M6D1: Suffragettes and Kitchen Soldiers: Women at Home This discussion addresses the following outcomes: · Discuss the ethics surrounding wartime activism and women’s fight for political equal

1021

On June 20, 1917, two months after the United States entered World War I, Lucy Burns

and Dora Lewis of the militant suffrage organization, the National Woman’s party

(nwp ), stood in front of the White House holding a banner welcoming representatives of

Russia’s new, provisional government to the United States. (See figure 1.) It read:

To the Envoys of Russia: President Wilson and Envoy Root are deceiving Russia.

They say “We are a democracy. Help us win a world war, so that democracies may

s u r v i v e .”

We, the women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty mil

lion American Women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief

opponent of their national enfranchisement.

Help us make this nation really free. Tell our government it must liberate its people

before it can claim free Russia as an ally.

Members of the nwp had been peacefully picketing the White House for months,

with Wilson and others treating them as little more than an annoyance. But the “Rus-

sian banner” drew an angry crowd. Two men ripped the banner down while Burns and

Lewis stood “like martyrs,” gripping its supports. Burns returned the following day with

another nwp member, Katharine Morey, and an identical banner. This too was destroyed,

as onlookers called the picketers “traitors” and “a disgrace to womanhood.” In the days

that followed, several nwp picketers were arrested, tried, and imprisoned in the Occoquan

Workhouse in Virginia—choosing imprisonment over paying a $25 fine—becoming the

first Americans “to be incarcerated for advocating women’s rights.”

Julia L. Mickenberg is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The author

wishes to thank Alyse Camus, Christina Hood, and Lindsay Schell for research assistance; Leslie DeBauche, Andrea

Friedman, Susan Friedman, Pernille Ipsen, Katie Feo Kelly, Lisa Kirschenbaum, Randy Lewis, Edward Linenthal,

and the Journal of American History’s anonymous readers for feedback and encouragement at key moments in the

writing of this article; and Kevin Marsh for copyediting assistance. Thanks also to Jennifer Krafchik, Elspeth Kursh,

William Gillis, and Paula Tarankow for help in locating and reproducing images, and for production assistance. The

author also gratefully acknowledges grant and fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Humani-

ties, the Jay C. and Ruth Hall Visiting Scholars fund from the University of Wisconsin, the Radcliffe Institute for

Advanced Study, the Sophia Smith Library, and the University of Texas College of Liberal Arts, all of which made

researching and writing this article possible. Readers may contact Mickenberg at [email protected].

1 Lucy Burns and Dora Lewis holding “Russian Banner,” June 20, 1917, photograph, SB001474 (Sewall-

Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C.).

2 On the National Woman’s party (nwp) picketing of the White House, see Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chap-

man Catt: A Public Life (New York, 1987), 145. On the violence at the nwp demonstration, see “Crowd Destroys

ffe Journal of American History

March 2014

doi: 10.1093/jahist/jau004

ffe Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.

SuThragettes and Soviets: American

Feminists and the Specter of

Revolutionary Russia

Julia L. Mickenberg 1022

The Russian banner marked a turning point for the woman suffrage battle in the Unit-

ed States. It galvanized the radical wing of the movement as never before, creating what

the suffragist Marie Howe described as an “unquenchable” “new spirit.” It marked a move

by the nwp toward civil disobedience on the model of the militant British “suffragettes”

and a move by the Wilson administration toward violent suppression of the picketers. Fi-

nally, it marked Wilson’s recognition that he needed to take militant suffragists’ demands

seriously. By publicly embarrassing the United States in front of a crucial war ally, the

militants became truly menacing, not just in the eyes of the president but also from the

perspective of liberal suffragists, who feared radical tactics would hurt the cause.

Carrie Chapman Catt, the head of the more accommodationist National American

Woman Suffrage Association (nawsa), had been criticizing nwp picketers’ confrontation-

al tactics for months, but after the Russian banner incident (which delayed a House vote

on forming a woman suffrage committee), nawsa leaders took steps not only to distance

themselves from the nwp but also, as we shall see, to silence the group. Even so, Catt

agreed with the banner’s basic message. In the week following the incident, she reminded

readers of the Woman Citizen (an organ of the nawsa) that when visiting Russia, Elihu

Suffrage Banner at White House,” New York Times, June 21, 1917, pp. 1–2. “Crowds Again Rend Suffrage Banners,”

ibid., June 22, 1917, p. 5. On the arrests, trials, and imprisonment of the picketers, see Linda Ford, Iron-Jawed An-

gels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party, 1912–1920 (Lanham, 1991), 151.

3 Ford, Iron-Jawed Angels, 157, 45–47.

Figure 1. Lucy Burns and Dora Lewis display the National Woman’s party’s “Russian banner,”

which they held at the White House gates on June 20, 1917, greeting visiting delegates from Rus -

sia’s Provisional Government (an ally in the war the United States had just entered) and reminding

onlookers of President Woodrow Wilson’s failure to grant women suffrage in the United States.

Courtesy Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, home of the historic National Woman’s Party, Wash -

ington, D.C.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1023

Root had boasted that in the last U.S. presidential election, “‘more than 18,000,000 votes

were freely cast and fairly counted by universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage,’” four

adjectives that “have been the slogans of the constitutional Russian revolutionists.” Catt

argued that, in reality, “in more than half our country suffrage is neither universal nor

equal, and for a generation Mr. Root has exerted his tremendous political influence to

continue the discrimination against millions of qualified citizens.” In April 1917 Wilson

chose Root, the former secretary of war under President William McKinley and secretary

of state under President Theodore Roosevelt, to head a mission to investigate the situa-

tion in Russia following the revolution. Wilson’s choice of Root was unpopular with radi-

cals and Jews because of his lack of sympathy for the Russian Revolution (which, in fact,

contributed to his failure to forge amenable relations with the new regime). Root was also

unpopular with suffragists for having argued that women’s natural qualities made them

unsuitable for “the arena of conflict” that was the public sphere. As he stated in 1916,

“Women in strife become hard, harsh, unlovable, repulsive; as far removed from that

gentle creature to whom we all owe allegiance and to whom we confess submission, as the

heaven is removed from earth.”

Russia became a crucial foil in the battle over woman suffrage. As a product of the first

revolution inspired by socialism, “new Russia” came to represent the very notion of in-

ternationalism. Thus it loomed large for many progressives, including feminists, whose

struggle was “decidedly internationalist” in orientation—and closely associated with so-

cialist agitation—beginning around 1890. Russia served as a powerful framing device for

considering the nature of women’s citizenship in the United States, for reasons specific

to Russia’s gender politics and its place in the U.S. imaginary. For a significant number

of American women—few of whom could rightfully be called Bolsheviks—the Russian

revolutions in 1917, and the “new Russia” that emerged from them, became touchstones

for a cosmopolitan, social democratic vision of female citizenship in the United States

that encouraged American feminists to set their sights well beyond suffrage. A belief that

Russian revolutionaries were taking practical measures to transform women’s place in so-

ciety opened space for American feminists to conceive a new model of citizenship that

encompassed not simply political rights but also social rights, economic security, and, to

use the philosopher Etienne Balibar’s formulation, a new kind of subjectivity that results

from being citizens rather than subjects.

4 On the National American Woman Suffrage Association (nawsa) and the nwp, see Sara Hunter Graham,

Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, 1996), 106–9. Carrie Chapman Catt, “Mr. Root’s

Idea of a Popular Election,” Woman Citizen, June 23, 1917, p. 64. On Elihu Root, see John Braeman, “Elihu

Root,” American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/articles/06/06-00571

.html?a=1&g=m&n=Elihu%20Root&ia=-at&ib=-bib&d=10&ss=0&q=1; Zosa Szajkowski, “Jews and the Elihu

Root Mission to Russia, 1917,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 37 (1969), 57–116; and

“Hon. Elihu Root on Woman’s Sphere,” Carroll (Iowa) Herald, 9 (Feb. 1916), 5.

5 On the Soviet Union and internationalism, see Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” New Left Re-

view, 14 (March–April 2002), 5–25. On internationalism in the early women’s movement, see Ellen Carol DuBois,

Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York, 1998), 265. On links between feminism, suffrage, and socialism,

see Ellen Carol DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” New Left

Review, 186 (March–April 1991), 20–45; and Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana,

1981). On American feminists and understandings of citizenship after suffrage (with reference to activism in the

Soviet Union), see Wendy Sarvasy, “Beyond the Difference versus Equality Policy Debate: Postsuffrage Feminism,

Citizenship, and the Quest for a Feminist Welfare State,” Signs, 17 (Winter 1992), 332; and J. Stanley Lemons, The

Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana, 1973). On subjectivity and citizenship, see Etienne Balibar,

“Citizen Subject,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New

York, 1991), 33–57.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1024

The dominant narrative of modern feminism’s “grounding” in the 1920s emphasizes

the extent to which the first Red Scare (which began in 1919) contributed to the demise

of radical feminists’ original, far-reaching social agenda. But this narrative tells only part

of the story. For antifeminists (otherwise known as the “antis”), the Russian revolution-

aries’ attention to women’s issues—and suffragists’ attention to the revolutionaries’ pro-

gram—provided fuel for an argument that socialism and woman suffrage (that is, femi-

nism) were closely related, destabilizing, and un-American. Historians have dismissed

attempts by the antis to link Bolshevism and feminism as entirely spurious, without con-

sidering the element of truth in those accusations. The legacy of the Cold War has often

prevented historians from closely examining the widespread interest in Russia among

many progressives, including feminists, whose history has been particularly embattled.

Feminists’ claims that “darkest Russia” was outpacing the United States in democracy

was a critical tool for woman suffrage and directly affected its fate. Passage of the Nine-

teenth Amendment was tied up with the fact that Russian women gained the vote almost

immediately after the February 1917 revolution and then the ostensibly undemocratic

Bolsheviks, when they took power in October, retained this aspect of their predecessors’

program. Although U.S. suffragists turned national attention to Russia for strategic rea-

sons, many were deeply interested in efforts to make women equal players in Soviet soci-

ety, to eliminate the sexual double standard, and to remove barriers to women’s advance-

ment. But by calling attention to revolutionary Russia, suffragists’ aided their opponents’

efforts to tie the entire feminist agenda to subversion, an association that crippled the

feminist program for decades.

New Women for a Free Russia

As Ellen Carol DuBois has argued, the struggle for women’s suffrage was the most visible

manifestation of a more far-reaching and revolutionary feminist agenda that began to

cohere in the 1910s. Borrowing the words of one of feminism’s adherents in those early

days, Nancy Cott notes that “the real goal was a ‘complete social revolution’: freedom

for all forms of women’s active expression, elimination of all structural and psychological

6 On the first Red Scare and feminism, see Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven,

1987); and Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Co-

lumbus, 2001), 380–81. Scholarship on liberal interest in the Soviet Union has tended to neglect women, and the

Soviet Union is de-emphasized in work on the international dimensions of feminism. See David C. Engerman,

Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge,

Mass., 2003); Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (New Brunswick,

1998); David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, 1988); Lewis S. Feuer,

“American Travelers to the Soviet Union, 1917–32: The Formation of a Component of New Deal Ideology,” Ameri-

can Quarterly, 24 (June 1962), 119–49; Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy

and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York, 2011); Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the

Soviet Union: 1920–40; From Red Square to the Left Bank (New York, 2006); and Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women:

The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, 1997). Notable exceptions include Choi Chatter-

jee, “‘Odds and Ends of the Russian Revolution,’ 1917–1920: Gender and American Travel Narratives,” Journal of

Women’s History, 20 (Winter 2008), 10–33; and Shannon Smith, “From Relief to Revolution: American Women

and the Russian-American Relationship, 1890–1917,” Diplomatic History, 19 (Sept. 1995), 601–16.

7 The term darkest Russia may have come from a play of that title first published in 1891 to expose violence

against Russia’s Jews; the term remained in popular usage, becoming, for instance, the name of a novel, a serial pub-

lication, and a 1917 film. Henry Grattan Donnelly, Darkest Russia (New York, 1891). Henry Grattan Donnelly,

Darkest Russia: A Novel; A Story from the Celebrated Play of That Name (New York, 1896). Darkest Russia: A Weekly

Record of the Struggle for Freedom (London, 1890–1913). This periodical was also published as Darkest Russia: A

Journal of Persecution. Darkest Russia, dir. Travers Vale (World Film, 1917).

