Socialist Woman/Progressive Woman

SOCIALIST WOMAN/PROGRESSIVE WOMAN. Published to educate women in the principles of socialism and to encourage them to join the Socialist Party (SP), The Socialist Woman (1907–1909) appeared monthly under the editorship of Josephine Conger-Kaneko, with the assistance of her husband, Japanese socialist Kiichi Kaneko. Renamed Progressive Woman in 1909, ostensibly to reach a broader audience, the magazine resembled the Appeal to Reason in style and tone. Conger-Kaneko, born in 1874 in Centralia, Missouri, had previously edited a column entitled “Hints to the Appeal’s Wise Woman” and continued to share, although intermittently, office space and printing facilities with the parent publication. Aspiring to reach a national audience, Conger-Kaneko never departed politically from her original and most loyal readership, radical women in the Midwest and in California. Her journalism captured a political sensibility rooted in late-nineteenth-century reform movements, ranging from suffrage and temperance to social purity, and lacked the seeming sophistication of a materialist analysis of the “woman question.” Although Conger-Kaneko had studied scientific socialism with Ernest Untermann at Ruskin College, she maintained a sentimental, almost mystical view of womanhood. The Progressive Woman stressed the limitations that capitalism had imposed on women in fulfilling their major roles within the home and as preserver of the family.

The magazine served as the voice of women’s organizational autonomy within the SP. “The Socialist Woman exists for the sole purpose of bringing women into touch with the Socialist idea,” she explained. “We intend to make this paper a forum for the discussion of problems that lie closest to women's lives, from the Socialist standpoint.” Conger-Kaneko believed that women demanded a special agitational message as well as political space distant from domineering men. When the SP established the Woman’s National Committee (WNC), Conger-Kaneko nevertheless accepted the decision and made her publication its unofficial organ.

During the peak period of the WNC, which supplied plenty of copy, the Progressive Woman achieved a subscription high of three thousand and a total circulation of eighteen thousand for special issues. Alongside regular features, Conger-Kaneko ran large samples of letters from subscribers and inadvertently supplied future historians with information about rank-and-file women from the distant outreaches of Socialist organization. WNC organizers forwarded summaries of their meetings with local women’s committees across the country, reported on their involvements in strikes and in state suffrage campaigns, and tested propaganda in the magazine’s columns. The Progressive Woman also ran monthly lesson plans for local women’s committees and thereby publicized socialist primers on the woman question. Conger-Kaneko edited special issues on woman suffrage, child labor, and prostitution and regularly featured on the front cover a photograph of a prominent Socialist woman.

In 1911 the Progressive Woman ran into a series of technical and financial difficulties that foreshadowed its demise. Publishing from the SP national office in Chicago, Conger-Kaneko managed for another year before asking the WNC to take on the magazine’s financial obligations. The SP’s well-established policy against a party-owned press militated against this move, and a party subcommittee arranged instead to fund the Progressive Woman through a joint-stock company. Income proved insufficient to support the publication at the same time that the new chair of the WNC, Winnie Branstetter, charged the Progressive Woman’s editorial staff with ultraleftism.

In 1912 Conger-Kaneko ended the Socialist women’s magazine and resumed, with the assistance of her managing editor, Barnett Braverman, publication under the title of a popular socialist newspaper of the 1890s, the Coming Nation. A general-interest magazine, the Coming Nation ran until July 1913. In its final number, Conger-Kaneko left a long, bitter statement summarizing her experiences as a Socialist editor and crafting a revealing history of the demise of the SP’s singular women’s magazine. She went on to edit Home Life, a non-political magazine published in Chicago.

Buhle, Mari Jo. “Socialist Woman, Progressive Woman, Coming Nation.” In The American Radical Press, 1880–1960, vol. 2, edited by Joseph R. Conlin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974.

Socialist Woman/Progressive Woman/The Coming Nation. 1907-1914. Full Text https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-woman/index.htm