the phrase is appropriate for The Socialist Woman as a whole. Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," SW, November 1908.
[4] Some excellent basic books on left feminisms within the United States include Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989); Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism (Frederick Ungar, New York, 1985); and Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1979).
[5] Heidi Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union." This essay is reprinted, along with numerous commentaries and a response by Hartmann, in Lydia Sargent, Women and Revolution (South End Press, Boston, 1981).
[6] For Kate Richards O'Hare see Sally M. Miller, From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Activist Kate Richards O'Hare (University of Missouri Press, Columbia, MO, 1993) and Philip S. Foner and Sally Miller, editors, Kate Richards O'Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rogue, 1982). For Crystal Eastman see Blanche Wiesen Cook, Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution (Oxford, New York, 1978) and Blanche Wiesen Cook, Toward the Great Change: Crystal and Max Eastman on Feminism, Antimilitarism, and Revolution (Garland, New York, 1976). See also Cook, "Female Support Networks and Political Activism," in Linda Kerber and Jane DeHart, editors, Women's America: Refocusing the Past (Oxford: New York, 1986).
This Socialist women's movement, the debates it generated, and the theories it explored, defy all conventional generalizations about both the conservatism of Progressive Era feminism and the conservative Marxist orthodoxy of the Debsian Socialist movement. The activists grouped around The Socialist Woman (whom I will call "the Socialist women") propounded a feminist socialism and a socialist feminism which analyzed events, as Lida Parce said, "from the standpoint of a class conscious Socialist and a sex conscious woman."[3] Their sophisticated and nuanced philosophy explicitly addressed many of the intractable philosophical dilemmas which still bedevil socialist feminists--social versus biological constructions of gender, difference versus equity feminism, the symbiotic yet contradictory relationships between capitalism and patriarchy, and the difficulties of either allying with men for feminist transformation of society or forging a cross-class (and trans-race) sisterhood of all women. They also confronted many of the practical obstacles that beset later socialist-feminists.[4]
The opposition of male Socialists and the destruction of the Socialist party by ruling-class terrorism and violence soon consigned these pioneering efforts to historical oblivion. Many historians of feminism have ignored this vibrant movement. In the late 1970s, Heidi Hartmann, in a brilliant and widely-discussed essay, compared the marriage of marxism and feminism to "the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism."[5] It was not always so. The writers for The Socialist Woman, in advocating a socialism which incorporated feminism as an equal partner, enlarged and transformed their vision of socialism itself. In those years mainstream suffragists downplayed structural injustices in American society in their single-minded pursuit of the vote; the Socialist party, itself pursuing a narrowly electoral strategy, utilized traditional values and symbols while repudiating revolutionary cultural transformation. The Socialist Woman, on the contrary, propounded a radical critique of American society that linked issues of gender and class, adapted the initial radicalism of early feminism to the realities of modern industrial capitalism, and more fully realized the revolutionary implications of a truly humanistic socialism.
In contrast to both mainstream suffragism and electoral Socialism, the Socialist women vociferously repudiated traditional values, symbols, and ideas. Rather than enlisting feminism and socialism in defense of threatened institutions and ways of life, they explicitly rejected venerable concepts of family, home, marriage, religion, motherhood, work, and patriotism (among others). Socialism, they claimed, should not preserve these institutions in their traditional forms; nor would it automatically transform them, independently of the will of Socialists themselves.
Moreover, although the Socialist women loudly proclaimed their loyalty to their Party and its orthodox Marxist doctrine, they boldly challenged hoary socialist orthodoxies such as exclusive reliance on class and the class struggle, blind faith in an automatic transition to socialism, and the belittling of cultural issues implicit in the base/superstructure dogma. Indeed, Socialist women applied Marxist theories and categories to their own struggle for equality within the Socialist party and within mainstream society, thereby transforming Marxism itself. They rejected all claims that socialism would automatically liberate women or that women could rely on men for their freedom; they posited a "sex struggle" concurrent with and as important as the class struggle. Women, they insisted, must liberate themselves and forge a socialism good for their sex.