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1025

handicaps to women’s economic independence, an end to the double standard of sexual

morality, release from constraining sexual stereotypes, and opportunity to shine in every

civic and professional capacity.” The term suffragette, originally used by the British press

to mock the confrontational tactics of suffrage militants associated with the Women’s

Social and Political Union (led by Emmeline Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Christa -

bel Pankhurst), “came to stand around the world for a fundamentally modern and mass

approach to building a woman suffrage movement. The term . . . conjured up radical

challenges to dominant definitions of womanhood,” DuBois notes. The parades, mass

demonstrations, and soap-box speaking adopted by militants signaled a definite move

out of the “women’s sphere” and into the public realm. Thus, if suffragette was used to

diminish or demean suffrage activism, for some women it became a proud badge of their

m i l it a n c y.

The history of woman suffrage has been plagued by assumptions about the movement’s

conservatism: suffrage is seen as a limited demand, and historians point to white suffrag-

ists’ neglect of or deliberate calls for abridging the rights of immigran\ct and African Ameri-

can women as a strategy to make white women’s enfranchisement more attractive. But the

suffrage struggle had radical implications. As DuBois argues, “women’s demands for suf-

frage uniquely threatened to disrupt and reorganize the relations of gender.” Women in-

vested the vote with larger meanings tied up with becoming active participants in a public

sphere and full individuals with agency and autonomy. They imagined significant social

changes that women’s vote might achieve. Moreover, they looked beyond the boundaries

of the United States for models of what full citizenship might mean.

The suffrage campaign forced explicit consideration and renegotiation of women’s citi-

zenship as a category. The political scientist Rogers Smith characterizes citizenship laws

as “among the most fundamental political creations.” Such laws “distribute power, assign

status, and define political purposes. Citizenship laws also literally constitute—they cre-

ate with legal words—a collective civic identity. They claim the existence of a political

‘people’ and designate who those persons are as a people, in ways that often become inte-

gral to individuals’ senses of personal identity as well.” Women’s legal disenfranchisement

at the national level—like that of unnaturalized immigrants, African Americans (who

were prevented from voting in many states), and children—marked their second-class sta-

tus as citizens. To the extent that calls for suffrage stood in for a larger effort to refigure the

terms of women’s citizenship, the rhetoric of Russian revolutionaries suggested a model

that was, for some, almost thrillingly expansive, seeming to affirm the far-reaching goals

articulated by early feminists.

To be sure, it was not only American suffragists who paid attention to events in Rus-

sia. Both Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst traveled to Russia shortly after the revolution

8 On the struggle for woman suffrage as the most visible manifestation of a more far-reaching and revolutionary

feminist agenda, see DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights, 4. Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, 14. On

the term suffragette and on suffrage activism, see DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights, 266.

9 On the radical and far-reaching implications of the suffrage struggle, see DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Wom-

en’s Rights, 4. On the larger meanings of citizenship for women, see Kathleen Canning and Sonya O. Rose, “Gen-

der, Citizenship, and Subjectivity: Some Historical and Theoretical Considerations,” Gender and History, 13 (Nov.

2001), 427–43, esp. 431–32.

10 On the explicit consideration and renegotiation of women’s citizenship as a category, see Cott, Grounding of

Modern Feminism, 15. See also Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of

Citizenship (New York, 1999). On citizenship laws, see Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conficting Visions of Citizen-

ship in U.S. History (New Haven, 1997), 30–31.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1026

and displayed great concern about its outcome. And the Bolshevik feminist Alexandra

Kollontai had an important influence on feminists around the world. But revolution-

ary Russia had a peculiar appeal to U.S. suffragists and also generated par\cticular animus

against them.

Russia had been a special object of American missionary zeal since at least the 1880s,

representing, according to the historian David Foglesong, a skewed mirror image, “dark

double,” or alter ego of the United States. Shared geographical traits (a large “frontier”

region, for example) and historical parallels helped turn Americans’ attention to Russia at

a moment when economic interest in the region bolstered reformers’ calls to bring justice

to the Russian people. Beginning in the mid-1890s, amid recession in the United States,

American manufacturers “began to be keenly interested in selling their sewing-machines,

harvesters, and other products in the huge Russian empire.” Economic interests in the

region created a moral incentive for the United States to demand fair play from an attrac-

tive trading partner. Russia’s serfs were freed at nearly the same historical moment that

Confederate slaves were emancipated (1861 and 1863, respectively). In both instances,

legal “freedom” failed to truly liberate these subjects. Americans, black and white, noted

the parallel situations, even while imagining the United States as more civilized and en-

lightened than “uncivilized, backward, despotic, and Asiatic” Russia.

It is not simply coincidental, then, that the “free Russia” movement in the United

States was launched by former abolitionists and their children, including Henry Black-

well, Lucy Stone (also a prominent women’s rights activist), and their daughter Alice

Stone Blackwell; Julia Ward Howe; Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and William Lloyd

Garrison’s sons Francis Garrison and William Lloyd Garrison Jr. In 1881 the famed abo-

litionist Wendell Phillips declared that “‘dynamite and the dagger’ were justified in a land

where a young Russian girl could be ‘stripped naked and flogged to death in the public

square’ because she whispered ‘her pity for a brother knouted and dragged half dead into

exile for his opinions.’” Building on such sentiment, the Russia expert George Kennan’s

exposés of the Siberian prison system, beginning with a series of articles in 1887, bol-

stered by a speaking tour, and culminating in his Siberia and the Exile System (1891)—

sometimes called the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Russian prisons—inspired the creation of the

Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom (safrf ) in Boston in 1891. Their orga-

nization promised “to aid by ‘all moral and legal means the Russian patriots in their efforts

to obtain for their country Political Freedom and Self-Government.’” Many of those who

11 Emmeline Pankhurst, representing the Women’s Social and Political Union, supported the moderate socialist

leader Alexander Kerensky and the Mensheviks; her daughter, Sylvia Pankhurst, supported the Bolsheviks and even

advised Vladimir Lenin on British affairs. On Emmeline Pankhurst and the Russian Revolution, see June Purvis,

Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London, 2002), 292–99. On Sylvia Pankhurst and Bolshevism, see Mary Davis,

Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics (London, 1999), 71–93. Christine Fauré, “The Utopia of the New Wom-

an in the Work of Alexandra Kollontai and Its Impact on the French Feminist and Communist Press,” in Women in

Culture and Politics: A Century of Change, ed. Judith Friedlander et al. (Bloomington, 2006), 376–89.

12 On Russia as a “dark double” of the United States, see David S. Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil

Empire”: The Crusade for a “Free Russia” since 1881 (New York, 2007), 11. On the shared geographical traits and

historical parallels of Russia and the United States (especially vis-à-vis slavery and serfdom), see ibid., 49–50; Dale

E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham, N.C., 2000); and Ar-

nold Shankman, “Brothers across the Sea: Afro-Americans on the Persecution of Russian Jews, 1811–1917,” Jewish

Social Studies, 37 (Spring 1975), 114–21. On the economic interest in the region, see Foglesong, American Mission

and the “Evil Empire,” 25. On the United States being compared with “uncivilized, backward, despotic, and Asiatic”

Russia, see Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, 22.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1027

pioneered woman suffrage efforts were not just abolitionists or the children of abolition-

ists but also leaders of the safrf. 13

As with the ties that the “free Russia” movement had to abolition, the movement’s

connection to first-wave feminism was not incidental. The Russian Revolution emerged

from a tradition of activism that for decades had been “saturated with references to the

woman question.” Women were key participants in Russia’s revolutionary struggles, and

in the various factions, women’s equality with men was a basic assumption. Many revolu-

tionaries drew inspiration from Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 utopian novel Chto Delat?

(What is to be done?), which centered on a woman, Vera Pavlovna, whose oppression and

subsequent liberation symbolizes the liberation of Russia. The shooting of St. Petersburg’s

governor in 1877 by Vera Zasulich, and the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 via

a plot partly organized by Sophia Perovskaya and Vera Figner, provoked outrage in some

quarters and admiration in others but pointed to the militancy of Russian women and

drew attention to the situation driving them to violence.

Under the Bolsheviks, rhetoric of female equality continued—now with laws to sup-

port it. Vladimir Lenin himself proclaimed in 1919, in words reprinted by the Nation: “It

is a fact that, in the course of the past ten years, not a single democratic party in the world,

not one among the leaders of the bourgeois republics, has undertaken for the emancipa-

tion of women the hundredth part of what has been realized by Russia in one year.” Not-

ing the “humiliating laws prejudicial to the rights of women [that] have been abolished,”

such as divorce laws, “the repugnant rules for inquiring into paternity, and other regula-

tions relating to ‘illegitimate’ children,” he acknowledged

work still to be done to release

women from “all the little household tasks which chain her to the kitchen and the nu\crs-

ery.” To have a head of state even notice these chains impressed many feminists in the

United States.

In truth, the Bolsheviks’ rhetoric of women’s liberation was largely strategic. Efforts in

Russia on behalf of women were limited by material shortages, internal resistance, and

13 On the involvement of former abolitionists and their children in the “free Russia” movement, see Foglesong,

American Mission and the “Evil Empire,” 19. On Wendell Phillips, see ibid., 12. George Kennan, Siberia and the

Exile System (2 vols., London, 1891). On George Kennan, see Frederick F. Travis, George Kennan and the American-

Russian Relationship, 1865–1924 (Athens, Ohio, 1990). On the Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom

(safrf ), see Foglesong, American Mission and the “Evil Empire,” 19–22; and Travis, George Kennan and the Ameri-

can-Russian Relationship, 204–8, 223, 273. Louis J. Budd, “Twain, Howells, and the Boston Nihilists,” New Eng-

land Quarterly, 32 (Sept. 1959), 351–71, esp. 357–58; and Alice Stone Blackwell, The Little Grandmother of the

Russian Revolution; Reminiscences and Letters of Catherine Breshkovsky (Boston, 1917), 125. safrf leaders who took

a prominent role in the woman suffrage movement included Henry Blackwell, Alice Stone Blackwell, Julia Ward

Howe, and Lillie Chace Wyman.

14 On the Russian Revolution and a tradition of activism “saturated with references to the woman question,” see

Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, 1997),

14. On women’s equality in Russia’s revolutionary struggles, see Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in

Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, 1978), 99–105. On revolutionaries and Chto

Delat?, see ibid., 64–125. Nikolaï Tchernuishevsky, A Vital Question; or, What Is to Be Done?, trans. Nathan Haskell

Dole and S. S. Skidelsky (1863; New York, 1886). On the assassinations and violence in Russia in the 1870s, 1880s,

and after, see Norman M. Naimark, Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alex-

ander III (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917

(Princeton, 1993); Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party before the First World War (New

York, 2000); and E. L. Scherbakova, Otshchepentsy: Put’ k terrorizmu (60-80-e gody

xix veka) (Renegades: Paths to

terrorism [1860–1880]) (Moscow, 2008). On the history of women revolutionaries in Russia, see Anna Hillyar and

Jane McDermid, Revolutionary Women in Russia, 1870–1917: A Study in Collective Biography (New York, 2000);

Vera Broido, Apostles into Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II (New York,

1977); and Amy Knight, “Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party,” Russian Review, 38 (April

1979), 139–59.

15 N[ikolai] Lenin, “Women in Soviet Russia,” Nation, Feb. 7, 1920, pp. 185–86.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1028

entrenched patriarchal assumptions. “Whatever genuine idealism was at work, the ideals

of ‘liberating’ women, including them in the public sphere, always contained a degree of

instrumentalism, a sense that transforming women’s place in society and the state repre-

sented an opportunity that was only partially about the women themselves,” the historian

Elizabeth Wood maintains. A significant portion of American suffragist rhetoric about

Russia was, likewise, strategic, designed to embarrass American officials through unfavor-

able comparisons with a country long thought to be backward and undemocratic. It is

therefore easy to overlook the fact that behind the antis’ accusations and the suffragists’

taunts, there was something of real substance.

“Russian Freedom” and the “Woman Question”

Attention to Russia’s oppressive conditions grew from increasingly visible revolutionary

activity there, exposés such as Kennan’s, and a sense that citizens of “darkest Russia”

shared history and circumstances with the oppressed “darker peoples” of the United

States. Similarly, as we know, the push for women’s rights grew from recognition that all

women, like African Americans of either gender, were oppressed. But as Foglesong sug-

gests, the urge to save oppressed Russians also enabled American reformers to work for

justice in the world while deflecting attention away from “American imperfections” and

de-emphasizing race-based sectional conflicts in an era of national healing after the Civil

War. Moreover, “free Russia” advocacy was part of the “civilization work ” that created

the basis for an activist sisterhood among white women in the United States, allowing

them to enter the public sphere as allies of white men in the service of progressive reform

and to preach a universalist message despite exclusionary racial practices.

