Passionate Commitments

Julia M. Allen

Description

Winner of the 2014 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction presented by the Publishing Triangle

Developing their rhetorical skills in early-twentieth-century women's organizations, Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, life partners and heirs to significant wealth, aimed for revolution rather than reform. They lived frugally while devoting themselves to several organizations in succession, including the Episcopal Church and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, as they searched for a place where their efforts were welcomed and where they could address the root causes of social inequities. In 1927, they joined the Communist Party USA and helped to build the Labor Research Association. There they engaged in research and wrote books, pamphlets, and articles arguing for gender and racial equality, and economic justice.

Julia M. Allen's Passionate Commitments is a love story, but more than that, it is a story of two women whose love for each other sustained their political work. Allen examines the personal and public writings of Rochester and Hutchins to reveal underreported challenges to capitalism as well as little-known efforts to strengthen feminism during their time. Through an investigation of their lives and writings, this biography charts the underpinnings of American Cold War fears and the influence of sexology on political movements in mid-twentieth-century America.
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Robin Hackett
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part One. Beginnings

1. 1919
2. Anna Rochester
3. Grace Hutchins
4. Community Consciousness
5. Into the World

Part Two. Love and Work

6. Love Requires a New Form
7. Worker Journalists
8. Love and Work
9. Revolutionary Change
10. Twentieth-Century Americanism

Part Three. Legacies

11. War against Fascism
12. Love and Loyalty
13. Cold War at Home
14. “Purpose: Keep the Group Going”

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Gay Studies
• USA
• United States of America
• 20th century
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 10 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438446899
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

PASSIONATE COMMITMENTS
The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins
JULIA M. ALLEN
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allen, Julia M., 1947–
Passionate commitments : the lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins / Julia M. Allen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4687-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Rochester, Anna. 2. Hutchins, Grace, 1885–3. Women social reformers—United States—Biography. 4. Women labor leaders—United States—Biography. 5. Women communists—United States—Biography. I. Title.
HQ1412.A45 2013
303.48'4082—dc23
2012025921
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Cedar
for the title and for all her love and patience
Illustrations
Fig. 1.1 Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins at Adelynrood, ca. 1921 (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 1.2 Main room, Adelynrood, early twentieth century (Courtesy of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross) Fig. 1.3 Florence Converse, ca. 1910 (Courtesy of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross) Fig. 2.1 Anna Rochester, 1897 (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 2.2 Vida Scudder and Florence Converse, ca. 1925 (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 2.3 Anna Rochester, 1918 (labeled “best picture of Anna Rochester” by Grace Hutchins) (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 3.1 Grace Hutchins, 1900 (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 3.2 Grace Hutchins, ca. 1916 (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 3.3 St. Hilda's School for Girls, fundraising brochure (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 4.1 Helena Stuart Dudley (Courtesy of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross) Fig. 4.2 Cartoon #1 from Community House journal depicting aftermath of spraying for cockroaches (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 4.3 Cartoon #2 from Community House journal depicting aftermath of spraying for cockroaches (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 4.4 Adelynrood chapel (Courtesy of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross) Fig. 4.5 Grace Hutchins tending coal stove at Community House (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 4.6 Community House resident engaged in housework (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 5.1 Back Log Camp logo (Courtesy of Back Log Camp) Fig. 7.1 Class War Bulletins headline (Courtesy of International Publishers) Fig. 7.2 Back Log Camp tents (Courtesy of Back Log Camp) Fig. 8.1 Labor Unity magazine masthead (Courtesy of International Publishers) Fig. 8.2 Cover of Labor and Coal (Courtesy of International Publishers) Fig. 8.3 Dining tent at Back Log Camp (Courtesy of Back Log Camp) Fig. 8.4 Cover of New Pioneer magazine (Courtesy of International Publishers) Fig. 8.5 Labor Defender magazine masthead (Courtesy of International Publishers) Fig. 8.6 Cover of Wall Street pamphlet (Courtesy of International Publishers) Fig. 9.1 Anna Rochester, ca. early1930s (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 9.2 Cover of Women Who Work (Courtesy of International Publishers) Fig. 9.3 New Masses magazine masthead (Courtesy of International Publishers) Fig. 9.4 Cover of What Every Working Woman Wants pamphlet (Courtesy of International Publishers) Fig. 10.1 Ella Reeve Bloor (Mother Bloor) traveling across the country to promote the Daily Worker Fig. 10.2 Grace Hutchins speaking at Madison Square Garden, Nov. 2, 1936 (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 10.3 Vida Dutton Scudder at Adelynrood (Courtesy of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross) Fig. 11.1 Grace Hutchins, ca. mid-1930s (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 11.2 Anna Rochester, ca. 1940s (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 11.3 Grace Hutchins, ca. 1940s (University of Oregon Special Collections) Fig. 12.1 Daily Worker masthead (Courtesy of People's World ) Fig. 12.2 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, ca. 1940s (University of Oregon Special Collections)
Foreword