The Socialist women also translated Marxist materialism and the its demand for economic freedom into feminist terms by demanding economic equality and independence for women in the family and the workplace as the cornerstone of women's liberation. They solidly confronted the idea and reality of hegemony (while not using its not-yet-coined Gramscian term), recognized patriarchy as a separate system of oppression related to but not reducible to capitalism, and perceived culture as a semi-autonomous reality not subsumed beneath class or economic terms. Rejecting an obsessive and monocausal focus on economic determinism, they posited a pluralistic universe characterized by multiple causes reciprocally interacting upon one another. Finally, the Socialist women, experiencing marginality and male belittlement and resistance within the SP, challenged male supremacy within the Party and within the patriarchal Socialist family itself. They therefore demanded personal changes among male and female Party members and called for a cultural revolution within the Socialist party and within its male and female members.
In a manner customary among radicals, the Socialist women underestimated the obstacles confronting their enterprise. Despite their efforts, they neither converted mainstream feminists to socialism, or socialist men to feminism. Indeed, by the end of 1915 The Socialist Woman and the Woman's National Committee were both defunct, casualties of male indifference and hostility. Many of those who had written for The Socialist Woman and served on the WNC remained members of the Socialist party and continued writing and agitating for both socialism and feminism. But they spoke henceforth as isolated individuals within overwhelmingly male institutions and publications, and increasingly emphasized class over gender. Socialist women now lacked an institution that gave them a distinctive voice, a base from which they could agitate for feminism within and outside of the party. They could no longer formulate distinctively feminist-socialist or socialist-feminist positions, share common experiences, recruit female members, and debate important issues independently of the watchful tutelage of skeptical, uncomprehending, or hostile men.
This loss of an independent base impoverished the left intellectually and organizationally. Many of the trenchant, bitter articles in The Socialist Woman would have seemed far out of order in most radical publications, even in staunchly feminist ones such as The Masses or The Industrial Worker. Kate Richards O'Hare, the most prominent female SP member after the demise of The Progressive Woman, favored class over gender issues despite (or perhaps because of) her acute personal experiences with male chauvinism within the Party. Other prominent women, such as Anita Block, editor of the "Woman's Sphere" page for the Sunday magazine section of the New York Call, wrote women's columns for important Socialist publications which likewise downplayed distinctively women's grievances against the Party and its men, instead stressing gender and class oppressions within capitalist society. Crystal Eastman fought for her version of a radical socialist feminism without an institutional female base within the SP itself.[6]
Like the IWW in its concurrent dispute with the SP, the Socialist women won the philosophical argument, but lost the power struggle within the SP. They were defeated by factionalism and intrigue. They could not create a feminist space within patriarchal society, even within a Socialist party formally committed to women's equality. They achieved equally scant success within the mainstream feminist movement. For fifty years, women combining the insights of Marxism and feminism lacked an independent voice within a major social movement, a voice dedicated to transforming both the radical movement itself and, through it, mainstream society. The achievements and failure of the Socialist women eerily adumbrate those of their successors later in the century, and offer insight into the configurations of gender and class that have persisted in twentieth century American society.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] Conger-Kaneko changed the name, starting in March 1909, to win wider circulation. Her editorial policy remained unchanged; The Progressive Woman remained staunchly Socialist and commented extensively on SP affairs. Conger-Kaneko changed the name a final time, to The Coming Nation, in November 1913, in a futile effort to save the magazine by giving it a more general appeal. When speaking in general terms I will refer to the magazine by its original title, The Socialist Woman; when citing a particular issue, I will use the name in use at the time.
[2] The best account of the Socialist women's movement in the United State is Mari Jo Buhle's Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, 1983).
[3] Parce referred to her own column, but the phrase is appropriate for The Socialist Woman as a whole. Parce, "The Examiner's Glass," SW, November 1908.
[4] Some excellent basic books on left feminisms within the United States include Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989); Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism (Frederick Ungar, New York, 1985); and Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1979).
[5] Heidi Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union." This essay is reprinted, along with numerous commentaries and a response by Hartmann, in Lydia Sargent, Women and Revolution (South End Press, Boston, 1981).
[6] For Kate Richards O'Hare see Sally M. Miller, From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Activist Kate Richards O'Hare (University of Missouri Press, Columbia, MO, 1993) and Philip S. Foner and Sally Miller, editors, Kate Richards O'Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rogue, 1982). For Crystal Eastman see Blanche Wiesen Cook, Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution (Oxford, New York, 1978) and Blanche Wiesen Cook, Toward the Great Change: Crystal and Max Eastman on Feminism, Antimilitarism, and Revolution (Garland, New York, 1976). See also Cook, "Female Support Networks and Political Activism," in Linda Kerber and Jane DeHart, editors, Women's America: Refocusing the Past (Oxford: New York, 1986).