But African American women also drew upon the “darkest Russia” trope as a means

to criticize racial practices in the United States: antilynching activist and suffragist Ida B.

Wells, for instance, made unfavorable comparisons to Russia to emphasize the barbaric

treatment of African Americans in her supposedly more civilized country. Other black

female suffragists connected their calls for suffrage with Russian or Soviet rhetoric and

practice; Helen Holman, for instance, came to the Communist party in part through her

suffrage activism and “became widely known in Harlem during the 1920s for speaking on

street corners against black women’s subjugation under capitalism and for praising Soviet

family policies.” While the Russia/Soviet connection is somewhat harder to document for

African American suffragists, the Soviet Union’s appeal to African Americans as an osten-

sibly color-blind society has been well documented.

16 Wood, Baba and the Comrade, 13. On the challenges to women’s empowerment posed by material shortages,

see Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (New

York, 1995).

17 Foglesong, American Mission and the Evil Empire, 11; Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The

Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York, 1999), 8–10.

18 Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in America,” Arena, 23 (Jan. 1900), 15–24. On Helen Holman, see Erik S.

McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism

(Durham, N.C., 2011), 35. On the appeal of the Soviet Union to African Americans, see Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond

the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, N.C., 2002);

Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick, 2008);

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York, 2008); Mark

I. Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936 (Jackson, 1998); and McDuffie,

Sojourning for Freedom.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1029

In the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, Alice Stone Blackwell, “the lead-

ing propagandist of the women’s suffrage movement,” most directly linked abolitionists,

suffragists, and “free Russia” activists. Stone Blackwell’s two passions in life were Russian

freedom and woman suffrage, and she devoted most of her time to these two causes. In

1890 she was instrumental in uniting the two major suffrage organizations, the American \c

Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association (which had

divided over the issue of African American voting rights), and she took over editorship

of the Woman’s Journal, an organ of the National American Woman Suffrage Association,

after her mother, Lucy Stone, who founded the journal, died in 1893.

In 1903 Stone Blackwell revived the dormant Society of American Friends of Russian

Freedom at the same time that the bloody Kishinev pogrom (in which forty-nine Jews

were killed, more than five hundred injured, and 1,300 Jewish homes and businesses

looted or destroyed) brought renewed attention to Russian injustices. She devoted spe-

cial energy to the career of Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, a member of the Russian

Socialist Revolutionary party and known in the United States as Catherine Breshkovsky,

or simply Babushka (little grandmother). Breshkovsky, who became a cause célèbre in the

United States, was an educated daughter of the aristocracy who renounced her privilege

to go “among the people” and foster revolt. She was wise, worldly, and unflagging in her

commitments despite years of prison and exile, and became a symbol of a larger, legend-

ary community of female revolutionists. Meeting Breshkovsky in a remote corner of Si-

beria in the 1880s, George Kennan recorded a line that gave a heroic cast to all of Russia’s

political exiles: just before Kennan “bade her goodbye” Breshkovsky is reported to have

said to him, “Mr. Kennan, we may die in exile, and our children may die in exile, and our

children’s children may die in exile, but something will come of it at last.”

Stone Blackwell, who came to know Kennan through their shared interest in Rus-

sia, secured sponsorship from the safrf for Breshkovsky’s 1904–1905 U.S. speaking

tour. She and a number of other prominent reformers—among them Lillian Wald, Jane

Addams, Ellen Starr, Isabel Barrows and, largely behind the scenes, Emma Goldman—

set up Breshkovsky’s speaking engagements, translated her speeches, and publicized her

tour. Stone Blackwell and Breshkovsky remained lifelong friends and correspondents,

19 Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York, 1981), 224. There is

surprisingly little scholarship on Stone Blackwell, although she is discussed in a number of biographical dictionar-

ies and is mentioned in most histories of the woman suffrage movement. On her devotion to Russian freedom and

woman suffrage, see Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary (3 vols.,

Cambridge, Mass., 1971), I, 156–58; Sharon Hartman Strom, Political Woman: Florence Luscomb and the Legacy of

Radical Reform (Philadelphia, 2001), 111–12. This devotion is most evident in Blackwell, Little Grandmother of the

Russian Revolution. The only full-length scholarly study of Stone Blackwell is Jennifer L. Martin, “Alice Stone Black-

well: Soldier and Strategist for Suffrage” (M.A. thesis, Florida State University, 1993). The suffrage leader Harriot

Stanton Blatch, daughter of abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, though not actively

involved in the safrf , had ties to early revolutionaries. She invited Peter Kropotkin to spend a week with her fam-

ily at their home outside of London and praised a letter of greeting that he had written to the first International

Congress of Women, which was held in Washington, D.C., in 1888, and partly sponsored by Stanton. See Harriot

Stanton Blatch to Peter Kropotkin, [1888?], delo 616, fond 1129 (Kropotkin, Peter Alexeyevich), opis 2 (State Ar-

chive of the Russian Federation [garf ], Moscow).

20 On Stone Blackwell’s revival of the safrf and on the Kishinev pogrom, see Blackwell, Little Grandmother of

the Russian Revolution, 125. For evidence that makes clear the close relationship between Stone Blackwell and Cath-

erine Breshkovsky, see ibid., 128, 144, 149, 153, 158, 161, 163, 166, 168, 178. See also the collection of Bresh-

kovksy’s letters, many of them to Stone Blackwell, in box 5 (1910–1923) and box 6 (1924–1934), National Ameri-

can Woman Suffrage Association Records, 1839–1961 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Kennan, Siberia

and the Exile System, II, 122.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1030

and Stone Blackwell was at the center of a mostly female network whose members were

drawn, through Breshkovsky, into support for Russian revolutionary activity. 21

A running discourse on the strength, bravery and liberated outlook of Russian revo-

lutionary women predated even Kennan’s memorable portrait of Breshkovsky. English

translations of Russian works introduced American readers to emancipated heroines such

as Anna Sergeevna Odintsova in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (published in 1862;

English translation in 1867), Elena Nikolayevna from Turgenev’s On the Eve (1859;

1903), and especially Vera Pavlovna in Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863; 1886,

but popularized in the United States well before that by Russian Jewish immigrants). Os-

car Wilde’s first play, Vera: Or, The Nihilists (1881), performed on both sides of the Atlan-

tic Ocean, drew from news accounts of revolutionaries including Perovskaya, Figner, and

Zasulich, who were also positively portrayed in the American press.

Contrary to historical accounts suggesting that visiting revolutionaries such as Bresh-

kovsky played down their violent methods, evidence suggests that female revolutionaries’

willingness to use violence was part of their mystique in the United States. In September

1906, after yet another political assassination in Russia carried out by a female militant,

the Woman’s Tribune published an article on “the Russian women,” praising “the assassi-

nation of General [Georgiy Alexandrovich] Min by a young woman who refused to give

her name” and recalling Turgenev’s paean to Vera Zasulich in his poem, “The Threshold”

(1878), published after Zasulich shot Gen. Dmitri Feodorovich Trepoff in 1877. The

New York settlement house worker Leroy Scott likewise highlighted Russian women’s

militancy: “The Russian woman has shared like and like with man: in leadership, in the

dangerous clandestine education of the masses, in throwing the terrorist’s bomb, in pris-

on, in the Siberian mines, on the scaffold.”

Both the perceived justness of the revolutionary cause and the prominence of women

in this struggle became staples of American popular culture prior to 1917: films such as

My Official Wife (1914), Beneath the Czar (1914), Escaped from Siberia (1914), and The

Rose of Blood (1917), reiterated these themes. In My Official Wife a beautiful nihilist tricks

an American man into letting her use his wife’s passport so that she can enter Russia and

murder the tsar. In The Rose of Blood a female revolutionary continues her work of assas-

21 On Breshkovsky’s 1904–1905 speaking tour, see the documents held in inventory numbers 687–785, Partija-

Socialistov Revoljucionerov (Rossija) Archives (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Netherlands);

Jane E. Good, “America and the Russian Revolutionary Movement, 1888–1905,” Russian Review, 41 (July 1982),

273–87; Jane E. Good and David R. Jones, Babushka: The Life of the Russian Revolutionary Ekaterina K. Breshko-

Breshkovskaia (1844–1934) (Newtonville, 1991), 78–90; Blackwell, Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution,

110–32; and Emma Goldman, Living My Life (2 vols.; 1931; New York, 2013) I, 359–62.

22 On the discourse on Russian revolutionary women, see Leroy Scott, “Daughter of the Russian Revolution,”

Everybody’s Magazine, 17 (Oct. 1907), 467–76; Rose Strunsky, “Siberia and the Russian Woman,” Forum, 44 (Aug.

1910), 129–41; Marie Sukloff, “Making of a Russian Terrorist,” Century, 89 (Nov. 1914), 93–105; and Anna

Strunsky Walling, “Woman and the Russian Revolutionary Movement,” California Woman’s Magazine (Aug. 1905),

1–2. On English translations of Russian works, see Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. Eugene Schuyler (1862,

New York, 1867); Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve, trans. Isabel Hapgood (1859; New York, 1903); and Chernyshevsky,

What Is to Be Done? On the popularization of What Is to Be Done? by immigrants, see Steven Cassedy, “Cherny-

shevskii Goes West: How Jewish Immigration Helped Bring Russian Radicalism to America,” Russian History, 21

(Spring 1994), 1–21. On Vera: Or, The Nihilists, see Stuart Mason, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (London, 1914),

249–81. On positive portrayals of Russian revolutionaries in the U.S. press, see, for example, Florence Brooks,

“New York End of the Russian Uprising,” New York Times, Jan. 29, 1905, p. SM3.

23 Good, “America and the Russian Revolutionary Movement.” Anonymous, “The Russian Women,” Woman’s

Tribune, 23 (no. 19, 1906), 76. For “The Threshold” (1878), see Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, The Essential Turgenev,

ed. Elizabeth Cheresh Allen (Evanston, 1994), 877–78. Leroy Scott, “The Women of the Russian Revolution,” Out -

look, Dec. 26, 1908, p. 915.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1031

sinating government officials even after marrying a prince. She eventually follows orders

to slay her husband, doing so by dynamiting her own house, dying along with the prince.

An injunction was issued in Chicago against showing the film, on the grounds that it

could incite revolt.

The nawsa archives—in addition to containing over a thousand pages of Breshkovsky

correspondence collected by Stone Blackwell—document lectures delivered to suffrage

gatherings on topics such as the historical development of the Russian women (in 1902)

and the revolutionary movement in Russia (in 1907). Under Stone Blackwell’s leadership,

the Woman’s Journal (renamed Woman Citizen in 1917) featured a running commentary

on the situation in Russia and regularly ran advertisements for Free Russia, the organ of

the safrf. In 1904 the writer and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman praised the

Russian people, including “the students [who] pour out their flood of passionate enthu-

siasm in fruitless resistance to the government, and in fruitful sowing among the peas-

antry,” and she criticized the government’s “long black record of ruthless oppression.”

Commenting on a 1905 St. Petersburg resolution calling for universal suffrage, Stone

Blackwell noted that it “must have been startling to many conservative Americans, who

have fondly imagined that the demand for equal rights for women was limited\c to a hand-

ful of discontented spinsters in the United States. The movement is world wide. . . . It

is further advanced in some respects among the ‘intellectuals’ of Russia than it is in the

United States.”

Thanks to Stone Blackwell, the Woman’s Journal/Woman Citizen became a principal

source of news on Breshkovsky, publishing excerpts from her letters and reporting on

her living conditions, trials, and near escapes. In truth, Breshkovsky was not especially

interested in woman suffrage: she saw the cause as the purview of bourgeois feminists

but recognized that American suffragists were important allies. Emma Goldman shared

Breshkovsky’s views on suffrage but also shared many American suffragists’ enthusiasm

for Russia’s revolutionary women (including Breshkovsky) because of the revolutionaries’

commitment to liberation and their ideal of comradely love.

24 My Official Wife, dir. James Young (Vitagraph, 1914); Beneath the Czar, dir. Alice Blaché (Solax, 1914); Es -

caped from Siberia, dir. Sidney M. Goldin (Great Players Feature Film 1914); The Rose of Blood, dir. J. Gordon Ed-

wards (Fox Film, 1917). On The Rose of Blood, see also American Film Institute Catalog of Feature Films, http://www

.afi.com/members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=&Movie=14778.