Passionate Commitments recovers two life stories that, as told here, emphasize intersections between histories that are not often treated together—the history of the American Left, women's histories, and queer histories. Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester, born into wealthy nineteenth-century East Coast families, spent the first half of the twentieth century in love with one another and at work agitating for social and economic justice. They researched and wrote for labor unions, donated hours and money in support of a free press, raised bail for friends and comrades, ran for public office, and always insisted on women's independence. They left behind a rich archive of letters, books, and essays that chronicled public lives, deep private commitments, and constant personal reinvention as they moved ideologically away from institutional Christianity and women-centered service organizations, which were the sites of careers for many middle-class women of their era, toward mixed-gender organizations and labor activism. This dual biography describes, with affection and meticulous scholarship, Hutchins's and Rochester's love for one another and their many accomplishments. It describes, as well, the principle by which they lived and transformed themselves, their “rhetoric of the whole person,” in which every part of their lives—from their writing and their partnership to their living arrangements and financial choices, even including their choices in clothing—contributed, without contradiction, to their revolutionary aims.
The central mystery of Allen's book is an utterance by Hutchins that seems to stand out as a shocking exception to her diligent efforts to live through a coherent social justice rhetoric. In 1949, she accused Whittaker Chambers, who was acting as an informant for anticommunist federal agents, of being a “homosexual pervert.” This utterance defies easy explanation. It is not easily explained away as evidence that Hutchins and Rochester had an asexual partnership, as Allen shows. Nor is it understandable as naïveté: by the time Hutchins made this comment, Freud and the sexologists had popularized the notion of same-sex partnerships, such as that of Hutchins and Rochester, as sexual (if often pathologically so). Nor can the utterance be understood in terms of scapegoating; Hutchins was not trying to draw attention away from her own homosexuality by accusing someone else, as did many in the era about which Allen writes. This utterance, moreover, reveals a broader ideological mystery: but for the important example of their lives together, which was openly acknowledged by many who knew them, Hutchins and Rochester did not directly advocate for freedom for those who, like themselves, chose same-sex partners. Given their rigorous attention to a rhetoric of the whole person, how do we understand this failure to incorporate the class newly being identified as homosexuals into their social justice platform? Neither naïveté nor self-defense serves as an adequate explanation here. Moreover, the choice to attribute Chambers's anticommunist lies to his homosexuality, combined with Hutchins's silence about her own partnership with Rochester, made it more difficult for Hutchins to intervene to defend herself or others against the simultaneously antihomosexual and anticommunist government attacks that increased in intensity during the 1950s. This silence, in turn, Allen argues, substantially delayed the inclusion of rights for homosexuals into the Left platform for change.
So how do we understand this—the biggest rhetorical mistake of Hutchins's life, as Allen describes it? How did Hutchins and Rochester understand themselves, and how did their partnership inform those identities? In her search for answers, Allen links the development of Hutchins and Rochester's identities to the writing of the sexologist Edward Carpenter. Allen thus writes her subjects into an often-told history of the development of contemporary gay and lesbian identities. As Michel Foucault enables us to tell this history, contemporary gay and lesbian identities are products of sexological writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which same-sex sexual behavior accrued meaning-making power. One of the effects of sexological writing was an increase in explicit legal and social disapprobation of homosexuality, such as that experienced by Hutchins, Rochester, and Chambers; another effect was the emergence of a homosexual minority that could recognize itself and thus advocate for civil rights based on a shared identity.
Carpenter's writing about the relationship between sexuality and identity, however, is more multidimensional than this version of sexology, which has become part of queer history. Carpenter was a Christian socialist who