Smedley, Agnes

SMEDLEY, AGNES (1892–1950). An American radical, a feminist, and an internationalist, Agnes Smedley achieved distinction as a novelist and foreign correspondent. Born into a Missouri tenant farmer family and growing up in a succession of Colorado mining camps near the site of the Ludlow massacre, Smedley devoted her life to publicizing and supporting what she saw as the most hopeful and humane forces within the Indian and Chinese independence and revolutionary movements, while waging a fiercely independent lifelong struggle for the equality of women and her own autonomy.

Her autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1929) is an early feminist classic reprinted by the Feminist Press in 1989. However, it was her writing and speaking about and on behalf of independence and liberation movements in India in the 1920s and in China from 1929 until her death in 1950 that left the deepest impression on American and international readers during her lifetime. Her Portraits of Women in Revolution (1976), also published by the Feminist Press, joined these two aspects of her political commitments.

Smedley was among the first foreign correspondents to report from Communist headquarters in Yenan in 1937. Subsequently, as the only woman war correspondent at the front in the China theater, she traveled with Communist Eighth Route Army forces, reporting from behind Japanese lines. Her posthumously published (auto)biography of General Zhu De (old spelling: Chu Teh), The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh (1956), and her reportage from the front, Battle Hymn of China (1984), derived from her experiences in wartime China. Both are major works that express her conviction that the Chinese Communist Party was the single force capable of bringing national independence, democracy, and social justice to China. She died in England in the midst of a campaign to brand her as a Communist and a spy.

Mackinnon, Janice, and Stephen Mackinnon. Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Price, Ruth. The Lives of Agnes Smedley. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,2005.

Smedley, Agnes. Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution. Edited by Jan Mackinnon and Steve Mackinnon. New York: Feminist Press, 1976.

Works by or about Agnes Smedley. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28%221892-1950%22+AND+Smedley%29+AND+%28-mediatype%3Asoftware%29%29