Woman's National Committee

WOMAN’S NATIONAL COMMITTEE. The purpose of the Woman’s National Committee (WNC) was to represent women and their concerns within the Socialist Party. At the 1907 meeting of the Second International in Stuttgart, Germany, delegates adopted a resolution calling upon Socialists to campaign for woman suffrage, but only within their own organizations. The American party responded immediately by appointing its first national lecturer on women’s issues. In May 1909 the party’s national convention created a special committee “to care for and manage the work of organization among women” and provided funds to maintain a woman organizer in the field.

The establishment of the WNC marked an important event in the history of socialist women because its clearly defined position within the Socialist Party signaled the end of the autonomous women’s organizations that had formed since the party’s founding in 1901. Although many women continued to meet separately, they did so as committees within the regularly constituted Socialist locals.

The WNC coordinated several aspects of women’s affairs. Two outstanding organizers, Anna A. Maley and Caroline Lowe, chaired the committee during its most active years and made the WNC a valuable educational service to rank-and-file women. They produced and distributed scores of leaflets focused on women’s issues and drew up a more extensive curriculum for study. The WNC endorsed the campaign for woman suffrage and sponsored lectures by the party’s most popular speakers. The WNC advised local women’s committees on conducting strike-support work and on reaching out to immigrant women. Through its work, the role of women within the Socialist movement gained recognition along the lines established by the Second International.

As the party endured a bout of intense factionalism around 1912, the national executive committee of the Socialist Party withdrew its financial support, and the leadership of the WNC fell into disarray. By this time, local women’s committees had been established in at least fifteen states, and women’s membership remained steady. The final chairperson of the WNC, Winnie Branstetter, nevertheless orchestrated its demise. In June 1915 the national executive committee, after polling its members, officially abolished the WNC. Although most women accepted this decision without formal protest, a few interpreted the event as an affirmation of their own suspicion that the WNC had been little more than an attempt by the party leadership to bring women under their control. After 1915 Socialist women lacked coordination at the national level as well as a distinctive voice within the larger movement. Attention to women’s issues faded away.

Buhle, Mari Jo. Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Dancis, Bruce. “Socialism and Women in the United States, 1900–1917.” Socialist Revolution 6 (January–March 1976).

Miller, Sally. “Women in the Party Bureaucracy: Subservient Functionaries.” In Flawed Liberation: Socialism and Feminism, edited by Sally Miller. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.