Dignity, Respect, Equality, Love
Blanche Wiesen Cook
As we imagine a future defined by justice, economic democracy, and political freedom, our path is illuminated by many women who envisioned an end to poverty and dedicated their lives to movements for human betterment and global peace. Many of these women left lasting legacies that allow us to continue the struggle for respect across all our racial, religious, and ethnic differences.
Jane Addams (1860–1935), Lillian D. Wald (1867–1940), and Crystal Eastman (1881–1928) were three of them. They were community builders whose words have galvanized generations of activists. Appalled by the poverty and neglect they witnessed at home and in their travels, and motivated by love for and a sense of responsibility to people who suffered, Addams and Wald became America’s most progressive social workers.
In 1889, Addams opened Hull House, a community center in Chicago. It provided health care, education, and English classes for newly arrived immigrants; counseling for families and workers, including meetings with trade unionists to oppose child labor and discrimination; recreation and cultural activities; and classes in art, music, and poetry. Wald, trained as a nurse, opened the Henry Street Settlement House in New York in 1893. It provided similar services, emphasizing health care, and included the Neighborhood Playhouse theater. She also launched the Visiting Home Nurse Service, with first-aid stations, nurse education programs, and convalescent centers throughout the city. In 1912, she was elected the first president of the National Organization for Public Health.
Addams and Wald shared a commitment to international peace and women’s suffrage and empowerment with radical journalist Crystal Eastman. Eastman, dramatic and determined, was an orator and athlete. Her vision of women’s power included “women’s right to physical equality with men.” She imagined a female utopia of athletes where women would be “unhampered by preconceived ideas of what was fit or proper or possible.”
“When women were expected to be agile, they became agile,” she proclaimed. “When they were expected to be brave, they developed courage; when they had to endure, their endurance broke all records.”
In 1907, Eastman graduated second in her class at New York University Law School and embarked on her legal career as a labor investigator. In 1910, her report “Work Accidents and the Law” detailed the cruel conditions and appalling neglect American workers suffered. It generated a new movement for workers’ rights and occupational health and safety. She served on the US Commission for Industrial Relations, drafted New York State’s first workers’ compensation law (the model for the nation), and became a dedicated socialist and feminist activist. In 1911, after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City killed 146 people, mostly young women, she wrote that when healthy women and men die of preventable disasters, we do not want to discuss relief funds, “we want to start a revolution.”
Convinced that women’s empowerment was the first step toward that revolution, she cofounded, with Alice Paul and other equal-rights feminists, the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913. That year, she was also a delegate to the International Woman Suffrage Congress in Budapest, Hungary.
Addams, Wald, and Eastman worked closely together to end World War I, to keep the United States neutral, and to fight US imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean. They lobbied, protested, and wrote numerous articles as they sought to imagine and build a society where wars would be impossible. They launched the American Union Against Militarism, which spawned the American Civil Liberties Union to defend democracy—freedom of speech, press, assembly “and freedom of conscience—the essentials of liberty. . . . To maintain something over here that will be worth coming back to when the weary war is over.” They also founded the Woman’s Peace Party, which became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
After the war, Eastman became convinced that the only way to restore liberty was to achieve socialism. In WILPF’s journal, Four Lights, she hailed the Russian Revolution “with mad, glad joy.” In a December 1920 article, “Now We Can Begin,” she wrote that many feminists were socialists or communists who knew “that the vast majority of women as well as men are without property . . . bread-and-butter slaves under a system of society which allows the very sources of life to be privately owned by a few” and counted themselves part of “the working-class army that is marching to overthrow that system.”
But real change, Eastman believed, also required a women’s revolution. Women’s slavery did not come from the profit system alone, and their emancipation would not be ensured by its downfall. Too many “revolutionary” men, she wrote, disregarded women’s needs: “ ‘My wife is all right,’ he says. And his wife, one usually finds, is raising his children in a Bronx flat or a dreary suburb, to which he returns occasionally for food and sleep when all possible excitement . . . has been wrung” from the day.
For socialism to embrace all humanity, women had to have equal opportunity “to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined . . . [to] housework and child-raising.” Should women choose housework and child-raising as an occupation, she said, it should be “recognized by the world as work,” and paid a just wage.
Eastman demanded equal pay for equal work and a “revolution in the early training and education of both boys and girls. It must be womanly as well as manly to earn your own living, to stand on your own feet. And it must be manly as well as womanly to know how to cook and sew and clean and take care of yourself.” She was aware that “men will not give up their privilege of helplessness without a struggle” and that they actually “cultivated ignorance about household matters.”
Impressed that many of her friends and allies, including Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, lived communally with their best beloveds in their settlement houses and summer residences, Eastman noted that two women could “ ‘make a home’ together without either one being overburdened or over-bored. It is because they both know how and both feel responsible.” They create “a pleasant partnership, more fun than work.” But when a man and woman live together, “it is almost never a partnership—the woman simply adds running the home to her regular outside job. Unless she is very strong, it is too much for her, she gets tired and bitter.”
The solution was socialism and feminism, women’s empowerment that involved sexual freedom, voluntary motherhood, and choices about love and lust. “Feminists are not nuns,” Eastman wrote in an article about birth control. “We want to be loved, and most of us want children. . . . But we want our love to be joyous and free.” That freedom would require political and economic equality between women and men. To that end, in 1923, she was one of four members of Alice Paul’s Woman’s Party who drafted and campaigned for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. This, she said, was the most important “fight worth fighting, even if it takes ten years.” (Congress approved the ERA in 1972, but only thirty-five states ratified it. The struggle to pass it continues.)
