Reed, Evelyn

REED, EVELYN (1905-1979). Mostly known for her 1975 book, Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family, Evelyn Reed was a life-long student and proponent of women’s rights and the need for a socialist revolution to ensure them. From 1940 until her death, she was an active member of and writer for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In 1972, she stood the SWP’s presidential candidate, although she secured a position on the ballot in only three states. Reed and George Breitman (co-edited three volumes of the writings of Leon Trotsky (1973,1974,1976).

Born in Haledon, New Jersey in 1905, to David and Rebecca Horowitz, in her mid-teens Reed fled to New York City to explore and develop her passions as a painter and the arts. She enrolled in the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League. In addition to studying painting, she found a wide-ranging circle of artists and intellectuals who broadened her political horizon. There, as part of a community of artists and intellectuals during the 1920s and early 1930s, she participated in a 1934 demonstration against the destruction of Diego Rivera’s murals at Rockefeller Center. Through the rest of the 1930s, both in New York and during a short stint (and brief marriage to would-be writer and literary scholar Osborn Andreas) in Iowa, Reed found means to focus her life on her painting and pursuit of the arts.

Increasingly, Reed became aware of the misogyny that was to become the central focus of her life as a self-motivated student and writer. Long before the women’s liberation movement made such explorations acceptable in radical circles, Reed began to seek answers by studying anthropology and political theory. In 1939, when she had met a young professor who was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and helped him distribute The Militant newspaper, she also began a study of Marxism that led her to Frederick Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). As she would tell young women comrades decades later, during the excitement of the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this moment marked the beginning of a thrilling quest that became central for the rest of her life.

In 1939, Reed followed her friend to Coyoacán, Mexico, where he had accepted the job of secretary and guard for Leon Trotsky, who had taken refuge there against Stalin’s threats to assassinate him. Reed helped in the household, joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and after Trotsky was assassinated remained to help his widow, Natalia Sedova, whose portrait was to be Reed’s last painting. She moved full speed into revolutionary socialist politics and activities, including her passionate work to learn and write about the exploitation of women and its roots in class society.

After she returned to New York City, Reed joined the staff of the SWP’s magazine, the Fourth International, where she worked with and in 1942 married its editor, George Novack. After eighteen of her SWP comrades were indicted, prosecuted, convicted, and sent to prison under the new Smith Act in 1941, Reed became executive director of the Civil Rights Defense Committee, which organized publicity and fund raising on their behalf. In the mid-1940s, she became a staff writer for the SWP’s weekly, The Militant, at which time she adopted the pen name “Evelyn Reed” after the revolutionary John Reed. She continued writing for SWP publications until her death, including the years when she and Novack lived in Los Angeles (1954-1965).

In 1954, Reed gave a talk which the Fourth International published under the title, “The Myth of Women’s Inferiority,” in which she presented what would remain her thesis
“[The] inequality of the sexes has marked class society from its very inception several thousand years ago, and has persisted throughout its three main stages: chattel slavery, feudalism and capitalism. For this reason class society is aptly characterized as male-dominated. This domination has been upheld and perpetuated by the system of private property, the state, the church and the form of family that served men’s interests.” Therefore, it would take a socialist revolution to upend male dominance.

While Reed’s revolutionary socialist feminism was tolerated in the SWP for decades, beginning with the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s, the SWP recognized Reed’s writing and public speaking as a party asset. For the last ten years of her life, Reed participated in the actions and discussions of this new movement and became a mentor to her young comrades. She had found a growing hearing for her arguments that the oppression of women was integral to class society, and that both needed to be abolished. Her magnum opus, Women’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family, was published in 1975. She lectured widely at conferences and universities and organized classes for SWP members. A strong promoter of reproductive rights, Reed was a founding member of the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition. Throughout the 1970s, Reed toured internationally until she died at age seventy-three in New York City.

Reed, Evelyn. Woman’s Evolution: from Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975.

Lubitz’ TrotskyanaNet. “Evelyn Reed: Bio-Bibliographical Sketch.” https://www.trotskyana.net/Trotskyists/Bio-Bibliographies/bio-bibl_reed.pdf

“Evelyn Reed.” A guide to most of her published work with background information: https://www.pathfinderpress.com/collections/evelyn-reed/subjects_womens-emancipation-struggle