Winter, Ella

WINTER, ELLA (1898-1980). A distinguished radical journalist and authority on life in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s, Lenore (Ella) Sophie Winter was born in Melbourne, Australia. Her family moved to England in 1910, and she later studied at the London School of Economics. By this time, she had already declared herself a socialist. It was a reading of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” that gave her a critique of private property that would endure throughout her life.

At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1918, where she was acting as secretary to the Zionist delegate Felix Frankfurter, she met the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), more than thirty years her senior. After living for a time in Paris and bearing a son in Italy, in 1927 Winter and Steffens moved to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, where they joined the remarkable arts colony that flourished since the early part of the century. They wrote for The Carmelite (1928-1932), an alternative newspaper that tapped the talents of radical writers and arranged for exhibitions of paintings by surrealist and Dadaist painters and theatrical performances. Winter sponsored a “socialist reading room” in their home.

In 1930, Winter traveled to the Soviet Union to assess the impact of the Five-Year Plan for economic development launched in 1928. Her observations make up her first book, Red Virtue: Human Relations in the New Russia (1933). The title page of the book celebrates an oft-quoted sentence from Steffens, who had visited the Soviet Union in 1919: “I have seen the future, and it works.” Winter agreed, and she joined the Communist Party, USA. What she saw in the Soviet Union had convinced her that the Communist government there was creating “something new under the sun,” a classless society without inequities and discrimination. “A science of social engineering is being developed,” she wrote. The goal, however, went beyond collectivism and industrial efficiency per se. The Soviet experiment was fostering, she believed, new social relations and new social attitudes.

Winter returned to the Soviet Union during World War II and published a second assessment. I Saw the Russian People (1945), part travel account, underscores the suffering and bravery of the Russian people during wartime. In both books, she paid special attention to the status of women and the care of children under Soviet collectivism: “I found that part of the new Russian plan was the determined drive to get women out of the kitchen and into public life, the farm, industry, the professions. Soviet women were judges, doctors, engineers, editors, bricklayers, and were learning to utilize their new independence."

The acclaim accorded to Red Virtue set Winter on the path to successful journalism. She secured an interview with Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshoremen’s Association, during the 1934 strike and surveyed the conditions of California farm workers. She published widely in magazines ranging from the Manchester Guardian and The Nation to Collier’s and Ladies’ Home Journal. In 1935, she became a founding member of League of American Writers, an anti-fascist organization of party members and political allies. Three years later, she co-edited, with Granville Hicks, Lincoln Steffens as Revealed in His Letters.

After Steffens died in 1936, Winter soon married Donald Ogden Stewart (1894-1980), a humorist and major film writer in the 1930s and 1940s. During the McCarthy era, both Winter and Stewart were blacklisted, and they resettled in England. Winter again visited a country in the throes of a grand social experiment. In 1958, at the invitation of the Chinese National Women’s Federation, she crossed the mainland and concluded her trip by affirming her faith in the process of revolution.

In 1969, after eighteen years in England, Winter returned to the United States to check on plans for a new publication of Steffens’s letters and was pleased with recent political developments. In an interview with the New York Times, she observed: “The silence of the McCarthy period has been broken. Americans seem to be out from under the blanket of fear that prevailed then.” She died in Hampstead, London, at age 82.

Dennis, Michael. “Women in the Defense of Workers: Ella Winter, the Literary Left, and Labor Journalism in California.” Women’s History Review. Vol. 26, #6(December, 2017), pp. 857-879.

Simkin, John. “Ella Winter.” Spartacus Educational. April, 2013. https://spartacus-educational.com/Aella_winter.htm

Winter, Ella. And Not to Yield: An Autobiography. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963.

Donald Ogden Stewart and Ella Winter Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Yale University. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/1620