Millard, Betty

MILLARD, BETTY (1911-2010). A writer and activist in the Communist Party, USA, Elizabeth Boyton Millard was born to a wealthy family in Highland Park, Illinois and attended the University of Chicago before transferring to Barnard College in 1932. After graduating in 1934, she joined the anti-fascist movement during the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, she joined the Young Communist League and in 1940 the Communist Party. The status of women, however, remained a primary concern.

In 1948, Millard wrote “Women Against the Myth,” a short essay appearing first in the New Masses and then reprinted as a pamphlet by International Publishers. The essay begins with a brief historical survey of the economic, legal, and political barriers that guarantee women a secondary status. The post-World War II situation garners special attention, as highlighted by the misogyny enshrined in the newly popular Freudian psychology. To counter this trend, Millard revivifies F. Engels’s theory of women’s oppression, that is, their subordination as grounded in private property, and asserts that only when women enter productive labor and struggle for their rights will they gain emancipation. The status and multifaceted roles of women in the U.S.S.R. serve to illustrate this point. The strategy is clear: “Women must continue to be a major force in their own advance, but they can move ahead only in common action with labor.” She calls upon women to support a progressive third party, to fight for price and rent controls, child-care facilities, protective legislation, and to support the rights of “triply oppressed” African American women.

In the late 1940s, Millard’s activism focused on promoting women’s rights through the Congress of American Women (CAW), founded in 1946. Millard spent two years based in Paris as a member of the secretariat of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the parent body of the CAW and aligned with the global communist movement. She toured Europe and Asia, talking with other women pledged to end the “madness for war.” She helped promote a massive international petition, which by April 1952 collected the signatures of more than 600 million advocates of disarmament. In a popular pamphlet “Women on Guard: How Women of the World Fight for Peace” (1952), she surveys these activities and additionally describes the role of American women in Women for Peace Clubs and their campaigns directed against the United States intervention in Korea.

Millard’s left-wing activities brought her to the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which in 1959 investigated the CAW. Millard had served as an editor of the New Masses (1943-1947) and Latin America Today (1951-1956). Millard left the Communist Party at the end of the decade but remained politically active. Soon after, she joined the successful campaign of Cheddi Jagan, who was elected premier of British Guiana in 1961. She joined the March on Washington in 1963 and later protested against the US war in Vietnam. When she was in her eighties, retired part-time to a farm in Dutchess County, New York, she came out as a lesbian and from then on supported financially the LGBT movement and environmental causes.

de Haan, Francisca. "Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women's Organisations: The Case of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF)." Women's History Review. 19 (4, 2010), pp. 547–73.

Millard, Betty. “Women Against the Myth.” Historic Pittsburgh Collection. University of Pittsburgh Library System. https://historicpittsburgh.org/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735059397616/viewer#page/6/mode/2up

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

Betty Millard Papers. Smith College Library, Finding Aid. https://findingaids.smith.edu/agents/people/40548