women's rights Archives - Not Even Past

Voting Rights Still Threatened 100 Years After the 19th Amendment

100 years ago, Congress approved the 19th Amendment, which prohibited the denial or limitation of voting rights “on account of sex.”

The agonizing, fourteen-month struggle by suffragists to get three-quarters of the states to ratify the Amendment, especially its dramatic culmination in the Tennessee statehouse, has garnered much attention. But it may come as a surprise that Texas, a state that has become notorious nationwide for passing some of the most restrictive voting legislation, ratified the Amendment in just 14 days.

Black and white image of women Register to Vote in Travis County, 1918 — Women Register to Vote in Travis County, 1918. (via Texas State Library and Archives Commission)

To be sure, Texas’s speedy ratification of the 19th Amendment represents a beacon for women’s political power in the U.S., but a critical assessment of the process it took to win it tells us far more about today’s political atmosphere and cautions us to compare the marketing of voting rights laws with their actual implications.

In a one-party state like Texas, the primaries were the elections that mattered, and 1918 marked the first time women could participate — thanks, in part, to campaigning by thousands of members of the all-white Texas Equal Suffrage Association (TESA).

Not all women got the chance to vote, however. Despite efforts by Black activists, including suffragists, Texas’s all-white primary system trumped women’s newly won right nearly everywhere in the state. Even still, the support from TESA secured the election of a pro-suffrage governor, William Hobby, and convinced him to introduce an equal suffrage amendment to the Texas constitution.

Like today, however, reactions to heightened immigration from Mexico – largely by those fleeing the violence of the Mexican Revolution – influenced Texas’s equal suffrage movement. Believing the specter of adding Mexican-born women to voter rolls would alienate legislators who would otherwise back women’s suffrage, Governor Hobby proposed a two-part amendment that would extend full suffrage to women but reverse a policy allowing foreign-born residents to vote if they had petitioned for naturalization.

Tasked with getting voters to approve the amendment on May 24, 1919, TESA adhered to advice from national women’s suffrage leaders willing to alienate Mexican American and African American suffragists for another state win. “In the winning or losing of the Second Amendment on your ballot,” read a TESA leaflet addressed to the Men of Texas, “the State chooses between her women and the alien enemies within our gates as citizens.”

Image of a printed flyer saying, "Men of Texas: The women of Texas need your help on May 24th" issued by the Texas Equal Suffrage Association — Printed flyer saying, “Men of Texas: The women of Texas need your help on May 24th” issued by the Texas Equal Suffrage Association [FP E.4 B #26 (Folder 6)] via Austin History Center

While this tactic won the allegiance of many Texans, it lost them the election — not a total surprise because immigrant men on a pathway to citizenship still retained the right to vote.

Just eleven days later, Congress approved the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the denial of voting rights on the basis of only sex. It took Hobby just two weeks to call a special session to approve the federal amendment’s simple language.

By 1921, Mexican-born women awaiting naturalization had lost their right to vote. In 1923, a restructured all-white primary law closed out even Black women who had managed to register earlier.

And again, on this 100^th anniversary of Congress’s approval of women’s suffrage, voting rights are imperiled in Texas, this time by measures espoused as necessary to end voter fraud: the voter identification law already in place, threatened purges of voting rolls to eliminate non-citizens, and bills that nearly passed in this legislative session that would have classified registration mistakes as felonies.

In practice, these measures have targeted the same kinds of groups excluded from voting a century ago, such as the African American and immigrant women unable to reap the benefits of the 19^th Amendment.

Photograph of women Congress members wearing white attend President Trump’s State of the Union address at the US Capitol on February 5, 2019 — Women Congress members wearing white attend President Trump’s State of the Union address at the US Capitol on February 5, 2019. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images (via Slate)

Photos of congresswomen wearing white at the 2019 State of the Union address illustrate how that history of injustices may have inspired women to figure so prominently in movements for truly universal voting rights. Those sworn in for the first time this year include many who could not have joined major suffrage organizations in 1919. But as crucial as it has been and will be to gain further political power for women by voting them into office, we can’t isolate that from burning voting rights issues today, in which Texas, like then, is a leader in voting restriction.