25 “Madame Sofja Lvovna Friedland of Moscow, Russia. Lecture Tour across the Continent,”

1902, leaflet, scrapbook 3, Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller nawsa Suffrage Scrap-

books (1897–1911), p. 100, American Memory: Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/

ampage?collId=rbcmil&fileName= scrp1010101/rbcmilscrp1010101.db&recNum=0&itemLink=D?rbcmiller

bib:1:./temp/~ammem_qvFw; “Geneva Political Equality Club Afternoon Meeting at Mrs. S. K. Nester’s Home,”

March 11, 1907, clipping, scrapbook 5, ibid., http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/rbcmillerbib:

@FIELD%28DOCID+@BAND %28@lit%28rbcmiller001817%29%29%29. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Our

Attitude toward Russia,” Woman’s Journal, March 19, 1904, p. 90. Alice Stone Blackwell, “Advanced Russia,” ibid.,

Feb. 25, 1905, p. 29, quoted in Smith, “From Relief to Revolution,” 610.

26 The Woman’s Journal and Woman Citizen contained dozens of articles on Breshkovsky, and other sources

would sometimes refer to Stone Blackwell as a source for information on Breshkovsky. See, for example, on (false)

news that Breshkovsky had been killed, “Mme. Breshkovsky’s Last Days Vividly Pictured in Letter: Alice S. Black-

well Produces Epistle Written Shortly before Revolutionist’s Death,” Chicago Sunday Press and the Women’s Press,

Nov. 23, 1918, p. 3a. On Breshkovsky’s attitudes on woman suffrage, see Blackwell, Little Grandmother of the Rus-

sian Revolution, 178, 80. On Emma Goldman’s views on suffrage and Russian revolutionary women, see Goldman,

Living My Life, 28, 56; and Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York, 1911), 10–11, 123–32. In

contrast to many suffragists Goldman became a vocal critic of the Bolsheviks. See Emma Goldman, My Disillusion-

ment in Russia (Garden City, 1923).

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1032

“Fashion Hints from Darkest Russia”

The February Revolution, which overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and led to a provisional

government under the moderate socialist Alexander Kerensky, ignited on International

Women’s Day in 1917, with food riots led by women workers, housewives, and soldiers’

wives. As demonstrations in Saint Petersburg expanded into full-scale revolutionary agi-

tation, women took the lead. Leon Trotsky claimed in his history of the revolution that

women shamed soldiers into joining the workers: “They go up to the cordons more boldly

than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: ‘Put down your bayonets—

join us.’”

News of the revolution was joyfully received by suffragists everywhere, along with a

much larger group of intellectuals, bohemians, and progressives: “The belief that Rus-

sia was the beacon for a new era of world democracy spread through the ranks of labor

and the Socialist Party and to every center of modern culture,” Christine Stansell notes.

American suffragists quickly acted to support Russian feminists’ demand for suffrage.

Shortly after the fall of the Romanovs, eighteen prominent American women, including

Lillian Wald, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Harriot Stanton Blatch, signed a declaration

congratulating the revolutionaries on their achievements and expressing their “confidence

in the Duma” that the “supreme sacrifices of Russian heroines” would be rewarded with

women’s full political equality in the country’s “first great scheme of self-government and

democracy.” The declaration concluded, “Heroes of Russia, trust your women.”

Woman suffrage under the new regime seemed a foregone conclusion. The Columbus

[

oh ] Daily Monitor on March 30, 1917, published a cartoon by Edwina Dumm with

the caption “Fashion Hints from Darkest Russia.” (See figure 2.) In it, Mrs. Uncle Sam

complains to her husband about the fact that Mrs. Russia wears the halo of equal suffrage

over her head while Mrs. Uncle Sam does not: “And to think you let her get it first!” she

cries, while a smirking New Russia looks on. The April 1, 1917, issue of the International

Woman Suffrage News, the monthly organ of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance

(headed by Catt), proclaimed in an ecstatic editorial:

The great events of the last few weeks in Russia will stand out among the greatest

in history, and Women Suffragists all over the world will welcome the liberation of

the hundreds of millions of inhabitants of that vast empire. A crushing weight has

been lifted from the neck of a multitude which will now become a nation. Freedom

of speech, of religion, of the Press, of public meeting; freedom to work or abstain

from working; freedom for nationality, now promised to the people, will open the

doors to them of full participation in public life, and the free development of all

their faculties.

Articles in the journals of the nwp , the n aw s a, and other suffrage groups echoed these

sentiments, highlighting support for woman suffrage in Russia and emphasizing women’s

involvement in the new government. (See figure 3.) Breshkovsky, writing to the Woman

27 Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917

(Pittsburgh, 2010), 220; Wood, Baba and the Comrade, 14; Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution,

trans. Max Eastman (1930; Chicago, 2008), 80–81.

28 Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York,

2000), 322. Undated document, [April 1917?], folder 1.2, box 92, Lillian D. Wald Papers, 1895–1936 (Columbia

University Special Collections, New York, N.Y.). The document has a penciled note that reads: “Mrs Blatch thought

you might like to see this. Jane Pincus.” Jane Pincus was a member of the Women’s Political Union in New York. See

Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, 1997), 166.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1033

Citizen via Stone Blackwell, assured readers that “we Russian women have already the

rights (over all our country) belonging to all citizens, and the elections which are taking

place now, over all our provinces, are performed together by men and women. Neither

our government nor our people have a word against the woman suffrage.” In fact, the

Provisional Government did not officially extend full suffrage to women until late July

19 17.

29 Edwina Dumm, “Fashion Hints from Darkest Russia,” Columbus ( oh) Daily Monitor, March 30, 1917. For

the original March 28, 1917, line drawing, see call no. fed 1 49 a, digital image no. d_7048 (Billy Ireland Cartoon

Library and Museum, Ohio State University, Columbus), http://cartoons.osu.edu/digital_exhibits/edwinadumm/

gallery.html. “Features of the Month,” International Woman Suffrage News, 11 (April 1917), 1. For articles in sup-

port of women’s suffrage in Russia, see Basil Manly, “Woman in the New Russia,” Suffragist, March 24, 1917, p.

9; “The Dawn of Democracy in Russia,” ibid., April 14, 1917, p. 3; J. G. Ohsol, “Concerning Woman Suffrage in

Russia,” Woman Citizen, June 2, 1917, pp. 12, 17; “Woman Officials in Russia,” Suffragist, June 9, 1917, p. 3; and

“Again Outdone by Russia,” Woman Citizen, June 23, 1917, pp. 63–64. Nina Allender, “Russia First,” Suffragist,

March 24, 1917, cover. Catherine Breshkovsky, “To the National American Woman Suffrage Association,” ibid.,

Aug. 4, 1917, p. 167. Breshkovsky’s letter was dated May 20, 1917. See ibid. On the Provisional Government’s ex-

tension of full suffrage to women, see Ruthchild, Equality and Revolution, 229.

Figure 2. Mrs. Uncle Sam, with her husband, points out Mrs. Russia wearing the halo

of “Equal Suffrage” and leading her smiling companion, “New Russia,” forward. She

chidingly tells Uncle Sam, “And to think you let her get it first!” Edwina Dumm, the

author of the cartoon, was the nation’s first full-time female editorial cartoonist and

drew the syndicated Tippie & Cap Stubbs comic for six decades after the Columbus

(

oh) Daily Monitor folded in 1917. Edwina Dumm, Columbus ( oh) Daily Monitor,

March 30, 1917. Courtesy Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum and Library, Ohio State Uni -

versity, Columbus.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1034

The February Revolution occurred shortly after nawsa activists began directly lobby-

ing Congress (in December 1916) and just after nwp activists began picketing the White

House (in January 1917)—and not long before the United States entered World War I. As

Congress began holding hearings that spring to consider a woman suffrage am\cendment to

the Constitution, the Russian Revolution became a touchstone in the conversations. The

Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage heard testimony on behalf of the nawsa on April

20, 1917, two weeks after the United States entered the war. Senator Charles Spalding

Thomas of Colorado, noting his support for woman suffrage, brought up the revolution

to praise the moderate tactics of the nawsa (whose members he called “wise and patriotic

women”), while warning picketing nwp activists that their confrontational tactics could

only hurt their cause. Just as the greatest danger to the new government in Russia was

“those revolutionary and explosive forces which can not wait for slower and better devel-

opment of a republican government, but which determine to have all or none from the

start,” so President Wilson could not help but abhor “the spectacle of suffrage banners

Figure 3. “America First” became a national slogan during World War I, and local America

First associations sprouted up to oppose immigration, promote “Americanization,” and urge

stiff penalties for people working against the war or who expressed disloyalty to the United

States. The creator of this illustration, Nina Allender, was the principal cartoonist for the Na -

tional Woman’s party. Nina Allender, “America First!/Russia First Universal Suffrage,” Suffrag-

ist, March 24, 1917. Courtesy Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, home of the historic National

Woman’s Party, Washington, D.C.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1035

daily flaunted in his face with a cool and impudent assurance which as\csumes that by such

means the country is to be persuaded and compelled into enacting the privilege.” 30

Catt, taking the floor shortly after Thomas, gave a speech that likewise hinged on the

Russian Revolution. She, however, focused on Russia’s women, noting that the revolu-

tionary forces had pledged their support to woman suffrage: “Women of Russia have

made equal sacrifices for freedom, women by thousands have made the long march into

Siberia; they have given up their lives at hard labor in the mines; they have languished

and died in damp, cold prisons; they have been shot at sunrise; they have perished on the

scaffold—and all for the freedom of the people.” Catt warned that the United States must

show leadership and not repudiate “its own standard of self-government.” She also chided

senators: “Little did American suffragists think that any woman of darkest Russia would

be promoted to political freedom before those of the United States of America.” To Presi-

dent Wilson, Catt would be more conciliatory, but she privately urged that the concerns

of Russia’s women be taken into account when Wilson put together a delegation to visit

the new government. In her testimony before the congressional committee, the historian

and activist Mary Ritter Beard turned to the war that the United States was now fighting,

for the sake of “democracy.” “Whose democracy,” she asked: that of England, or Russia,

both of which had taken a stand for universal suffrage, or that of the United States, which

had not? “Shall we withhold the vote from American women and send its leading oppo-

nent in this country, Mr. Elihu Root, to Russia to advise her to refuse recognition to her

superb women and let England become the democratic leader of the world?”

Less than a month after this Senate hearing, members of the nwp testified before the

House of Representatives. Elizabeth Selden Rogers—a descendent of one of the Founding

Fathers and sister-in-law to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson—gave the first statement.

She insisted that woman suffrage, passed or nearly passed by the United States’ allies, in-

cluding Russia (“in her great revolution for political freedom for men and women”), was

a necessary war measure: “It is impossible to think that [women] should be asked to wage

war for the principle of self-government and to protect it and to make great sacrifices,

the most supreme sacrifices, without having some part in the Government.” Lucy Burns,

an nwp founder, editor of their journal, the Suffragist, and one of the sign-holding activ-

ists who would be arrested in June for protesting in front of the White House, made a

more pointed reference to the Russian Revolution, noting that an increasing number of

people had been refusing to make sacrifices for governments that made demands without

offering rights in return. “The people of Russia have already risen against a government

that was unworthy to call upon them to make these sacrifices,” she warned, “and now the

people of Russia are calling upon the people of the whole world to rise up against their

Governments.” Burns had worked with the Pankhursts in Britain and, like a number of

other suffragists, was highly educated, with advanced degrees in linguistics. Asked if she

believed the American system of government should be done away with, Burns dodged

30 On the February Revolution and actions of U.S. suffragists, see Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democ-

racy, 95, 106. Woman Suffrage Hearing before the Committee on Woman Suffrage, United States Senate, Sixty-Fifth Con-

gress, First Session on S.J. 2, Proposing an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Conferring upon Women

the Right of Suffrage (Washington, 1917), 29.

