Greie-Cramer, Johanna

GREIE-CRAMER, JOHANNA (1864–n.d.). Born of middle-class parents in Dresden, Germany, Johanna Greie emigrated with her husband to the United States, where she became a leading socialist writer and lecturer on the “woman question.” She played an instrumental role in supporting German American socialist women in their establishment of separate organizations within the Socialist Labor Party of the 1880s. Although Greie shared the commonplace opinion that women’s emancipation depended upon the overthrow of capitalism, she readily challenged many of her contemporaries by pointing to men as women’s adversary.

In 1888 Greie spearheaded the formation of the Frauen und Mädchenbund, the first federation of socialist women’s clubs centered in the Northeast and industrial Midwest. For one year she traveled to address these clubs only to witness their demise by the next. Following the Second International’s adoption in 1896 of Clara Zetkin’s resolution favoring women’s organization, German American women organized the Social Democratic Women’s Federation and once again provided Greie-Cramer (by this time widowed and remarried) with a platform. She edited a women’s column in the New Yorker Volkszeitung and resumed her lecture tours. Johanna Greie-Cramer played an instrumental role in building a base for women’s organization among the German American and Yiddish-speaking socialists who would form the Socialist Party after the turn of the century.

Buhle, Mari Jo. Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.