Laurie B. Green is an associate professor of history and a faculty affiliate in the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Versions of this op-ed have been featured in The Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express News, Abilene Reporter News, Amarillo Globe News, and The El Paso Times.

More by Laurie Green:
Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity
The Media Matters: Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Discovery of Hunger in the U.S.

You might also like:
Great Books on Women’s History: United States
Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas

By Micaela Valadez

The year 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the Tex-Son strike, a major labor battle waged in San Antonio, Texas from 1959 to 1963 by mostly Mexican, Mexican-American, and some Anglo women all of whom were active members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Local 180. This strike is important for the history of Mexican Americans, women, and labor organization because it bridged the two other major moments for Mexican and Mexican American labor activism: the Pecan Shellers strike in San Antonio during the 1930s and the other Farah strike of the 1970s in El Paso. Little is known about labor activism strategies of marginalized women in the Southwest during the period in between these two infamous labor organizing efforts. The Tex-Son strike unveils what working women did to advocate for their needs on the garment factory floor during the Cold War period, especially in a historically anti-labor, anti-union state.

Black and white image of two women carrying picket signs, Tex-Son "On Strike" for Local 180, ILGWU, San Antonio, 1963 — Two women carrying picket signs, Tex-Son “On Strike” for Local 180, ILGWU, San Antonio, 1963 (via UTA Libraries)

The Tex-Son strike was organized by the ILGWU, affiliated for most of its existence with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and then the AFL-CIO when the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1955. By the mid-1930s, most of the garment industry moved to the Southwest as the region offered a low-cost labor pool of Black and Latinx workers. This industry transition proved to be complicated for the ILGWU as the union sent Anglo men with little experience in Spanish-speaking communities to represent workers in the Southwest. Eventually, the ILGWU maintained a presence in large cities in Texas, including San Antonio.

San Antonio was home to one of the largest populations of ethnically Mexican people in the United States, which the garment industry exploited for some of the lowest wages in the country. Many working-class ethnically Mexican women in San Antonio were able to obtain positions in the defense industry during WWII, but afterwards were left with slim options besides factory jobs. Tex-Son, owned by brothers Harold and Emanuel Franzel, employed both Anglo and Mexican American women, but were actively outsourcing work to Tupelo, Mississippi where Black women made up a lucrative labor force. In response to an uptick in union membership among Tex-Son workers by the ILGWU, the Franzels produced anti-union literature and warned their workers against signing any union agreements in the fall of 1958, before the strike began. In response, the ILGWU Negotiating Committee sent demands to the Franzels which included better wages and benefits among others.

The work of Gregoria Montalbo was essential to building momentum for the strike. An organizer from Chicago, her main job was to explain to hopeful recruits about the benefits and necessity of a strike against Tex-Son. Montalbo’s role as the president of Local 180 was focused on recruitment prior to the strike as well as working to gain support from San Antonio’s clergy during the strike, appealing to the many workers who were members of Catholic congregations in the city. One of the most committed clergy supporters was Father Sherrill Smith who agreed with Local 180 that San Antonio needed unions in order to create a more equitable work environment for everyone. He played a key role on the picket line and going door to door to recruit more people to join the strike.

The Tex-Son strike was the first to use an ILGWU Chicana lead organizer, Sophie Gonzalez, who became the face of the Tex-Son strike. Gonzalez began union organizing in 1949 after her brother, a union organizer for the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butchers of America Union, encouraged her to accept a position in the ILGWU. Her presence in local newspapers and on the picket line was an integral piece of the ILGWU’s strategy. She maintained a certain physical appearance that portrayed her respectability as a woman but remained fierce in her communication of worker’s demands to the media and locals.

The very first week of the strike was the most tumultuous in terms of physical altercations between the women and allies on strike, the women who continued to work throughout the strike, and the police. On February 26^th and 27^th, the women on strike, angered by scab workers being escorted in and out of the factory, began throwing eggs and rocks at strike breakers and getting in physical altercations. The police charged the strikers with rioting and drunkenness, however there was not sufficient evidence to prove that any of the strikers were inebriated while on the picket lines.