31 For Catt’s testimony, see Woman Suffrage Hearing before the Committee on Woman Suffrage, 35–36. Carrie

Chapman Catt to Woodrow Wilson, May 7, 1917, folder 12, box 1, Carrie Chapman Catt Papers (Bryn Mawr Col-

lege Special Collections, Bryn Mawr, Pa.); Wilson to Catt, May 8, 1917, ibid. For Mary Ritter Beard’s testimony,

see Woman Suffrage Hearing before the Committee on Woman Suffrage, 45.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1036

the question, answering, “the only way to meet such sentiment, growing so rapidly, is to

meet it halfway.” 32

It was likely as a result of these hearings that Rogers came up with the idea for the Rus-

sian banner. nwp members were well aware of the banner’s capacity to provoke and of the

risk they were taking by welcoming foreign visitors with it. The Espionage Act, passed just

five days before their picketing, made it a federal crime to “willfully make or convey false

statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval

forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies . . . when the United

States is at war.” Suffragists had weighed in on the bill while it was under consideration,

seeking assurances that it would not impede their work. In early April, nwp member Ida

Waters, claiming to “represent 2,000,000 suffragists,” had raised objections before the

House Judiciary Committee. Waters acknowledged the need for “certain precautionary

measures” in a time of war but added, “we are very anxious that the right of free speech,

which is guaranteed to us by the Constitution, shall not be denied us.” She was assured

that one could only be punished for making “false” statements, “with the intention of do-

ing his own country injury.” Waters was promised that activists would not lose their abil-

ity “to speak for suffrage and for righteousness.”

This, then, was the context in which the Russian banner created a sensation. While it

did lead to several women being arrested, they were charged with obstructing traffic rath-

er than the more serious crime of espionage: the banner had been carefully worded to not

make any “false statements.” Catt believed the incident was so damaging to the cause that

several of her lieutenants personally asked George Creel, the head of the Committee on

Public Information, to initiate a news blackout on the picketers. But their actions proved

too newsworthy to resist.

For women in the nwp and their allies, the response to the Russian banner was just

what they had hoped for. In the aftermath of the skirmishes, the Suffragist featured a cari-

cature by Nina Allender of the confrontation, with the caption, “Making the Russian En-

voys Feel at Home,” likening the crowd’s behavior to violence in Russia. (See figure 4.)

An editorial praised the demonstrators, noting, “It was a just and beautiful appeal. Russia

has made itself free and has invited the nations of the world to join her in a federation \cof

freedom. We who are struggling for liberty take the hand of Russia and ask her to help

us.” Moving forward, it became clear that drawing wartime contrasts with Russia was an

especially effective way to highlight the hollowness of American democratic rhetoric and

to make the case for woman suffrage.

32 For Elizabeth Selden Rogers’s testimony, see Woman Suffrage Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary,

House of Representatives, Sixty-Fifth Congress, First Session, on Woman Suffrage (Washington, 1917), 170, 173. On

Lucy Burns, see “Profiles: Selected Leaders of the National Woman’s Party: Visionaries; Lucy Burns (1879–1966),”

American Memory: Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/profiles.html.

33 On the Russian banner, see Ford, Iron Jawed Angels, 145, 147. On the Espionage Act, see 18 U.S.C.,

part 1, chap. 37 (1917). For Ida Waters’s testimony, see Espionage and Interference with Neutrality Hearings be-

fore the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Sixty-Fifth Congress, First Session on H.R. 291

(Washington, 1917), 4, 6. Also available at http://www.archive.org/stream/espionageandint00housgoog/espionage

andint00housgoog_djvu.txt.

34 On the arrests, see Ford, Iron Jawed Angels, 147. On the request for a news blackout, see Graham, Woman Suf-

frage and the New Democracy, 107–10.

35 Nina Allender, “Making the Russians Envoys Feel at Home,” [June 1917], SB000723, Nina Allender Col-

lection (Sewall-Belmont House and Museum). The image appeared on the cover of Suffragist, June 30, 1917. “The

Women Speak,” ibid., June 23, 1917, p. 6.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1037

On July 10 the Russian delegation made a surprise visit to Lillian Wald’s Henry Street

Settlement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which had welcomed several Russian revo-

lutionaries over the years, including Breshkovsky. Crystal Eastman, a socialist, pacifist,

and nwp organizer, addressed the delegation and the crowd that gathered to greet them,

explicitly linking the Russian revolutionary victory to women’s emancipation: “You will

teach many things to America,” she declared, “You will teach America that there can be

no real democracy with the women left out.”

Although Eastman’s enthusiasm for the revolution was genuine, many of the staged

confrontations that employed Russia in rhetorical appeals were designed to taunt the

U.S. government rather than to express genuine sympathy. However, they should be seen

along a spectrum of performances that utilized Russia for political effect and as a source

of real inspiration. The literary critic Mary Chapman points to suffragists’ frequent use of

ventriloquism, quotation, and silences and the “ironic, parodic, decontextualization and

reframing of these utterances.” We see this in suffragists’ quoting of Wilson’s and Root’s

comments about democracy and in negative comparisons to Russia’s prison system and

36 “Russian Envoy Thrills East Side,” New York Times, July 10, 1917, p. 3.

Figure 4. Nina Allender’s cartoon is a commentary on the violent skirmishes that

broke out in response to the National Woman’s party’s “Russian banner,” suggesting

that antifeminists’ angry reaction to the picketers put them in the same uncivilized

category as “darkest Russia.” Nina Allender, “Making the Russian Envoys Feel at Home,”

Suffragist, June 30, 1917. Courtesy Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, home of the

historic National Woman’s Party, Washington, D.C.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1038

standards of justice, which continued into the Bolshevik era. If, as Chapman argues, suf-

fragists made a habit of “challeng[ing] the authority of . . . previous understandings by

exposing their internal contradictions,” “darkest Russia” provided an ideal vehicle for this

tactic.

The cover of the Suffragist from August 18, 1917, featured an Allender cartoon with

Elihu Root, suitcase plastered with stickers marked “Petrograd” and “Russia” by his side,

having a chat with Uncle Sam. (See figure 5.) “Travel is so broadening,” he observes, “And

say! The Women are fighting for Democracy in Russia! You ought to see ’em!” Through a

window behind Uncle Sam, we see suffragists picketing, holding signs that say “Democ-

racy Begins at Home.” Both men are oblivious to them.

Wilson’s “fight for democracy” heightened contrasts with U.S. allies on the subject

of voting rights, but it also threatened to take attention away from the suffrage struggle.

Suffrage activists worked to remind political leaders of the relevance of their cause to the

war, even as they adamantly fought the suggestion that women’s exemption from mili-

tary service ought to exclude them from the ballot. Against Root’s implication that Rus-

sian women had “earn[ed] the right to enfranchisement” on the battlefield (referencing

Russia’s legendary women’s “battalion of death,” “the modern world’s first female combat

unit,” which was sent to the front in June 1917, in large part to embarrass Russian [male]

soldiers into doing their duty), Mary Winsor somewhat misleadingly argued in the Suf -

fragist that “the Russians have given women the vote and given it freely without haggling

or bargaining long before the regiment of women was formed.” As with a number of other

suffragists, her attention to Russia would continue into the Bolshevik era.

The October or Bolshevik Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin, erupted on October 25

on the Russian Julian calendar (November 7 on the Gregorian calendar followed in the

United States). This revolution overthrew the Provisional Government and led to the na-

tionalization of all private property, Russian withdrawal from World War I, and, eventu-

ally, the creation of the Soviet Union. In the United States, the buildup to and eruption of

the Bolshevik Revolution coincided with some of the most dramatic suffrage demonstra-

tions and arrests. In October 1917, while imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse, Lucy

Burns started a petition demanding political prisoner status for imprisoned suff\cragists;

all signers were placed in solitary confinement. After their demand was rejected, several

women began a hunger strike. A few days later, Alice Paul, the leader of the nwp , was ar-

rested and sentenced to seven months in the workhouse, the longest sentence yet handed

down. In response, Lucy Gwynne Branham, herself fresh out of Occoquan, picketed the

White House holding a banner suggesting that the Wilson administration’s brutality to-

ward political prisoners surpassed that of the Russian tsar (see figure 6): “WE DEMAND

THAT THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT GIVE ALICE PAUL A POLITICAL

37 Mary Chapman, “‘Are Women People?’ Alice Duer Miller’s Poetry and Politics,” American Literary History, 18

(Spring 2006), 59–85, esp. 66, 67.

38 Nina Allender, “Travel Is So Broadening,” [Aug. 1917], SB00846, Allender Collection. The image appeared

on the cover of Suffragist, Aug. 18, 1917.

39 Mary Winsor, “Catching Up with Russia,” ibid., Aug. 18, 1917, p. 8. On the woman’s ‘battalion of death’, see

Melissa K. Stockdale, “‘My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness’: Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia’s

Great War, 1914–1917,” American Historical Review, 109 (Feb. 2004), 90, 91. On Mary Winsor’s attention to Rus-

sia in the Bolshevik era, see Mary Winsor, “The Status of Women in Soviet Russia,” ca. 1927, unpublished manu-

script, folder 7, Mary Winsor Papers (Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.); and “American

Investigation Committee on Russian Women,” Equal Rights, Jan. 21, 1928, pp. 395–96.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1039

OFFENDER, THE PRIVILEGES RUSSIA GAVE MIYUKOFF,” referring to the Rus-

sian liberal, Paul Milyukov, who spent six months in prison in 1901 for a political speech. 40

Branham’s reference to Russian history was not merely incidental. She held a master’s

degree in history from Johns Hopkins University and had begun working toward a Ph.D.

in history at Columbia University under Charles Beard. Like Burns, she turned from

academia to activism, becoming a field organizer for the nwp . She would later become a

leading advocate for Russian relief, recognition of the Bolshevik government, and cultural

relations between the Soviet Union and the United States.

40 “Detailed Chronology, National Woman’s Party,” American Memory: Library of Congress, memory.loc.gov/

ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/detchron.pdf; “Lucy Branham Protests the Political Imprisonment of Alice Paul

with ‘Russia’ Banner,” Oct. 1917, photograph, Pickets—Arrests and Imprisonments folder, container I:160, group

I, National Woman’s Party Records, Women of Protest: Photographs from the National Women’s Party: Library of Con-

gress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mnwp.160034.

41 Lucy Gwynne Branham worked for Russian relief with the American Women’s Emergency Committee

(aw e c ), which mostly comprised former nwp activists, including Blatch, Helen Keller, Jessica Granville Smith,

Helen Todd, and Rogers. As a representative of that group, Branham lobbied Congress against an Allied blockade

of Russia in 1921. The blockade began in 1918 in response to Russian officials agreeing to a separate peace with

Germany, but unofficially continued until the American Relief Administration intervened in the Russian famine

in the late summer of 1921. She also traveled to Russia in 1921 to do publicity for the American Friends Service

Figure 5. Elihu Root, the U.S. envoy to Russia, chats with Uncle Sam about his recent

trip to Russia, in a Nina Allender cartoon called “Travel Is So Broadening.” Root

points out that “the Women are fighting for Democracy in Russia,” a reference to the

famous Russian women’s “battalion of death” that fought during World War I. Both

men are oblivious to the female suffragists marching outside the window and holding

signs that say “Democracy Begins at Home.” Nina Allender, “Travel Is So Broadening,”

Suffragist, Aug. 18, 1917. Courtesy Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, home of the

historic National Woman’s Party, Washington, D.C.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1040

Amid the attention that these well-bred, well-educated, and audacious suffragists

around Washington were drawing, New York State’s suffrage campaign, the leaders of

which were closely following developments in Russia, was coming to a climax. On Oc-

tober 27 the nawsa led a massive suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Signs included ones that read, “Our Allies, England, France and Russia, are for Woman

Suffrage. Wake Up, America!” The New York referendum passed on November 6, a vic-

tory that historians often cite as the turning point that assured passage of the federal

amendment. A day later, Bolsheviks took over the Winter Palace (the seat of the Provi-

Committee; served as field secretary for Russian Reconstruction Farms, an American-run collective farm in the Cau-

casus, from 1925 to 1927; and headed the Women’s Committee for the Recognition of Russia under the Women’s

International League for Peace and Freedom. She later served as secretary for the American Society for Cultural

Relations with Russia. See “The Bitter Cry of the Children,” Survey, Dec. 20, 1919, p. 252. On American Women’s

Emergency Committee, see testimony of Blatch and Branham, Relations with Russia: Hearing before the Committee

on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Sixty-Sixth Congress, Third Session, on S.J. Res. 164, a Resolution Provid-

ing for the Reestablishment of Trade Relations with Russia, and So Forth (Washington, 1921), 96–105. On Branham

and the Women’s Committee for the Recognition of Russia, see Katherine A. S. Siegel, “The Women’s Committee

for the Recognition of Russia: Progressives in the Age of ‘Normalcy,’” Peace and Change, 21 (July 1996), 289–317;

Women’s Committee for the Recognition of Russia folder, box 38, series B5, Pennsylvania section, part III, U.S. sec-

tion, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Papers (DG043), Swarthmore College Peace Collection

(Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa.); and Lucy Gwynne Branham Papers (Library of Congress).

