Poyntz, Juliet Stuart

POYNTZ, JULIET STUART (1886–1937?). A leading left-wing feminist labor educator in the 1910s and 1920s, Juliet Stuart Poyntz vanished mysteriously in the late 1930s. Born on 25 November 1886 into a lawyer’s family in Omaha, Nebraska, she went on to earn degrees from Barnard College and Columbia University, attend the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, and find employment as a lecturer in history at Columbia University from 1910 to 1913.

After joining the Socialist Party in 1909, she began to shift into reform work and ultimately the labor Left. She held positions, in succession, with the US Immigration Commission, the American Association for Labor Legislation, the Rand School of Social Science, the lecture apparatus of the Socialist Party, and the educational arm of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), a branch of which she founded in 1915 and directed until 1919.

In this latter capacity, she became a powerful feminist-inflected Socialist voice for women workers and a pioneering figure in labor education and cooperation efforts such as the ILGWU’s Unity House, Unity Center, and Workers’ University. Her career demonstrated uncommon dexterity. She could with equanimity write existentialist feminist tracts about the challenge of leisure for working women and vie for power with the male heads of the ILGWU and the fledgling Communist Party. In the words of an ILGWU contemporary, she “was a gifted and striking personality... a rare combination of charm and force.”

By the mid-1920s, when the Communist party’s Third Period sectarianism made her place in the ILGWU untenable, Poyntz shifted to a more exclusive Party focus. Thereafter, the trail grows faint. Several sources maintain that she went to work for the Soviet government underground in the United States in the mid-1930s, and therefore dropped out of open political activity. A longtime friend, the anarchist Carlo Tresca, reported that after expressing disenchantment with this work in June of 1937, Poyntz disappeared abruptly. Tresca believed that she was abducted and murdered by a Soviet agent; efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to find out what happened to her yielded no clear answers. Her body was never found, and her life story has never been written.

Draper, Theodore. American Communism and Soviet Russia (1960). New York: Random House, 1986.
Federal Bureau of Investigation File 100–206603.

Johnpoll, Bernard K., and Harvey Klehr, eds. Biographical Dictionary of the American Left. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986.

MacLean, Nancy. “The Culture of Resistance: Female Institution Building in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, 1905–1925.” Michigan Occasional Papers in Women’s Studies, no. 21 (winter 1982).

Tresca, Carlo. “Where is Juliet Stuart Poyntz?” Modern Monthly 10 (March 1938).