Black and white image of Helen Martinez and her four children in San Antonio, Texas — Helen Martinez and her four children, San Antonio (via UTA Libraries)

The ILGWU also engaged in a propaganda campaign to accompany the strike and boycott of Tex-Son goods. This campaign exploited the dominant ideology of the time about motherhood instead of on the women’s role as economic providers. In doing so, they produced materials such as reproducing checks given to Tex-Son employees next to pictures of their children, effectively communicating the inability to care for a family on such dismal paychecks. Even children participated by handing out balloons to other children entering surrounding department stores with “Don’t Buy Tex-Son Children’s Clothes,” imprinted on them. These tactics, however, were detrimental to the image of strikers as workers, not just mothers.

In the first year of the strike, the ILGWU women gained support from other local unions, such as the International Union of Brewery Workers, and other male supporters who assisted in picket line activities. However, the daily hardships that came along with picketing wore down many of the women who originally joined the strike. Many were forced to seek out other kinds of employment, especially after being blacklisted by Tex-Son, barring them from working at other garment factories. By September 1960, ILGWU strikers began to fear that their leadership was giving up on them, which eventually came to fruition when two months later, the small benefit checks from ILGWU stopped entirely and Gonzalez and other union leaders pulled out of the strike entirely. After appeals from people like County Commissioner Albert Peña Jr., the AFL-CIO office in Washington, D.C. agreed to continue to fund the remaining 80 women on the picket line. However, morale was already low and a few women complained that Gonzalez’s absence hurt the propaganda strategy. Others, however, complained that her leadership style and charges of opportunism hurt the strike from the very beginning. Ultimately, the strike lost its fervor due to continued violence perpetrated on the women and general distrust and lack of enthusiasm and financial support. By the end of 1962 the ILGWU pulled out of San Antonio altogether. On January 24, 1963, only eleven women were left on the last day at the picket line.

Black and white image of brewer workers supporting Tex-Son strikes — Brewer workers supporting Tex-Son strikes (via UTA Libraries)

The consequences of an unsuccessful strike were clearly visible; after the ILGWU pulled out of San Antonio, unionism in the city remained practically absent. Many factories began to mock Tex-Son’s strategy of outsourcing work to the Deep South and across the U.S.-Mexico border. However, the Tex-Son strike is an important episode in the history of ethnically Mexican women’s Cold War era strategies to gaining labor rights for themselves. Blending public and private spheres by challenging the public to support their fight as mothers making ends meet for their families, the women presented locals with a new idea of women’s roles in the realm of labor. The Tex-Son strike also served as a primer of sorts for Texas Chicano Movement activism in the late 60s and early 70s that began to appeal to Chicanas’ racial and ethnic identity and oppression, rather than solely on gender identity and motherhood.

In addition to the historical importance, the strike also connects with current issues such as the recent Mississippi ICE raids at a poultry processing plant. Many observers suggest that the workers were targeted specifically because they successfully unionized and won a law suit against Koch Foods for $3.75 million over sexual harassment, national origin and race discrimination, and retaliation against Latinx workers. Although there are obvious differences between these two events, there are some salient congruencies. Both involved gendered discrimination and discrimination based on race and ethnicity. More obvious though, is the constant threats of violence that Latinx workers face then and today and their vulnerable position in exploitative labor relations. The Tex-Son strike and the unionization of the Mississippi poultry plant both ended in victory and defeat causing families to be uprooted and the loss of important sources of income. The immigrants detained by ICE are facing some of the most horrid conditions in detention and the women of the Tex-Son strike were beaten and chastised on the picket line. As different as the consequences of each are, the women involved share unsatisfactory and even dangerous work conditions alongside gender, ethnic, and national origin discrimination.

Sixty years after the beginning of the Tex-Son strike, Latinx people in the U.S. are still a major source of cheap labor and a punching bag for anti-union and anti-immigrant sentiments. Fortunately, strong labor activist roots for Latinx peoples of all nationalities and races still remain at the core of obtaining equitable working conditions. The Tex-Son strike of 1959, among others throughout the hemisphere, should be remembered as a foundation and lesson for labor activists today as anti-immigrant rhetoric is spewed from the highest bodies of government here and abroad.

