While the Men Played Revolution

Altman, Jake

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-17176-6_7

Jake Altman²

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Abstract

Building on the previous chapter, this chapter examines how socialist women understand their own lives and their work in relation to their male comrades. The chapter focuses on the life and experiences of Elizabeth “Zilla” Hawes and the conflicts that developed around gender in the Socialist Party and at Highlander Folk School.

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Notes

1.
“Inheritance Opponent Given Test,” Los Angeles Times, 25 May 1931, 7.
2.
Mary Loretta Sullivan, Employment Conditions in Department Stores in 1932–1933: A Study in Selected Cities of Five States (Washington, DC: U.S. Women’s Bureau, 1936), 19.
3.
“Inheritance Opponent Given Test,” 7.
4.
Zilla Hawes to Myles Horton, 20 November 1932, Box 15, Folder 30, HREC; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2011), 71.
5.
The social and cultural meaning of gender was central to this debate within the Socialist Party. Both sides deployed gendered representations to make their arguments. For context, see Alice Kessler-Harris on the sexual division of labor and female domesticity in the 1930s, “Gender Ideology in Historical Reconstruction: A Case Study from the 1930s,” Gender & History 1, no. 1 (1989), 34–35.
6.
The Decline of American Socialism, 62; Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 250–251.
7.
There is a dispute about whether or not Victorian conceptions of the family were “essentially […] middle class.” Mishler, Raising Reds, 19.
8.
Gertrude Weil Klein, “A Woman’s Point of View: The Girls Are Stickling Nobly,” The New Leader, 21 January 1933, 5.
9.
Ibid.
10.
Gertrude Weil Klein, “A Woman’s Point of View: The Girls Are Stickling Nobly,” 5; Gertrude Weil Klein, “A Woman’s Point of View,” The New Leader, 28 January 1933, 6.
11.
Klein, “A Woman’s Point of View: The Girls Are Stickling Nobly,” 5.
12.
Gretchen J. Garrison, “Help Wanted—Female,” Eighteenth National Convention of the Socialist Party of America, May 1934, Box 3, PECSP, 14.
13.
Gertrude Weil Klein, “It’s the Women Who Build While the Men Squabble,” The New Leader, 16 February 1935, 2. Klein was referring to the factional struggles that severely curtailed the party’s effectiveness and contributed to the beginning of its effective decline in 1936. Warren, An Alternative Vision, 10–15. For a longer exegesis on the fall of the Socialist Party, see Johnpoll, Pacifist’s Progress, 135–177.
14.
Klein, “It’s the Women Who Build While the Men Squabble,” 2.
15.
Ibid.
16.
Women, of course, participated in factionalism, too. A number of prominent socialist women signed the Revolutionary Policy Committee’s April 1934 “Appeal to the Membership of the Socialist Party,” including Zilla Hawes. They were, however, a small minority of the signers.
17.
Gretchen J. Garrison, “Help Wanted—Female,” Eighteenth National Convention of the Socialist Party of America, May 1934, Box 3, PECSP, 14.
18.
Gertrude Weil Klein, “Girls Battle Starvation in Elizabeth Shirt Strike,” The New Leader, 27 May 1933, 4; Nancy F. Cott, “Putting Women on the Record: Mary Ritter Beard’s Accomplishment,” in A Woman Making History: Marry Ritter Beard Through Her Letters, ed. Nancy F. Cott (Yale University Press, 1991), 31–32. Beard’s argument in On Understanding Women fit with the socialist women’s ideas about their constitutive role in the movement.
19.
Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 32.
20.
Gertrude Weil Klein, “Socialist Women Abroad Can Hail Achievements,” The New Leader, 21 July 1934, 8. Klein, eventually elected to the New York City Council for the American Labor Party, was one of a large number of impressive Socialist women whose stories remain largely untold. Klein has recently received some notable coverage in the venerable old social-democratic paper The Jewish Daily Forward. See Chana Pollack’s, “Gertrude Weil Klein’s Socialist Yikhes,” The Sisterhood (blog), The Jewish Daily Forward, 11 December 2014, http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/210761/gertrude-weil-klein-s-socialist-yikhes/.
21.
