Inman, Mary

INMAN, MARY (1894–1985). A Marxist-feminist theoretician who rejected the label “feminist,” Mary Inman covered a broad agenda in her writings on women’s oppression. These ranged from decrying the demeaning portrayal of women in the Maggie and Jiggs comic strip and protesting “cheesecake” photos in the major Communist Party newspapers to a longstanding and bitter debate with the Party over the correct position on the “woman question.” Underpinning all her writings was Inman’s argument that the production of life was as important as the production of life’s material requirements. Basic tenets of this argument resonated again in the mid-1970s with the Wages for Housework groups and committees that formed in the United States; and again in the early 21st century with calls for the Global Women’s Strike, which demanded “payment for all caring work –in wages, pensions, land and other resources.”

Raised in Oklahoma, Ida Mary Inman personally learned about women’s role in social production when, following her mother’s death, she became the “mother of the house” at age thirteen. Three years later, after a short-lived flirtation with fundamentalism, she became a socialist. In 1917 Inman married Frank Ryan, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World in Tulsa. Along with other Wobblies, they were both run out of town by vigilantes in November of that year. To escape detection, the couple began to live under her surname and eventually legalized Inman as their family name. In later years, Inman jokingly referred to herself as a “Lucy-Stoner,” a woman who kept her own family name after marriage, following in the footsteps of Lucy Stone.

Inman began writing on women in the mid-1930s, after reading Clara Zetkin’s conversations with Lenin. When her six-hundred-page manuscript was rejected by the Party, Inman turned to Harrison George, a Wobbly comrade who had become the editor of the People’s World in San Francisco. He published condensed portions of the manuscript in weekly installments, after which time, in 1940, it went into three printings under the title In Woman’s Defense. Initially, her argument underscoring the importance of household labor to the overall economy was well received by women like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Mother Bloor. By 1941, however, especially in light of her call to organize women as workers, the Party launched an official attack in a series of articles by Ruth McKenney in the New Masses. These were eventually followed by the publication of A. Landy’s pamphlet Marxism and the Woman Question.

The balance of Inman’s original manuscript was published in revised form in 1942, under the title Woman-Power. Inman’s works were banned by the Party and she was forbidden to write on the woman question for one year. Though she was expelled from the Party in 1942, Inman nevertheless honored the discipline, breaking her silence with the pledge that “never again will the woman’s movement be without a militant weapon of publicity of its own.” Inaugurating her four-page newsletter Facts for Women in 1943, Inman used its pages for the next three years to both continue her theoretical discussions and to develop programmatic ideas for the organizing of women, including a plan for the formation of a Union of Labor-Power Production Workers (housewives).

Inman’s final book, The Two Forms of Production under Capitalism, was published in 1964, but she continued to write about women, carrying her longstanding argument with the Communist Party to Chair Gus Hall in a sixty-six-page letter in 1972 and to the readers of Political Affairs in a lengthy 1973 commentary. Although Inman’s writing efforts during the last dozen years of her life were primarily autobiographical, she continued to speak out on women’s issues almost until her death in 1985.

Gluck, Sherna. “Socialist Feminism between the Two World Wars: Insights from Oral History.” In Decades of Discontent: The Women’s Movement 1920–1940, edited by Lois Scharf and Joan Jensen. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.

Inman, Mary. “The Role of the Housewife in Social Production (1940). Reprinted in Viewpoint Magazine, October 31, 2015. https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/the-role-of-the-housewife-in-social-production-1940/

Inman, Mary (1894-1985): Papers, 1940-1983. Finding Aid. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women. Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Inman, Mary. “Thirteen Years of CPUSA Misleadership on the Woman Question.” 1949. Schlesinger Library and California State University, Long Beach, Archives.

Weigand, Kate. Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.