This article draws on the following sources:

Lori Flores, “An Unladylike Strike Fashionably Clothed: Mexicana and Anglo Women Garment Workers Against Tex-Son, 1959-1963. Pacific Historical Review. 78, no. 3 (August 2009), 367-402.

Irene Ledesma, “Texas Newspapers and Chicana Workers’ Activism, 1919-1974. Western Historical Quarterly, 27, no. 3 (1995), 309-331

Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. 10^th Anniversary Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan. By Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2018)

In her first book, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci enters a longstanding conversation surrounding twentieth-century eugenics projects. Contraceptive Diplomacy adopts a transpacific approach to reproductive politics, focusing on joint Japanese-American efforts to curb population growth and maintain strong national bodies. Takeuchi-Demirci grounds her analysis in two women central to the movement: Margaret Sanger and Ishimoto Shizue. As she traces Japanese-American relations and birth control activism throughout the century, Takeuchi-Demirci finds that state governments’ racial fears and desire for international dominance eclipsed Sanger’s and Shizue’s feminist goals. Rather than provide women more control over their own reproduction, Japan and the United States harnessed eugenics discourse to demonstrate their cultural and scientific advances and reduce “undesirable” populations.

Takeuchi-Demirci begins by highlighting Sanger’s trip to Japan following World War I. Already infamous in the United States for her birth control activism, Sanger’s decision to move her work abroad allowed her to escape the frustrations she experienced in her domestic efforts. The Japanese government saw in Sanger’s call a way to resolve a host of social problems by limiting the population, while an active women’s movement, well aware of her work, welcomed Sanger as a fellow woman dedicated to reproductive rights. Moving from the post World War I moment to the tense years leading up to the Second World War, Takeuchi-Demirci shows that Sanger and Shizue maintained a connection throughout the conflict, albeit with tensions, and reframed birth control as a way to obtain international peace by balancing the world order. Anti-Japanese feelings in the United States ultimately inspired an immigration ban. Fearing “The Yellow Peril,” the U.S. government became concerned that Japanese migrants, who supposedly reproduced at alarming rates, would overrun the white population. The U.S. government also blamed Japan’s “aggressive” imperialism on Japanese women’s robust fecundity. Around the same time, Sanger began to temper her radicalism and joined forces with eugenicists interested in population control. Despite the fact that these men wanted to promote reproduction in white women while reducing it among non-white, Sanger nevertheless saw the alliance as an opportunity to promote birth control as a benefit for women.

In U.S. occupied Japan after World War II, caution about population control following the Nazi genocide did not prevent the U.S. from promoting birth control behind the scenes or from claiming that these efforts were indigenous-led. In particular, Takeuchi-Demirci argues, the United States hoped reducing the population and enhancing its quality would defend against communist infiltration. When birth rates did in fact decline, the U.S. envisioned replicating their approach throughout Asia. Takeuchi-Demirci shows how the Japanese continued these efforts and linked them to “New Japan,” the empire’s more modern, progressive successor. Sanger participated in these activities by pushing to develop new birth control technologies using Eastern countries, and people, as a testing ground. Japan hesitantly accepted this offer, but insisted on leading the project to mitigate any Western exploitation. The Japanese eventually lost interest in the population control movement as birth rates continued to fall, to the distress of the United States, which remained intent on preventing communism’s spread through modified populations.

Ishimoto Shizuko in 1922 (via Wiki Commons)

Contraceptive Diplomacy travels uncharted territory by investigating transpacific attempts to bolster state power through a combination of birth control and eugenics. Takeuchi-Demirci’s work reminds us that U.S. eugenics projects did not exist in isolation, but on the world stage during a century fraught with international conflict. In working together to promote population control, Japan and the United States actually competed to demonstrate their cultural and scientific superiority. Feminist-led initiatives became, as Takeuchi-Demirci calls it, “a tool for patriarchal control and world domination” (210). Born in an anti-imperialist and socialist climate during the first World War, birth control traveled in imperialistic ways to facilitate international diplomacy. Takeuchi-Demirci shows the different ways discourses can be manipulated to serve dominant desires, and how even those who initially resisted this co-option, such as Sanger, become complicit. While the argument that eugenics served state goals is not particularly new, Takeuchi-Demirci does shed light on previously ignored Japanese-American projects. Her work makes this scholarly oversight appear all the more glaring given Sanger’s extensive involvement with the Japanese government and women’s groups.