Figure 6. Only recently released from prison in 1917, Lucy Gw ynne Branham support -

ed a campaign to convince the government to treat National Woman’s party leader

Alice Paul as a political prisoner by alluding to the notorious Russian prison system

and implying that treatment of suffragists in U.S. prisons was even worse. Branham’s

sign implicitly condemned the U.S. system of justice and thereby made a case for giv -

ing women a voice in the legal system so that it might improve. Courtesy Records of the

National Woman’s Party, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1041

sional Government) in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), launching the October Revolution.

Three days after that, in the United States, thirty-one picketers, including Dora Lewis,

who had held the “Russian banner” at the White House in June, and just-out-of-prison

Lucy Burns were arrested while protesting the treatment of suffrage prisoners, whom

guards had begun to force-feed. Upon arrival at the workhouse, the women were dragged,

beaten, and pushed into their cells; Burns was handcuffed to her cell overnight with her

arms above her head. The violence was later memorialized as the “Night of Terror.”

The brutal treatment backfired, becoming a public relations nightmare for the Wilson

administration. Paul, Burns, and twenty others were unconditionally released on No-

vember 27 and 28. But the damage had been done. The Suffragist printed a speech given

at the December 1917 nawsa conference by the Russian poet and revolutionist Maria

Moravsky, expressing shock that “American women could be arrested for peaceful pick-

eting at the White House.” Moravsky said that the treatment of the prisoners “reminded

me clearly of our old regime.” Noting she had twice been imprisoned in Russia, she in-

sisted, “I can assure you it was better than that which American women—suffragists—

must bear.” In Jailed for Freedom (1920), the suffragist Doris Stevens recalls a letter that

a young Russian immigrant, Vera Samarodin, sent to the Russian ambassador on behalf

of her sister, Nina, who was among those imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse. The

letter claims that Nina was subject to far crueler treatment than she would have received

in Russia, simply for demanding basic rights, which she exercised “to help the women of

this nation achieve the freedom her own people have.”

Even as Wilson condemned the actions of the “so-called pickets” and privately ex-

pressed hope to Catt that they would not influence the public (presumably negatively)

regarding woman suffrage, he went along in September 1918 with Catt’s call to support

woman suffrage as a “war measure.” Although Wilson’s declaration did not directly refer-

ence Russia, continuing comparisons of that country and the United States by Wilson

allies such as Catt, and by others, suggest that the specter of “darkest Russia” surpassing

the United States in democratic practice helped push Wilson toward support of the Nine-

teenth Amendment.

Bolshevik Feminists?

The historian David Foglesong argues that although the struggle to free Russia from the

despotic rule of the tsar was an enormously popular cause in the United States, “Bolshe -

vism . . . came to signify, more than tsarism ever had, the evil antithesis of Americanism.”

Even so, as Foglesong acknowledges, the Bolsheviks retained the goodwill of a significant

42 The papers of Harriet Laidlaw, the head of the New York State Women’s Suffrage Association, include trans-

lation of a pamphlet published by the All Russian League of Women’s Enfranchisement in Petrograd, which docu-

ments struggles for woman suffrage during the revolutionary period. See undated statement, [1917?], folder 156,

box 8, H. B. (Harriet Burton) Laidlaw Papers, 1851–1958 (Schlesinger Library). On the suffrage parade, see

“20,000 March in Suffrage Line,” New York Times, Oct. 28, 1917, pp. 1, 18, esp. 1. On November 6 as a turning

point in assuring the passage of the amendment, see Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 114. On the

“Night of Terror,” see Ford, Iron-Jawed Angels, 179–81.

43 On the Wilson administration and the release of suspects on November 27 and 28, see Ford, Iron-Jawed An-

gels, 182. On Maria Moravsky’s speech, see Maria Moravsky, “A Challenge from Russia,” Suffragist, Dec. 15, 1917,

p. 12. On Vera Samarodin and Nina Samarodin, see Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York, 1920), 180–81,

esp. 180.

44 Wilson to Catt, Oct. 13, 1917, folder 12, box 1, Catt Papers (Bryn Mawr College). Catt had called for sup-

porting suffrage as a war measure in August 1917. See Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt, 143.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1042

contingent of American progressives, liberals, and radicals. Among suffragists, although

the n aw s a (and Catt in particular) began to distance themselves from “radicals” in the

face of anticommunist rhetoric against suffragists, there was no marked shift in suffragist

rhetoric vis à vis Russia after the Bolsheviks took power. Positive references to Russian

practices regarding women continued, especially in nwp publications, after the suffrage

amendment was ratified in 1920. Still, a careful reading of suffrage publications reveals

that many suffragists, especially those in the n aw s a , were less enthusiastic about the

Bolsheviks than about their socialist predecessors. However, their criticisms tended to be

muted in public. Stone Blackwell, for instance, remained cautiously optimistic about the

Russian situation in her public writings, claiming that the “antis outdo the Bolsheviks”

in extremism. Harriot Stanton Blatch, like a number of other nwp activists, publicly

voiced support for the Bolsheviks in the years following the revolution. Blatch’s increas -

ingly radical politics brought her to the Socialist rather than the Communist party in

1920, but she took part in a celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution’s second anniversary

and joined other former suffragists in lobbying Congress for Russian famine relief in

1921. Privately, she expressed fear that women’s issues in Russia would be subsumed by

class concerns under Soviet control. That Stone Blackwell’s collection of Breshkovsky’s

letters and writings, The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution, happened to come

out in November 1917 (and was almost certainly already in press before the revolutionary

turn of events could be accounted for) seemed to imply that the Bolshevik Revolution

was the logical outcome of Breshkovsky’s lifelong agitation. From Breshkovsky’s perspec -

tive, this could not be further from the truth.

Although Stone Blackwell privately professed a preference for the more moderate so-

cialists, like many on the left, she was loathe to bring any credence to reactionaries who

were actively working to depose the Bolsheviks. As she explained to Breshkovksy’s protégé

George Lazarev:

I fully realize that [the Bolsheviks] seized the power in an unjust and arbitrary way,

and that their doing so has led to great misfortunes for Russia. It would have been

far better if they had left Kerensky and the Constitutional Assembly in control.

Also I realize that they are ruling despotically and not democratically. Yet I do not

desire to see them overthrown by outside force, because I believe that that would

mean a restoration of the monarchy, accompanied by all the horrors that followed

the fall of the Commune in Paris. It would be called a “constitutional monarchy,”

but its real effect would be to reduce Russia to the status of a colony, to be exploited

ruthlessly for the benefit of foreign capitalists.

45 Foglesong, American Mission and the Evil Empire, 56. On the Bolsheviks and the goodwill of American pro-

gressives, liberals, and radicals, see ibid., 57–58. On nawsa members distancing themselves from radicals, see Ford,

Iron-Jawed Angels, 228. On similar rhetoric vis à vis Russia in nwp publications after the Bolsheviks took over, see,

for example, “Women in Russia,” Suffragist, Nov. 27, 1917, p. 3. Stone Blackwell referred to the Bolsheviki as “ex-

tremists” in Alice Stone Blackwell, “Mme. Breshkovsky on the Russian Situation,” Woman Citizen, Dec. 1, 1917,

pp. 6–7; and A[lice]. S[tone]. B[lackwell]., “Antis Outdo Bolsheviki,” ibid., Dec. 8, 1917, p. 27. On Blatch, see

DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, 227–28; “Suffragist Meeting Turns into Bolshe-

vist Convention,” Woman Patriot, Dec. 27, 1919, p. 2; Relations with Russia, 96. The last letter from Breshkovsky in

Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution is dated June 10–23, 1917. In that letter she noted, “A new history of

the world is beginning, and here we are at the first steps of a march always difficult, but promising the most desir-

able results.” See Blackwell, Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution, 324.

46 Alice Stone Blackwell to George Lazarev, May 18, 1922, fond 5824, opis 1, del. 190, George Lazarev Papers

(State Archive of the Russian Federation).

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1043

The Suffragist reported in November 1917 that the revolutionary committee in power in

Russia was “as a matter of course including women in its councils and machinery.” At the

December 1917 n aw s a convention a speaker recalled President Wilson’s claims that “we

are fighting for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice

in their own government,” and, the speaker noted, “New Russia has answered the call.”

Although the Bolsheviks had tended to treat women’s issues as an afterthought prior

to taking power in 1917, they assumed that women’s legal equality with men would re-

sult from the revolution and publicly professed their commitment to a welfare state that

would diminish or even eliminate barriers to women’s advancement. Within ten years of

the revolution, in addition to women gaining the vote, abortions were legalized, divorce

was dramatically simplified, and women were given the option of keeping their names

in marriage (sometimes a man even took his wife’s name). Barriers to women’s educa-

tion and professional advancement were officially eliminated, generous maternity policies

were instituted, and efforts (admittedly inadequate) were made to create public laundries,

dining halls, and childcare facilities to free woman from what Lenin called “petty house-

work [that] crushes, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery,

and wastes her labor on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and

crushing drudgery.” The nwp activist Mary Winsor argued that the Bolsheviks were a big

improvement over the Provisional Government when it came to women’s issues. “Keren-

sky did nothing to improve things for women,” she insisted, but “Lenin said they must

not leave standing one brick of the whole edifice of women’s degradation; civil, legal, and

political. So they tore it all down and women now enjoy equal rights with men.”

The antis seized on such rhetoric. Although they were unable to stop the momentum

of the suffrage amendment, even before its passage they helped ignite a full-blown Red

Scare that characterized the feminist agenda as subversive and unpatriotic, and their ef-

forts later bore fruit. Before the Bolshevik take-over, the antis highlighted suffragists’ ad-

miration for the Russian Revolution to suggest suffragists’ disloyalty to the American sys-

tem of government. They were also quick to report on suffragists’ disenchantment with

the revolution. The Woman’s Protest against Woman Suffrage ran a story in October 1917

entitled “The Democracy in Russia Which Suffragists Laud,” quoting selectively from the

feminist Rheta Childe Dorr’s Inside the Russian Revolution (1917). The article recounts

Dorr’s horror at the chaos and violence, and her sense that the “fondest dreams of the so-

cialists,” whom she had once admired, had “turned out to be a nightmare.” Dorr’s book

does indeed condemn the lack of democracy under the Provisional Government, and she

shows even more skepticism about the Bolsheviks, who at the time of her writing were

waiting in the wings. But Dorr’s quote was taken out of context: her book offers strong

47 “Women in Russia.” On the nawsa convention, see Ida Husted Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 1900–

1920 (6 vols., New York, 1922), V, 513. Volumes 1–4 of this work were written and edited by different combina-

tions of Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper.

48 On women in Bolshevik Russia, see Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 48–58, 185–253; and Bar-

bara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge, Eng., 2004), 142–43. For the June 28, 1919, speech

in which he discusses freeing women from housework, see Vladimir Lenin, “A Great Beginning,” in The Woman

Question: Selection from the Writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, and Joseph Stalin, by Karl Marx et

al. (New York, 1951), 56. Emphasis in original. Winsor, “Status of Women in Soviet Russia.” See also “Position of

Women in the Soviet Union,” Equal Rights, Nov. 5, 1927, p. 207.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1044

praise for Russia’s women and remarks positively on widespread support for women’s suf-

frage in Russia. 49

After the Bolsheviks took power, the antis began a full-force campaign to link suffrage

to Bolshevism and subversion. The Woman’s Protest against Woman Suffrage, in its new

guise as the Woman Patriot (For Home and National Defense against Woman Suffrage, Femi-

nism, and Socialism), recounted pro-Soviet utterances and actions by feminists as though

the publication was exposing heretofore hidden connections. Then, having established

links between U.S. suffragists and Soviets, the antis revealed the negative effects of Bolshe-

vik policy on women (and men) in Russia. They suggested as well that granting women

suffrage would be the first step to “Bolshevizing” the United States. The Woman Patriot

also played to southern anxieties about race and gender disorder, and about federal inter-

vention at the polls: they implied the amendment would make it impossible\c to prevent

black women from voting and predicted that “the White Woman of the South shall be

subordinated to the black woman of the South.” The Woman Patriot even tried to blame

(Bolshevik) suffragists for race riots in the summer of 1919, sugges\cting their rhetoric of

social equality had created racial unrest.

