Lewis, Lena Morrow

LEWIS, LENA MORROW (1868–1950). The first woman elected to the national executive committee of the Socialist Party, Lena Morrow Lewis was one of the movement’s most successful and long-term organizers. Born in Gerlaw, a small town near Monmouth, Illinois, Lena Morrow served for six years as a district superintendent of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union before turning to the campaign for woman suffrage. She soon realized that “women are victims of class distinctions more than of sex distinctions.” In 1902 she took her commitment to women’s advancement, finely honed organizing skills, and “revolutionary spirit” into the Socialist Party. Traveling among distant party locals on the West Coast, Morrow paused briefly in 1903 to marry the well-known socialist lecturer Arthur Lewis. The couple traveled together for a while, but within a few years Lena Morrow Lewis returned to the life of solitary itinerant lecturer for Socialism.

Although Lewis continued to support the woman’s movement, particularly the suffrage campaign, she did so with the expectation that educated, enfranchised women would aid the struggle for Socialism. In her mind, the class struggle encompassed women’s emancipation. For this reason she did not support autonomous women’s organizations within the Socialist movement and directed women as individuals to stand up to male chauvinists within their locals. “The woman who will be a real and permanent service to the party,” she argued, “is the one who maintains her place in the movement and her right to work solely and only on the grounds of her merit and fitness to do things.” To demand separate clubs seemed to Lewis either a demeaning request or an appeal for special privilege.

In 1910–1911 Lewis became a principal in a sex scandal involving national secretary J. Mahlon Barnes. Although re-nominated to the national executive committee, Lewis returned in 1913 to her former position as national organizer and accepted an appointment in Alaska. Among miners and their wives, she found a congenial outpost and stayed there until 1917. She edited the Alaska Labor News and ran for Congress in 1916 on the Alaskan Socialist Party ticket.

Lewis remained in the party after the historic split in 1919 and returned to her original setting, the West Coast. In 1925 she became managing editor of the Oakland Labor World, an important daily newspaper. After the paper folded during the Depression, Lewis moved to the New York area, where a small group of Socialists could provide financial support. In 1936 she quit the party and became a founding member of the Social Democratic Federation, the conservative wing of the party centered in New York’s garment trades. She passed her remaining years working at the Tamiment Institute, organizing the papers of the defunct Rand School of Social Science.

Buhle, Mari Jo. “Lena Morrow Lewis: Her Rise and Fall.” In Flawed Liberation: Socialism and Feminism, edited by Sally M. Miller. Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

Guide to the Lena Morrow Lewis Papers, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University.