Gertrude Weil Klein, “It’s the Women Who Build While the Men Squabble,” The New Leader, 16 February 1935, 2; Gertrude Weil Klein, “An Ex-Governor Wraps Himself in the Red Flag,” The New Leader, 29 December 1934, 2; Gertrude Weil Klein, “And What Do You Think?” The New Leader, 22 September 1934, 2; Gertrude Weil Klein, “Women Socialists Everywhere Lead Fight Upon War,” The New Leader, 12 January 1935, 2; Gertrude Weil Klein, “A Grave Digger and a Soldier on the Road,” The New Leader, 8 September 1934, 2; and Gertrude Weil Klein, “Girls Battle Starvation in Elizabeth Shirt Strike,” The New Leader, 27 May 1933, 4.
22.
Gertrude Weil Klein, “A ‘Butterfly on a Wheel’ and a ‘Little Snip’,” The New Leader, 19 January 1935, 2.
23.
The New Leader, Advertisement, Eighteenth National Convention of the Socialist Party of America, May 1934, Box 3, PECSP.
24.
Socialist Party of America, Eighteenth National Convention of the Socialist Party of America, May 1934, Box 3, PECSP.
25.
Pauline M. Newman, “A Meeting of the Faithful Few,” The New Leader, 12 January 1929, 6.
26.
Ibid.
27.
S.A. de Witt, “Song for an Impossible Lady,” The New Leader, 17 March 1928, 8.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Anthony and Debs are quoted in Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 224; de Witt, “Song for an Impossible Lady,” 8.
30.
de Witt, “Song for an Impossible Lady,” 8.
31.
Ibid.
32.
Ibid.
33.
Ibid.
34.
August Claessens, “An Apostrophe to Sexual Freedom: A Discussion of the Future of Modern Marriage,” The New Leader, 8 December 1928, 5.
35.
Ibid.
36.
Pauline M. Newman, “The Woman Socialist,” The New Leader, 12 January 1929, 6; Socialist Party of America, “Necrology,” Eighteenth National Convention of the Socialist Party of America, May 1934, Box 3, PECSP, 14.
37.
August Claessens, The Logic of Socialism (New York: The Leonard Press, 1921), 3.
38.
Claessens, “An Apostrophe to Sexual Freedom: A Discussion of the Future of Modern Marriage,” 5.
39.
Ibid.
40.
August Claessens, “Equality of the Sexes,” The New Leader, 23 May 1925, 9.
41.
August Claessens, “A Debate on Feminism,” The New Leader, 13 February 1926, 4.
42.
Ibid.
43.
Paul C. Mishler, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 18–19.
44.
Gertrude Weil Klein, “The Poor Little Rich Girl; And Her Poor Little Sister,” The New Leader, 27 July 1935, 3; “Crime,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, 29 December 1935, 8.
45.
Weil Klein, “The Poor Little Rich Girl; And Her Poor Little Sister,” 3.
46.
Ibid.
47.
Claessens, “An Apostrophe to Sexual Freedom,” 5.
48.
Ibid. For a discussion of the reluctance of the Old Left to identify with “feminism,” see Weigand, Red Feminism, 7–8.
49.
James Denson Sayers, “Veteran Campaigner Tells How Socialism Can Progress in the South,” The New Leader, 3 December 1932, 8.
50.
Ibid.
51.
Mishler, Raising Reds, 17–18.
52.
Daniel, Looking After, 81.
53.
Ibid.
54.
Ibid.
55.
Some socialists sought to define “free love” as companionate marriage, which captured the idea that people should be free to choose and dissolve marriages and dispelled notions that socialists were engaged in promoting an orgy of sexual excess. Despite the widespread rejection of a more expansive notion of “free love” by socialists, the left would continue to be hounded by critics who claimed that socialists sought to destroy the underpinnings of Christian morality, including monogamous marriage. Socialists, in turn, were keen to point out that bourgeois marriage was a ridiculous ideal and not monogamous. Socialists, turning the tables of the moralists, portrayed capitalists, gendered as male, as sexually deviant hypocrites.
56.
Daniel, Looking After, 81. For a cursory introduction to the relationship between socialists and free love see the following works. Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question 1884–1911 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 114–116; Mishler, Raising Reds, 16–20; and Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 260–262.
57.
Gertrude Weil Klein, “The Women of Austria Who Died Beside Their Men,” The New Leader, 31 March 1934, 6.
58.
Weigand, Red Feminism, 97–98.
59.
Pauline Newman, “Our Position Justified,” The New Leader, 29 December 1928; Weigand, Red Feminism, 31.
60.
Gertrude Weil Klein, “A Woman’s Point of View: The Girls Are Stickling Nobly,” The New Leader, 21 January 1933, 5.
61.
Ibid.
62.
Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 4, 8, 11.
63.
August Claessens, “An Apostrophe to Sexual Freedom,” 5. For a discussion of the reluctance of the Old Left to identify with “feminism,” see Weigand, Red Feminism, 7–8.
64.
Klein, “It’s the Women Who Build While the Men Squabble,” 2.
65.
Ibid.
66.
Garrison, “Help Wanted—Female,” 14.
67.
Ibid.
68.
Gertrude Weil Klein, “Women Socialists Everywhere Lead Fight Upon War,” The New Leader, 12 January 1935, 2.