Not all of Takeuchi-Demirci’s goals are achieved, however. Her stated intention to trace her narrative through Sanger and Schizue does not materialize; in fact, Schizue seems confined to the first few chapters, before disappearing as Sanger steals the show. While the women’s understated presence may make sense in light of the state’s tightening control over birth control, Sanger’s continued appearance seems to privilege the Western activist. Nevertheless, Takeuchi-Demirci’s has produced a fine book, as well as a relevant one. Her epilogue notes continuing twenty-first century eugenics projects and renewed fears about non-white reproduction outstripping that of whites (one thinks, for example, of United States anxiety over supposed Mexican “anchor babies.”) Contraceptive Diplomacy will appeal to a wide variety of readers, including those interested in international relations, twentieth-century United States or Japanese history, gender history, and the history of medicine.

Kellianne King is a graduate student pursuing a dual-title in History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Her areas of interest include nineteenth and twentieth century United States history as well as the history of medicine and psychiatry.

Notes from the Field
The “Knock Knock Who Is There” Moment for Japan
Racing the Enemy

American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream

By Julia L. Mickenberg

Until quite recently, tales of Americans’ enchantment with the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s were typically told as prelude to their eventual disenchantment: this “liberal narrative” described immature, naïve, utopian idealism replaced by contrition and mature, rational rejection of radical extremism. So it was that I felt embarrassed by the excitement I found myself experiencing when I read descriptions from the time of exciting developments in the “new Russia.” In addition to the Soviet avant garde’s innovations in visual art, theatre, film, and literature, I found repeated emphasis on the special provisions being made for women and children: eliminating the very idea of an “illegitimate” child; radically democratizing education; simplifying divorce; mandating equal pay in the workplace; legalizing and subsidizing abortion; extending pre-natal and maternal welfare provisions; and creating public dining halls, laundries, and nurseries so that domestic duties would not limit women’s professional capacity (yes, these duties were still understood to be women’s).

I felt in my own gut some of the deep attraction that many people in the West experienced amid and following the Russian Revolution. But as a historian, I had incontrovertible proof that the Soviet state, despite every artist it supported, every cool program it put into effect, every effort it made to raise the level of the masses, was at a very fundamental level dehumanizing, repressive, and often violent, all of which became clear to many outsiders fairly early on. I remember telling a colleague that I was interested in exploring and perhaps making sense of all the hopeful rhetoric in the US vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and her warning me that following this path would get me into a whole lot of mishegas, craziness, a Yiddish word that I’ve always figured needs no translation. But the Soviet thing was like an itch I couldn’t keep myself from scratching. I wondered if I could take on this topic, or some piece of it, without seeming to be an apologist for Stalin or denying the facts of history. I had written about left wingers who wrote children’s books during the McCarthy era, which is to say, I had already spent some time thinking about the inherent contradictions within the communist movement.

British Quakers postcard appealing for funds and supplies to support children suffering from the 1921 famine in Russia. © Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. Used with permission. This same image was used in a booklet published by the communist Friends of Soviet Russia.

A few scholars who had come of age after the end of the Cold War were writing about Americans and the Soviet Union in more nuanced ways than had been possible in an earlier era. However, I’d seen very little written specifically about attraction to the “new Russia” on the part of women, particularly independent, educated, and liberated “new women”— this despite the fact that, as the title of a breezy syndicated news article published in 1932 would suggest, “American Girls in Red Russia” were, well, a thing.

American Friends Service Committee workers in a Quaker hut in Buzuluk, Christmas Eve, 1922. Bottom left, Robert Dunn and Dorothy North “reading an Irish play.” Bottom right, Ann Herkner. The other two men are Karl Borders and a Russian coworker. (Andree A. Brooks Research Files on Bluet Rabinoff, box 2, Robert Dunn photographs, Tamiment Library, New York University).