America’s post–World War I “red scare” derailed efforts toward socialism and feminism until the Depression. Eastman lived mostly in England until her death in 1928. Jane Addams was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 but was nonetheless attacked as “the most dangerous woman in America” in 1935, the year of her death. Brazilian Catholic Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara, one of the founders of liberation theology, which was later condemned by the Vatican, said years later, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist,” a quote that became a popular poster.
Increasingly, however, progressive and socialist women understood that economic security combined with feminism and sexual freedom were required for individual serenity and community harmony. While Crystal Eastman never believed male-dominated socialist parties could be counted on to fulfill that promise, the Russian feminist Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) believed that women’s liberation required socialism.
Kollontai was born Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich in St. Petersburg, the daughter of a tsarist general and an affluent Finnish-born mother, both of the old Russian nobility. She grew up in the countryside, where she witnessed “the injustice of adults.” She was “particularly and painfully shocked” that everything had been given to her, “whereas so much was denied to the other children,” the peasant children who were her playmates.
She was determined to be free to live her life according to her own needs and wants. At eighteen, against her parents’ wishes, she married her cousin Vladimir Kollontai, “an impecunious young engineer.” But her domestic “happiness lasted hardly three years,” and in 1898 she left her husband and son to study political economy at the University of Zurich. From then on, she devoted her life to women’s freedom and equality. In 1908, her book Finland and Socialism resulted in a warrant for her arrest. She left for England and toured Germany, Canada, and the United States, and then moved to Paris, where she was close to socialists Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, and Bertrand and Dora Russell.
Kollontai lectured widely and inspired countless women and men dedicated to human betterment. When Russian journalist Ilya Ehrenburg first heard her lecture in Paris in 1909, he was deeply moved by her observation that “personal happiness, for which we were created, was unthinkable without universal happiness.”
She remained in exile until 1917. After the Russian Revolution in October 1917, the Communist Party’s Central Committee created a women’s department, the Zhenotdel, to wage a widespread literacy and women’s rights campaign. Kollontai was appointed people’s commissar for social welfare. She organized homes for maternity and infant care, drafted decrees on the care of mother and child, issued health and nutritional standards, legalized birth control, and wrote the first Soviet marriage and divorce laws, which were characterized by equality.
In 1919, she introduced her more expansive vision of the “New Woman” in a workers’ democracy. Supported by new ideas of reproductive rights and communal family arrangements, the New Woman—educated, economically independent, sexually liberated—would flourish. Women’s servitude to the family, state, and society would be replaced by equality, shared learning, and freedom for all physical and emotional experiences. Unpossessed, she would have no interest in possession. She would be free to fulfill herself and her own needs to work and be creative.
“The woman of the past had been raised to adopt a negligent attitude toward herself,” Kollontai wrote. “But now every woman was free to fulfill her needs, exercise her profession, work in service to ideas and community, create healthy, joyous sexual relations. History has never seen such variety of personal relationships.” Socialism required “a basic transformation of the human psyche” that enabled people to “achieve relationships based on the unfamiliar ideas of complete freedom, equality, genuine friendship.”
In 1923, Kollontai published her most controversial article, “Make Way for Winged Eros,” to celebrate “multifaceted love.” Socialism’s task, she wrote, was not to drive away Eros, but to create informed sexual “relationships in the spirit of the great new psychological force of comradely solidarity,” which embraced a new respect for different love relationships among society’s many differing people—all free to choose. Her vision was initially supported by Dr. Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, who affirmed Russia’s “sexual revolution,” which meant “the absolute non-interference of the state and society in sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured.” It also affirmed homosexual rights and decreed that all forms of “sexual gratification are natural, and all forms of sexual intercourse are private matters.”
But Communist Party opposition to Kollontai’s views intensified. Between 1925 and 1927, a wave of terror and brutality confronted Muslim women in Zhenodtel clubs in the Crimea and throughout the Soviet east. In 1929, Joseph Stalin halted the modernization campaign and disbanded the women’s commission. After 1922, Kollontai lived abroad, mostly as Soviet ambassador to Norway, Mexico, and, from 1930–1946, Sweden. Although she survived Stalin’s tyranny, repression, and purges, partly because of her international influence, her views were discarded in Russia. She died in 1952 in Moscow, surrounded mostly by feminist friends and colleagues.
During the last months of her life, she pondered her exile, possible new beginnings, and imagined the future: “The world never stagnates, it is always stirring, new forms of life are always appearing.” She looked forward to a wonderful future of “Happiness. Happiness for everyone.”
Despite America’s several red scares and the Soviet state’s turn to repression, the words of these twentieth-century visionaries have endured and continue to move us forward. Activist women read Kollontai around the world. Jane Addams and Lillian Wald influenced Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), who began her adult life teaching calisthenics and dance at a New York settlement house.
Eleanor Roosevelt fought for women’s rights, civil rights, and human rights throughout her life, convinced that to end war, we must end poverty. As first lady from 1933 to 1945, she urged her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to extend Social Security to all Americans and to include in the program health and housing security—two items still on the American legislative agenda. The agonies of World War II intensified her conviction that a peaceful future depended on a New Deal for all the world’s people. She repeatedly spoke out against discrimination, segregation, poverty, and greed. She believed the United Nations, which issued its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, would lead the world toward racial harmony and “a spirit of mutual responsibility for human welfare.”
During the 1970s, a second wave of feminism rediscovered the legacy of these and many other socialist women. Two who especially inspired me were my friends and mentors Dorothy Healy and Annette Rubenstein. Healy, an activist, journalist, and radio broadcaster who lived a fighting life, said to me one day, “I don’t get ulcers. I never get ulcers. I give ulcers.” Rubenstein, a scholar, activist, and editor, frequently said, “We will have socialism, or we will have barbarism.”
Today, with war and poverty epidemic and an intensified assault against women and women’s rights, it is time. Imagine Code Pink and Pussy Riot worldwide. Imagine Socialism.