69.
Ibid.
70.
For a discussion of how this idea might be placed in the context of socialist theory, see Buhle, Woman and American Socialism, 27–29. In particular, see Buhle’s discussion of August Bebels’s idea of “a prehistorical ‘Golden Age’ of primitive communism wherein humanity had known peace and harmony under a matriarchal social system.” The idea that women were particularly suited to advance social causes and the construction of these causes around “public motherhood” were central to the Progressive movement and potentially informed the ways in which socialist women thought about their capabilities, though each movement was distinctive. See Stromquist, Re-inventing “the People”, 107–108, 119.
71.
Harvard College Class of 1893: Fifth Report (Cambridge: Crimson Printing Company, 1913), 85.
72.
Harvard College Class of 1893: Third Report (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill Press, 1903), 223.
73.
Harvard College Class of 1893: Fifth Report, 85.
74.
1880 United States Federal Census Year: 1880; Census Place: Dresden, Washington, New York; Roll: 942; Family History Film: 1254942; Page: 66C; Enumeration District: 131; Image: 0134; Catalogue of the Alpha Delta Phi (New York: Executive Council of the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity, 1899), 489.
75.
“Harvard Scratch Races,” Boston Post, 1 May 1891, 3.
76.
Harvard College Class of 1893: Fifth Report (Cambridge: Crimson Printing Company, 1913), 85.
77.
Daniel, Looking After, 13.
78.
“Religious Intelligence,” The Christian Register, 13 March 1913, 263.
79.
Ibid.
80.
Harvard College Class of 1893: Fifth Report (Cambridge: Crimson Printing Company, 1913), 85; Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 11–12.
81.
Robert M. Zecker, “‘Not Communists Exactly, but Sort of Like Non-believers’: The Hidden Radical Transcript of Slovak Immigrants in Philadelphia, 1890–1954,” The Oral History Review 29, no. 1 (2002), 11, 16. Zecker’s informants vividly remembered life in the “not-so-nice Nicetown,” which they and Zecker then contextualize in “severity of industrial capitalism” of the Progressive Era.
82.
Oscar B. Hawes, “Need of Unity in Religion,” The Ocala Evening Star, 30 April 1909, 4.
83.
See list of members in the front matter of the Birth Control Review, no. 10 (October 1927).
84.
Harvard College Class of 1893: Fifth Report (Cambridge: Crimson Printing Company, 1913), 85.
85.
Keene, City Directory, 1928, 142. (New Haven: Price and Lee Company, 1928); 1920 U.S. census, Newton Ward 6, Middlesex, MA. Dwelling 242. Family 257.
86.
Dora Cooke (ed.), Vassarion (Vassar’s Yearbook) (Rochester, NY: The Du Bois Press, 1929), 201.
87.
1920 U.S. census, Newton Ward 6, Middlesex, MA. Dwelling 242. Family 257.
88.
Storrs, The Second Red Scare, 30–32.
89.
Vassarion (Vassar’s Yearbook), 1929, 122; On Candida, see Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century (Cornell University Press, 1989), 201–202.
90.
Vassarion (Vassar’s Yearbook), 1926, 160.
91.
Vassarion, 1929, 141. There is no mention of a socialist organization in the yearbook.
92.
“A Strenuous Minister,” The Scranton Republican, 6 February 1905, 1.
93.
“Rev. Billy Sunday and a Square Deal,” The Labor Journal, 29 December 1916, 4.
94.
Elizabeth D. Hawes, “Questionnaire for Prospective Brookwood Students,” 27 August 1932, Box 67, Folder 28, Brookwood Labor College Collection, Walter Reuther Library and Archives; “Olive Dame Campbell,” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 7 (1955), 54–55. Evidence suggests that there was an emphasis on domesticity for women at the John Campbell Folk School, though Olive Campbell did claim in one of the school’s bulletins, “Days were full of [a] variety [of work] for us all.” Olive D. Campbell, “John Campbell Folk School Bulletin,” May 1933, Folder 216, The John C. Campbell and Olive D. Campbell Papers [ODC], The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina; Olive D. Campbell, “John Campbell Folk School Bulletin,” May 1929, Folder 216, ODC.
95.
Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche Engelhardt, The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature (Ohio University Press, 2003), 22.
96.
Zilla Hawes Daniel, “The Plant, a little Café, and Lots of Coffee,” in Refuse to Stand Silently By, ed. Eliot Wigginton (Doubleday, 1991), 92.
97.
[Olive D. Campbell], Untitled statement of purpose, [1930s], Folder 216, ODC.
98.