The Woman Patriot attempted to associate not just suffrage activism but feminism in

general with disloyalty by linking both to a foreign ideology. A September 1918 article,

for instance, insisted that suffragists had no real loyalty to their country, “but are con-

stantly referring to Russia and alien lands as examples for American policy and practice.”

An editor suggested that funds should be raised to send the suffragists Carrie Chapman

Catt and Anna Howard Shaw to Russia “before it is too late to save the United States from

following in Russia’s footsteps, as these ladies are so eager for it to do.” They blamed chaos

in Russia during the civil war on woman suffrage. They claimed that “\cwoman suffrage

Russia” was “instituting female slave markets,” and asserted that “Feminists and Socialists

in Russia” had established “Bureaus of Free Love” and had “nationalized” women (and

children). More generally, the Woman Patriot held that “these movements endorsed by

the radicals always degrade women and destroy civilization.” (The claim that women were

“nationalized,” or made property of the state and freely available to men, was apparently

based on a decree issued by anarchists in Smolensk, perhaps specifically to discredit the

Bolsheviks, but it gained enough traction to merit being repeated in the New York Times

and to be taken up repeatedly in congressional hearings).

49 On the antis, see Thomas J. Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party: Female Anti-suffragists in the

United States, 1868–1920 (New York, 1994). On their commentary about Russia before the Bolshevik takeover, see

Rheta Childe Dorr, “The Democracy in Russia Which Suffragists Laud,” Woman’s Protest against Woman Suffrage,

11 (Oct. 1917), 6. Rheta Childe Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution (New York, 1917).

50 On Woman Patriot (For Home and National Defense against Woman Suffrage, Feminism, and Socialism), see

Woman Patriot, April 27, 1918, p. 1. On Woman Patriot’s commentary about pro-Soviet rhetoric and the negative

effects of Bolshevik policy and woman suffrage, see M[argaret]. C. R[obinson]., “Shall We ‘Catch Up’ with Russia?,”

Woman Patriot, Aug. 3, 1918, p. 7; and “Woman Suffrage Russia Instituting Female Slave Markets!,” ibid., June

29, 1918, p. 7. On antisuffragists, accusations of Bolshevism, and southern anxieties a\cbout race and gender, see

Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood, 44; Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 124; Jablonsky, Home,

Heaven, and Mother Party, 108–10; and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote,

1850–1920 (Bloomington, 1998), 124.

51 “The Fallacy of Federal Suffrage,” Woman Patriot, Sept. 14, 1918, pp. 7–8. [Robinson], “Shall We ‘Catch Up’

with Russia?” Emphasis in orginal. “Woman Suffrage Russia Instituting Female Slave Markets!”; “Bureaus of Free

Love Established by Feminists and Socialists in Russia,” ibid., Nov. 2, 1918, pp. 2–3. On the claim that women

were “nationalized,” see “Reds to Allot Husbands: Petrograd Council Decides Women of 18 to 45 Must Marry,”

New York Times, Jan. 5, 1919, p. 3.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1045

The antis recognized that suffrage activists wanted more than just the vote, and in that

sense their seemingly overblown rhetoric about the threat to civilization posed by suffrag-

ists was logical. The antis quickly came to understand that in praisin\cg revolutionary Rus-

sia’s policies toward women, suffragists were calling attention to the ways the revolution

had redrawn the terms of women’s citizenship and gender roles more generally. The extent

to which the antis played up this larger interest of suffragists is even more telling: the Bol-

shevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai, for instance, received far more coverage in the Wo m -

an Patriot than in the feminist press. The Woman Patriot especially seized upon the praise

given to Kollantai by leaders in the U.S. Children’s Bureau for her social welfare efforts as

occasion to condemn the bureau’s entire program as a socialist/communist conspiracy.

While such claims are absurd, historians sympathetic to feminism have been so loathe

to give them any credence that these scholars have resisted examining the actual connec-

tions between American feminists and Bolsheviks. For instance, the birth control pioneer

Margaret Sanger invited Kollontai to serve as vice president of an international birth con-

trol conference in 1925; a number of suffrage activists worked as journalists and relief

workers, or in other capacities in the Soviet Union and actively promoted U.S.-Soviet re-

lations; and, more generally, Soviet legal statutes, programs to support working mothers,

and women’s professional achievements suggested goals and possibilities for U.S. femi-

nists.

In the years following the Bolshevik Revolution, U.S. feminist journals printed out-

spoken defenses of Bolshevik policy. In 1919 several articles in international, nawsa,

and nwp publications challenged popular rumors that the Bolsheviks had “nationalized”

women. Articles throughout the 1920s emphasized equal rights for women under Soviet

rule, and several pieces praised Russia’s “feminist record.” Feminist journals avidly fol-

lowed Soviet efforts to establish communal dining halls, laundries, and nurseries; they

noted Soviet marriage laws that aimed to equalize power relations within marriage, to

make divorce easier, and to foster unions based on mutual affection rather than economic \c

considerations; they pointed to liberalized abortion regulations; they noted the program

of sex education; they highlighted the role of women in Soviet government, professions,

and industry; and they praised the “sweeping and unhampered program of social reform”

undertaken largely by women. Jessica Granville Smith, a former executive committee

member of the nwp who had gone to Russia in 1922 with the American Friends Service

Committee, a Quaker relief program, and who later helped start an American-run collec-

tive farm in the Causcaus (of which Branham was field secretary), addressed the National

Woman’s party in January 1925. Smith maintained, in remarks summarized in Equal

Rights, “the absolute economic, political, and legal emancipation of Russian women is

one of the biggest achievements of the Russian revolution.” Her Woman in Soviet Russia

(1928) became an important source for the U.S. public’s information on women’s posi-

tion in Russia. Branham, Winsor, and Ella Rush Murray visited the Soviet Union in 1927

under the aegis of the American Investigation Committee on Russian Women, which

52 “Kollontay and Our Children’s Bureau,” Woman Patriot, May 1, 1925, p. 66; anonymous, “Key Women of

the Revolution—Kollontai,” ibid., Nov. 1, 1921, pp. 6–7; anonymous, “The Pioneers of the Children’s Bureau,”

ibid., Aug. 15, 1921, pp. 4–5.

53 Alexandra Kollontai to Margaret Sanger, Jan. 23, 1925, fond 134, delo 1, Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai

Papers (1888–1952) (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History [rgasp\f], Moscow).

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1046

concluded that “there is now no inequality of the sexes” in Russia. They added: “It is pain-

ful to patriotic Americans to recognize how far their country lags behind Soviet Russia in

its treatment of women.” Liberal publications with a more general readership also praised

Bolshevik policies toward women as well as the women themselves. Between the antis’

overblown accusations and the pro-Soviet rhetoric in suffrage publications, is not surpris-

ing that two suffragists were among the first individuals called to testify at government

hearings investigating Bolshevik influence in the United States.

Suffragists and the Red Scare

In January 1919, after returning from a stint in Russia that formed the basis of over two

dozen articles that were syndicated to “more than a hundred newspapers across the U.S.

and Canada” and “eventually translated into five languages,” as well as her book Six Red

Months in Russia, Louise Bryant stayed for several weeks at the nwp headquarters in

Washington, D.C. On February 3 she and the journalist Albert R hys Williams spoke to

a gathering at Poli’s Theater devoted to telling “the truth” about Russia. Ida Waters of the

nwp had announced the meeting in advance at the Capitol, personally inviting several

congressmen and leaving flyers for others. Despite a large turnout, the meeting did more

harm than good for those wishing to shed a positive light on the Bolsheviks. The Woman

Patriot ran a series of articles under a banner headline that read, in part: “Bolsheviki

Meetings Arranged by Suffragists.” The more staid Washington Post ’s headline was “Ex-

tolling the Reds.” Bryant was among twenty-five women sent to jail a few days later for

burning an effigy of President Wilson in front of the White House.

Outrage following the Poli’s Theater event resulted in a Senate’s investigation, led by

Senator Lee Slater Overman of North Carolina, of “Bolshevism and all other forms of

anti-American radicalism,” marking official participation by the U.S. government in the

1919 Red Scare. Along with Catherine Breshkovsky, who had recently arrived in the

United States to solicit support for socialist critics of the Bolshevik regime, both Bryant

and the suffragist and journalist Bessie Beatty were among those called to testify before

Overman’s committee. Breshkovsky’s testimony described the dire conditions in Rus-

sia that included poverty and a lack of schools, schoolbooks, and teachers. She said the

54 On feminist journals and Soviet women, see Ellen Hayes, “Woman, Bolshevism, and Home,” Woman Citizen,

April 19, 1919, p. 1002; John Rockman, “The Alleged ‘Nationalization’ of Women,” International Woman Suffrage

News, 13 (May 1919), 110–11; “As We Unfortunately Get No Direct News from the Women of Russia,” ibid., 19

(Nov. 1924), 19; Ruby A. Black, “Women in Russia,” Equal Rights, Jan. 24, 1925, p. 395; “Russia Becoming Femi-

nist,” ibid., 394; and “An Enviable Record,” ibid., May 2, 1925, p. 92. On Jessica Smith and Equal Rights, see Black,

“Women in Russia,” 395. Jessica Smith, Woman in Soviet Russia (New York, 1928). On the 1927 visit to the Soviet

Union, see “American Investigation Committee on Russian Women,” 395–96. On liberal publications that praised

Bolshevik polices toward women, see Edward Alsworth Ross, “Russian Women and Their Outlook,” Century, 96

(June 1918), 249–57; “Enter the Woman Warrior,” Modern Review, 30 (Nov. 1921), 549; and Magdeleine Marx,

“The New Russian Women,” Nation, Nov. 7, 1923, pp. 508–10.

55 Mary V. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant (Boston, 1996), 102. Louise Bryant, Six Red

Months in Russia: An Observer’s Account of Russia before and during the Proletarian Dictatorship (New York, 1918). Ida

Waters to Senator [Charles Spalding] Thomas, Feb. 5, 1919, quoted in “Bolsheviki Meetings Arranged by Suffrag-

ists Arouse Senate to Investigate Radical Propaganda,” Woman Patriot, Feb. 8, 1919, pp. 1–3. “Extolling the Reds,”

Washington Post, Feb. 4, 1919, p. 6. Clara Wold, a suffragist from Portland, Oregon (Louise Bryant’s home town),

asked Bryant to take part in the action, inquiring whether she would be willing to be arrested. Clara Wold to Louise

Bryant, Jan. 30, 1919, telegram, folder 115, box 8, Louise Bryant Papers (ms 18\b0) (Manuscripts and Archives, Yale

University Library, New Haven, Conn.).

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1047

Bolsheviks were agents of the Germans and were worse than the tsar. She encouraged

American intervention to overthrow them. 56

Bryant and Beatty, both of whom had met Breshkovsky in Russia, offered a very dif-

ferent picture. Bryant worked to redirect discussion toward the way Soviet policy and

practice suggested a widened horizon of possibility for women. She refuted rumors about

the “nationalization of women” and suggested that enfranchised, liberated Russian wom-

en would not have allowed themselves to be “nationalized”: “Women are accepted on

an equal basis with men, getting equal pay for equal work. They have an equal place in

the labor unions. They are not excluded from any kind of work. I never have been in a

country where women were as free as they are in Russia and where they are treated not as

females but as human beings. . . . It is a very healthy country for a suffragist to go into.”

Bryant picked up on a running discourse among suffragists in adding, “They could not

understand, when we had democracy here so long, that our women, most of them, were

not even enfranchised.”

In her published writings, Beatty was more sanguine than Bryant about women’s po-

sition in postrevolutionary Russia, noting that despite women’s “equal rights” under the

new regime, their lot was not so different. Of 1,600 delegates at a political convention,

she counted twenty-three women. Many other women were there, but instead of par-

ticipating they were serving tea or ushering men to their seats. “It was so natural that it

almost made me homesick,” Beatty wrote in The Red Heart of Russia (1918). But in her

congressional testimony, Beatty, like Bryant, refused to condemn the Bolsheviks. She

also claimed that her testimony, based on careful, extended observation, was worth more

than that of critics who painted a portrait of chaos, mob rule, and nationalized women.

