People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [203]
Women were active in the socialist movement, more as rank-and-file workers than as leaders—and, sometimes, as sharp critics of socialist policy. Helen Keller, for instance, the gifted blind-mute-deaf woman with her extraordinary social vision, commented on the expulsion of Bill Haywood in a letter to the New York Call:
It is with the deepest regret that I have read the attacks upon Comrade Haywood . . . such an ignoble strife between two factions which should be one, and that, too, at a most critical period in the struggle of the proletariat. . . .
What? Are we to put difference of party tactics before the desperate needs of the workers? . . . While countless women and children are breaking their hearts and ruining their bodies in long days of toil, we are fighting one another. Shame upon us!
Only 3 percent of the Socialist party’s members were women in 1904. At the national convention that year, there were only eight women delegates. But in a few years, local socialist women’s organizations, and a national magazine, Socialist Woman, began bringing more women into the party, so that by 1913, 15 percent of the membership was women. The editor of Socialist Woman, Josephine Conger-Kaneko, insisted on the importance of separate groups for women:
In the separate organization the most unsophisticated little woman may soon learn to preside over a meeting, to make motions, and to defend her stand with a little “speech”. After a year or two of this sort of practice she is ready to work with the men. And there is a mighty difference between working with the men, and simply sitting in obedient reverence under the shadow of their aggressive power.
Socialist women were active in the feminist movement of the early 1900s. According to Kate Richards O’Hare, the Socialist leader from Oklahoma, New York women socialists were superbly organized. During the 1915 campaign in New York for a referendum on women’s suffrage, in one day at the climax of the campaign, they distributed 60,000 English leaflets, 50,000 Yiddish leaflets, sold 2,500 one-cent books and 1,500 five-cent books, put up 40,000 stickers, and held 100 meetings.
But were there problems of women that went beyond politics and economics, that would not be solved automatically by a socialist system? Once the economic base of sexual oppression was corrected, would equality follow? Battling for the vote, or for anything less than revolutionary change—was that pointless? The argument became sharper as the women’s movement of the early twentieth century grew, as women spoke out more, organized, protested, paraded—for the vote, and for recognition as equals in every sphere, including sexual relations and marriage.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose writing emphasized the crucial question of economic equality between the sexes, wrote a poem called “The Socialist and the Suffragist,” ending with:
“A lifted world lifts women up,”
The Socialist explained.
“You cannot lift the world at all
While half of it is kept so small,”
the Suffragist maintained.
The world awoke, and tartly spoke:
“Your work is all the same;
Work together or work apart,
Work, each of you, with all your heart—
Just get into the game!”
When Susan Anthony, at eighty, went to hear Eugene Debs speak (twenty-five years before, he had gone to hear her speak, and they had not met since then), they clasped hands warmly, then had a brief exchange. She said, laughing: “Give us suffrage, and we’ll give you socialism.” Debs replied: “Give us socialism and we’ll give you suffrage.”
There were women who insisted on uniting the two aims of socialism and feminism, like Crystal Eastman, who imagined new ways of men and women living together and retaining their independence, different from traditional marriage. She was a socialist, but wrote once that a woman “knows that the whole of woman’s slavery is not summed up in the profit system, nor her complete emancipation assured by the downfall of capitalism.”
In the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, there were more women