Mary Breckinridge, “Midwifery in the Kentucky Mountains: An Investigation by Mary Breckinridge,” 1923, Folder 161, OCD. See Jack Temple Kirby’s “Women, Wedlock, Hearth, Health, and Death,” in Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 for a discussion of Breckinridge’s work. Melanie Beals Goan identifies Olive Campbell as one of Breckinridge’s important predecessors in her biography, Mary Breckinridge: The Frontier Nursing Service & Rural Health in Appalachia.
99.
Invitation to the sale of handicrafts from Mrs. Albert C. Koch, 8 December 1942, Folder 216, ODC.
100.
List of Patronesses, [1940s], Folder 216, ODC; Revised list of Patronesses, [1940s], Folder 216, ODC.
101.
Invitation to Tea and Motion Pictures from Mrs. Alva Morrison, November 1938, Folder 216, ODC; Invitation to the sale of handicrafts from Mrs. Avery Coonley, 14 April [1942], Folder 216, ODC; Invitation from Mrs. J. Richmond Pitman, 12–13 November [1942], Folder 216, ODC; Invitation to the sale of handicrafts from Mrs. Edward Ballantine, 26 November [1942s], Folder 216, ODC.
102.
Speech by Olive D. Campbell to Southern Mountain Workers Conference, 9 April 1924, Folder 153, ODC.
103.
Ibid.
104.
Elizabeth Hawes to A.J. Muste, 12 September 1932, Box 67, Folder 28, BLCC. “List of Students, 1932–1933,” Box 95, Folder 19, BLCC.
105.
Elizabeth D. Hawes to A.J. Muste, 13 August 1932, Box 67, Folder 28, BLCC; Daniel, Rogue River Journal, 28.
106.
Roy Reuther, “What Is the Materialistic Interpretation of History,” Box 1, Folder 32, Roy Reuther Collection [RRC], Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI.
107.
Zilla Hawes to Myles Horton, 20 November 1932, Box 15, Folder 30, HREC; Zilla Hawes to Myles Horton and James Dombrowski, June [1934], Box 15, Folder 31, HREC.
108.
Zilla Hawes to Myles Horton, [1932], Box 15, Folder 30, HREC.
109.
Zilla Hawes, “Recommendations,” September 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, HREC.
110.
Ibid.
111.
Ibid.
112.
Ibid.
113.
Ibid.
114.
Zilla Hawes to Horton, Dombrowski and HFS, 4 June 1934, Box 15, Folder 31, HREC.
115.
Ibid.
116.
[Zilla Hawes to Dorothy Thompson], [24 January 1934], Box 15, Folder 31, HREC.
117.
Zilla Hawes to Horton, Dombrowski and HFS, 4 June 1934, Box 15, Folder 31, HREC.
118.
Ibid.
119.
Myles Horton, “Myles Horton’s Criticism,” September 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, HREC.
120.
“Staff Meeting,” 19 July 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, HREC; [Zilla Hawes to Dorothy Thompson?], [24 January 1934], Box 15, Folder 31, HREC.
121.
“Work Schedule,” [January–February 1934], Box 2, Folder 4, HREC.
122.
“The Daily Reminder,” 8 August 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, HREC.
123.
“The Daily Record,” 10 August 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, HREC.
124.
Ibid.
125.
“Work Schedule,” 31 July 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, HREC.
126.
“The Daily Reminder,” 8 August 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, HREC.
127.
“Work Schedule,” 31 July 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, HREC.
128.
“Staff Meeting,” 8 August 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, HREC.
129.
“The Daily Record,” 9 September 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, HREC.
130.
“The Daily Reminder,” 8 August 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, HREC.
131.
Jim Dombrowski to Rubert Hampton, 3 February 1934, Box 15, Folder 31, HREC.
132.
Ibid.
133.
This is mentioned, very briefly, in Adams’ James A. Dombrowski: An American Heretic, 1897–1983 and also in Glen’s No Ordinary School, 36. Adams downplays Horton’s absence, which he suggests spanned only a few weeks. I think it will become clear that Horton was “absent” in one form or another for much longer periods.
134.
Zilla Hawes to Myles Horton, [February 1934], Box 15, Folder 31, HREC.
135.
Myles Horton to Zilla Hawes, 1934 Thursday night, Box 15, Folder 31, HREC.
136.
Ibid.
137.
Zilla Hawes to [unknown], 13 February 1934, Box 15, Folder 31, HREC.
138.
Dorothy Thompson to Rupert Hampton, 17 April 1934, Box 15, Folder 31, HREC.
139.
Zilla Hawes to [Dorothy Thompson?], [24 January 1934], Box 15, Folder 31, HREC.
140.
Ibid.
141.
Ibid.

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Altman, J. (2019). While the Men Played Revolution. In: Socialism before Sanders. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17176-6_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17176-6_7
Published: 14 June 2019
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