Oddly enough, it was continuing research in children’s literature that finally convinced me to go ahead and write a book about “American Girls in Red Russia,” mishegas and all. In the archives of Ruth Epperson Kennell, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, published a number of books and stories about children in the Soviet Union, I found myself intrigued by Kennell’s own story, especially her years as a “pioneer” in Siberia working on an industrial commune founded by several American Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) in the early 1920s. Seeking release from what Lenin had described as the “household drudgery” that confines women in most societies, Kennell was attracted to the idea of living communally—and also working collectively toward the shared goal of creating a better world. Answering a call from the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia, she and her husband Frank signed a two-year contract, packed up their worldly possessions, and left their 18-month-old son back in California with Frank’s mother.

Ruth Kennell in Siberia, wearing a Russian blouse. (Courtesy of Red Hill Museum, Kemerovo, Russia, with help from Marina Potoplyak).

Ruth worked as the colony’s secretary, librarian, and postmistress and was also its most avid chronicler, writing in The Nation about the “new Pennsylvania” they were building. She also wrote, even more revealingly, about her experiences in letters, a diary, and an unpublished memoir/novel. In these private sources Ruth describes the personal awakening she experienced in Siberia, where she fell in love with a Cornell-trained engineer she met in the colony office: a Jew, a Communist, and an avid reader of literature and philosophy. When Frank decided to go back to California amid a dispute between Wobblies and Communists, Ruth insisted that she wanted to fulfill her two-year contract, but actually, she had other reasons for staying: as she noted in her diary, “I want to be free, free!” She was not alone. Ruth noted in an article that she published in H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury, “In the spring of 1925 more than one matrimonial partnership melted, usually on the wife’s initiative. The colony women found in Siberia the freedom their souls craved.”

John Reed Colony, of which Anna Louise Strong was “chief” or, more accurately, patron, in the mid-1920s. (Anna Louise Strong papers, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW37340. Used with permission from Tracy Strong.)

Kennell helped me begin to recognize the deeply personal attractions that American women felt to the Soviet Union, as well the moral and ethical compromises they made to rationalize so much that was deeply troubling about the Soviet system. Ruth was well aware of inefficiency, hostility to communism among many Russians, gender and ethnic conflicts, as well as the pettiness, corruption, cruelty, and ineptitude among Bolshevik leaders. But ultimately she still thought the Soviet experiment was worth supporting. Kennell’s friend Milly Bennett, author of the article on “American Girls in Red Russia” from which I took my book title, flippantly but also revealingly told a friend: “the thing you have to do about Russia is what you do about any other ‘faith.’ You set your heart to know they are right. . . . . And then, when you see things that shudder your bones, you close your eyes and say . . . ‘facts are not important.’”

Milly Bennett and other workers from the Moscow News marching in a May Day parade. Bennett is the woman, second from the right, wearing glasses. (Milly Bennett papers, Hoover Library, Stanford University.)

Historians of the Russian empire have used Soviet citizen’s diaries to gain insights into “Stalinist subjectivity,” that is, the ways that individuals actively incorporated the Bolshevik ideal into their very sense of themselves. But diaries and other intimate sources have barely been tapped as a means of exploring ways in which the Soviet system likewise brought meaning to the lives of Americans and other foreigners. American women’s diaries and letters reveal both their genuine excitement—about Soviet schools, theatre, public spectacles, nurseries, workers’ housing, laws supporting maternal and child health, the “new morality,” and the simple fact of women’s visibility in public life.

Kuzbas pilgrims picnicking. (Courtesy of Red Hill Museum, Kemerovo, Russia, with help from Marina Potoplyak.)

“Women do everything here,” Louise Thompson wrote to her mother in the summer of 1932 from Moscow. “Work on building construction, on the streets, in factories of course, and everywhere.” Thompson’s activism on behalf of African-American civil rights had attracted her to the Soviet Union, and she wound up leading a group of 22 African Americans, among them luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes and Dorothy West to act in what was being billed as the first true-to-life film about American race relations. Although the film was never made, group members, several of whom stayed on in the Soviet Union, were treated like the stars they might have been, honored rather than shunned for their blackness. Thompson liked to joke, “It will really be difficult to scramble back to obscurity when we return to the old USA, I suspect.”