(Reverend George A. Simons, in his testimony, for example, agreed with a description of

the Bolsheviks as violent, amoral, and lascivious figures who “rape and ravish and despoil

women at will.”) Beatty responded to questions about the Bolshevik “reign of terror” by

saying that there had been none until the allies intervened there. Asked whether she was

a socialist, Beatty, after several interruptions, managed to tell the committee that the only

party she had ever belonged to was one in California that had worked for the election of

President Wilson, “The College Equal Suffrage League of Nonpartisan Women.” Admit-

ting this group was, indeed, a suffrage organization, she reassured Senator Knute Nelson

that she did not, in his words, “belong to what we call the picket club, here.” Unwilling

to leave it at that, Beatty insisted on explaining herself: “I want to tell you what I am. For

12 years I have done social-service work of different kinds; and if you have ever been a

social-service worker you have a great passion in your heart to do away with poverty, and

you feel that every child born into the world should get an education, have enough milk,

and all that sort of thing.” To this Senator Nelson replied, “Yes; but you know the social

end of the Trotsky and Lenine government is going to do that job.” Beatty responded, “I

do not know just how it is going to be brought about, but I am interested in any program

which may help to bring that about.”

56 On the Senate investigations following the event at Poli’s Theater, see “Senate Orders Reds Here Investigated,”

New York Times, Feb. 5, 1919, p. 1; Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Min-

neapolis, 1955), 94; and Bolshevik Propaganda: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary,

United States Senate, Sixty-Fifth Congress, Third Session and Thereafter, Pursuant to S. Res. 432 and 469, February 11,

1919, to March 10, 1919 (Washington, 1919), 241–52.

57 Bolshevik Propaganda, 541.58 Bessie Beatty, The Red Heart of Russia (New York, 1918), 358; Bolshevik Propaganda, 109, 147, 699.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1048

Beatty was, indeed, interested in the “Soviet experiment” for just those reasons. Prior

to Red Heart of Russia, she had published A Political Primer for the New Voter (1912), fol-

lowing the woman suffrage victory in Beatty’s native California. In that guide she dis-

cussed practical aspects of civic life such as registration, naturalization, jury duty, voting,

and political parties. But Beatty’s publication was also a meditation on the rights and

duties of citizenship, and it clearly reflects an outlook that primed her to take an interest

in the “Soviet experiment.” A voting citizen, she says in part 1, “Citizenship,” holds “the

right of saying whether he will have jam on his bread, or just butter; whether he wants

pure milk and a sanitary dwelling place and clean streets, or impure milk, an unsanitary

dwelling place and unclean streets. To him belongs the right of saying whether he wishes

to see the country governed for the few who combine the ‘special interests,’ or for the

many who are the people.” In a chapter on the legal status of women she asserts, “Wom-

an’s interest in humanitarian measures, which always pinch the pockets of the big manu-

facturers, make these manufacturers fear the woman vote.” Helen Keller, who was on the

board of the nwp, echoed Beatty’s sentiments when she praised the Soviet Union on these

very terms, hailing “this nation making human life and happiness more important in its

government than the conservation of property for a privileged class.”

Breshkovsky, whose chief American supporters a decade earlier had been settlement

house workers, challenged the notion that the Bolshevik Revolution was a victory for so-

cial welfare. But Bryant told skeptical senators that Babushka was being used by counter-

revolutionaries. In fact, Stone Blackwell would privately confirm Bryant’s views on her

dear old friend, telling George Lazarev that the American public did not know the dif-

ference between a socialist, an anarchist, and a Bolshevik: “So when Babushka came to

this country and lectured against Bolshevism, she was received with open arms by all the

reactionaries, because they could make use of her, unconsciously to herself, in their cam-

paign against socialism.”

Victories and Defeats

Suffragists won a great victory when the Susan B. Anthony amendment passed on June

4, 1919, and was ratified on August 18, 1920. But getting the vote was only the first step

toward emancipating women and creating the kind of just society that many feminists

imagined as the goal for which citizenship rights should be exercised. As Crystal East -

man acknowledged in the radical periodical the Liberator, just after the suffrage victory,

“Now [feminists] can say what they are really after: and what they are after, in common

with all the rest of the struggling world, is freedom. ”

But if the Russian Revolution helped American women imagine new possibilities—

indeed, even helped them gain the right to vote—it also helped the antis paint feminism’s

broader agenda as subversive. The political scientist Wendy Sarvasy points out how the

nwp ’s journal Equal Rights (renamed from the Suffragist) “continually reminded its Amer-

ican readers that a number of other countries had a commitment both to formal \cgender

59 Bessie Beatty, A Political Primer for the New Voter (San Francisco, 1912), 5, 47. Helen Keller, “Jottings from

Russia from 1917–1921,” typescript, folder 7, box 225, Helen Keller Papers (American Academy for the Blind,

New York).

60 Bolshevik Propaganda, 508, 513; Blackwell to Lazarev, Feb. 22, 1920, fond 5284, opis 1, del. 190, Lazarev

Papers.

61 Crystal Eastman, “Now We Can Begin,” Liberator, 33 (Dec. 1920), 23–24. Emphasis in original.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1049

equality and to advanced social welfare policy, such as universal labor protections and

maternity insurance.” Within this discourse Soviet Russia was not merely one example

among many, as a reader of Sarvasy’s useful discussion of the postsuffrage “quest for a

feminist welfare state” might gather. But to suggest this might seem to validate retrospec-

tively the antifeminist discourse that helped undermine a range of social w\celfare measures,

including the sweeping maternal and child health program passed under the 1921 Shep-

pard-Towner Act; or that inspired the infamous 1924 “spider web chart,” linking women’s

welfare and peace activism to Bolshevism and subversion. This chart, published in Henry

Ford’s Dearborn Independent, led to an outcry by women’s organizations, the leaders of

which discovered that the same groups that had worked to link woman suffrage to Bol-

shevism were responsible for the chart and related efforts.

Indeed, there was no feminist-Bolshevist conspiracy. However, a significant propor-

tion of women on the spider web chart, including the suffrage activists Mary Winsor,

Lucy Gwynne Branham, Madeleine Doty, Sara Bard Field, Emma Wold, and Margaret

Dreier, had expressed interest in and even enthusiasm for the Russian revolutionary proj-

ect. None were actually Communists. But the reality is that revolutionary Russia was an

essential vehicle for American feminists—before and after they attained suffrage—to ar-

ticulate the social democratic notion of citizenship that Sarvasy describes. Moreover, the

Russian example endowed what might seem an improbable, utopian vision with practical

possibility.

For all but the most die-hard communists, this utopian vision of womanhood trans-

formed or to-be-transformed under a socialist state gradually gave way to a more nuanced

and critical understanding of life under Soviet control. Yet many on the left nonetheless

refrained from publicly condemning what Stone Blackwell in 1930 privately referred to

as the “present tyranny in Russia.” Even by the late 1930s, as Joseph Stalin’s version of

a socialist utopia translated into a pervading atmosphere of paranoia, repression, and,

ultimately, terror, there remained once-dedicated American suffragists who still viewed

Soviet Russia in utopian terms that suggest a combination of desire, naïveté, and willed

ignorance.

62 Sarvasy, “Beyond the Difference versus Equality Policy Debate,” 337. On the Sheppard-Towner Act, see J.

Stanley Lemons, “The Sheppard-Towner Act: Progressivism in the 1920s,” Journal of American History, 55 (March

1969), 776–86; and Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana,

1995), 170–90. “The Socialist-Pacifist Movement in America Is an Absolutely Fundamental and Integral Part of

International Socialism,” Dearborn Independent, March 22, 1924, p. 4. Catt to Jane Addams, May 27, 1924, box

4, Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, 1848–1950 (Library of Congress). Carrie Chapman Catt, “Poison Propaganda,”

Woman Citizen, May 31, 1924, pp. 14, 32–33.

63 Madeleine Doty reported on the Russian Revolution. Sara Bard Field marched with Bryant and later recalled

hearing Bryant’s stories about the Russian Revolution. See Sara Bard Field to Bryant, Jan. 26, 1922, box 8, Vir-

ginia Gardner Papers (Tamiment Library, New York University). Wold urged Bryant to join the suffrage movement

and encouraged her to speak about Russia. See Wold to Bryant, Dec. 8, 1918, folder 115, box 8, Bryant Papers.

Margaret Dreier’s husband, Raymond Robins, headed the American Red Cross expedition in Russia and worked

for U.S. recognition of Russia. See Neil V. Salzman, Reform and Revolution: The Life and Times of Raymond Robins

(Kent, 1991).

64 On the “present tyranny in Russia,” see Blackwell to Lazarev and Catherine Breshkovsky, March 14, 1930,

fond 5824, opis 1, del. 436, Lazarev Papers. Lillian Wald refused to condemn the Bolsheviks for similar reasons.

See Wald to Breshkovsky, Feb. 27, 1919, folder 10, box 1, Wald Papers. On American suffragist views on the Soviet

Union in the late 1930s, see Florence Luscomb, “Russia: Seeing Is Believing,” n. d., unpublished manuscript, folder

291, box 12, Florence Luscomb Papers (Schlesinger Library). The former suffragists Stone Blackwell, Bessie Beatty,

and Beatrice Kinkead were among the signers of a declaration published in Soviet Russia Today urging support for

the Soviet Union just days before the Nazi-Soviet Pact was announced. See “To All Active Supporters of Democracy

and Peace,” Soviet Russia Today, 8 (Sept. 1939), 24–25, 28.

American Feminists and Revolutionary Russia 1050

The Soviet Union offered no viable model of democratic citizenship, and just what

women’s entitlement to “equal rights” with men meant in that totalitarian system is hard

to say. Party members enjoyed more rights and privileges than regular citizens, and a

whole class of political undesirables were excluded from voting and other rights altogeth-

er. Moreover, centralized control and basic lack of choice made voting little more than a

show of loyalty to the regime. Although Russian women made notable professional gains, in practice the nurseries,

laundries, communal kitchens, and other schemes designed to rescue women from “do-

mestic drudgery” proved inadequate, and few women ever ascended to the higher ech-

elons of Soviet government. Stalinist policies served to strengthen the nuclear family and

women’s conventional roles. And, ironically (given this increasingly conservative family

policy), the women’s section of the Communist party’s Central Committee was dissolved

in 1930 under the rationale that it was no longer necessary. The paradoxical position of

women in Stalinist Russia exacerbated the burdens on women: they were expected to

work outside the home and participate in public life, and they remained the primary care-

takers of children and in charge of domestic responsibilities.

The turn to Russia by American feminists who embraced the “radical international

women’s movement” ultimately backfired, both because the Soviets’ promised gains for

women proved illusory and because the taint of Bolshevism served to narrow the mean -

ing of feminism in the United States. Many mainstream feminists came to resist any as -

sociation that might tar their cause, backpedaling on their original, capacious demands

for social transformation, while feminists who refused to repudiate the Left “were re -

lentlessly red-baited, themselves treated as subversives.” In 1920 the National Woman’s

party rejected Crystal Eastman’s platform, which proposed, in language reminiscent of

Bolshevik rhetoric, “to remove legal and customary barriers to women’s self-realization,

to remake marriage laws and public opinion to eliminate the homemaker-child-rearer’s

economic dependence, to end laws prohibiting birth control, and to remove laws of in -

heritance, divorce, child custody and sexual morality on the basis of sexual equality.” No

great surprise, then, that traditional gender roles became a defining feature of the Cold

War, eclipsing expansive feminist goals and making unspeakable the extent to which

the Russian Revolution had once seemed to suggest the practical possibility of fulfilling

those aspirations.

But instead of ruing early feminists’ misguided visions of emancipated Soviet wom-

en, following Kate Baldwin’s observations about the Soviet Union’s significance for the

formulation of black internationalism, we might consider the “narrative of possibility”

it helped create for non-Soviet others, that is, the way it “furnish[ed] a space to rethink

crucial aspects of social and cultural life at home.”

67 The suffrage struggle in the United

States, and U.S. women’s self-crafting as newly enfranchised citizens after passage of the

Nineteenth Amendment, was closely bound up with the gender politics of th\ce Russian

65 Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 291–97, 331–43.66 On feminists being red-baited, see DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights, 273. On Crystal Eastman’s

1920 platform, see Nancy Cott, “Woman Suffrage and the Left,” 43. On gender roles and the Cold War, see Elaine

Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988).

67 Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain, 8, 21.

ffe Journal of American HistoryMarch 2014 1051

Revolution. Though a gross disappointment for citizens of the Soviet Union—and, ulti-

mately, for all people who looked to the Soviet Union for a new model of world citizen—

the “Soviet experiment” had important and heretofore unexplored ramifications for U.S.

feminists’ ability to imagine themselves and to perform as subjects and as citizens of the

world.

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