Pauline Koner with her students from the Lesgaft Physical Culture Institute. (Pauline Koner papers, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.)

The young Jewish dancer Pauline Koner, like Isadora Duncan a generation earlier, was deeply inspired by the very fact of being in the Soviet Union and the opportunity that offered to embody a revolutionary ethos through her movement. “I have to pinch myself to really believe I’m here,” Koner wrote in her diary, in December 1934. “Since arriving on Soviet soil I’ve felt different, the air smelled different and the land looked different. . . . Moscow is the most energizing and invigorating place in the world. It is the place for creative thought and for happiness. Its beauty at times is unbelievable.” As a Jew, Koner had reveled in the experience of visiting Palestine; in the Soviet Union she reveled in the idea of shedding her ethnic particularity and joining the Soviet people.

My book includes suffragists, settlement house workers, “child savers,” journalists, photographers, educators, social reformers, and a range of “new women” who felt drawn to Russia and the Soviet Union from approximately 1905-1945.

Today, as American women continue to struggle for many of the same things as these women of yesteryear—satisfying work that will allow them to balance motherhood and career, romantic relationships that are not bound by economic incentives, and a way to make sense of a society that is exploitative, unjust, racist, and demeaning to women—Russia is once again in the news. Now, ironically, it is mostly right-wing men who see possibility in Russia thanks to its breed of capitalism that puts profit above all else. Like the Communist dictators of old, the new administration in Russia, utterly focused on its own power and gain, shows a callous disregard for individuals and personal freedoms. Meanwhile, American women—like women in many parts of the world—remain as hungry as ever for more just and satisfying social arrangements.

Julia L. Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Learn more about Americans’ attraction to revolutionary Russia:

Warren Beatty’s classic 1981 film, Reds, captures the romance of the Russian Revolution for many Americans. Beatty plays the journalist John Reed and Diane Keaton plays his wife and fellow journalist Louise Bryant; dramatic reenactment of their relationship with each other and with the Russian revolution is interspersed with interviews from surviving members of their Greenwich Village milieu.

The Patriots, a novel by Sana Krasikov, tells the story of a woman who moves from Brooklyn to the Soviet Union, “in pursuit of economic revolution, a classless society, gender equality — and a strapping engineer she met while working at the Soviet Trade Mission,” as the New York Times’ review puts it. She stays in the Soviet Union much longer than most of the women I write about, at a high cost. The book chronicles not just her life in Russia but also that of her son, who returns to the Russia of his childhood and youth as a Big Oil executive, navigating Putin’s Russia as he tries to learn more about his mother’s past.

Mary Leder’s My Life in Stalinist Russia is the memoir of a woman who, at 16, went with her parents from Los Angeles to Birobidjian, a planned Jewish colony in Soviet Far East, but quickly decided this muddy, disorganized mess in the middle of nowhere was not for her and went on to Moscow. There she found she could not get a job without her passport, but when her father sent that on to her it was mysteriously lost in the mail. Leder felt she had no choice but to take Soviet citizenship—and hence wound up being stuck in the Soviet Union for more than thirty years.

Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (1995) by Wendy Goldman speaks to both the ambitious Bolshevik program vis-à-vis women and children and the material and practical realities that prevented realization of the most utopian visions in realms ranging from social welfare to morality.

Anna Louise Strong’s memoir, I Change Worlds: The Remaking of An American, was a bestseller when it was published in 1935 and it offers an insightful picture into what motivated Strong to be a self-appointed propagandist for the Soviet Union, despite awareness of the system’s many limitations. She wrote the book hoping it would provide her with entry into the Communist Party, but in fact neither the Soviet or American parties would have her, despite having devoted much of her life to serving the Soviet Union.

Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia. This popular history describes the thousands of Americans drawn to the Soviet Union during the First Five Year Plan, and the significant numbers who wound up in the gulag or dead, with far too little protest from the US Embassy.

Recent Posts