Lilienthal, Meta Lilienthal Stern

LILIENTHAL, META LILIENTHAL STERN (1875–1948). Writing under the pen name “Hebe” or the surname of her first husband, Stern, Meta Lilienthal Stern Lilienthal produced scores of leaflets, short essays, and pamphlets on women and their concerns for the Socialist Party. She edited a women’s page in the New Yorker Volkszeitung and a “Votes for Women” column in the New York Call, and provided an important link between the German- and English-language sectors of the socialist movement. In 1908 she served briefly on the Woman’s National Committee, resigning because she believed its leadership did not sufficiently acknowledge the need for women to organize separately from men.

Born in New York City, Lilienthal grew up in a Socialist environment. Her mother, Augusta Lilienthal, had emigrated from Germany in 1861, joined the Socialist Labor Party, and wrote on woman’s rights for Die Neue Zeit. Her freethinking parents provided their only daughter with a classical education, including a few years at Barnard College. In 1894 she married Emil Stern; they had three children before divorcing in 1907.

Before joining the Socialist Party, Stern devoted one year to studying the major socialist texts. Well versed in history as well as economics, she specialized in writing short pieces of propaganda. Two lengthy pamphlets illustrate her grounding in historical materialism: From Fireside to Factory (1916) and Women of the Future (1916). She later translated from the German August Bebel’s classic, Women and Socialism. In her mind, socialism nevertheless represented “something more than an economic science, or a political theory; it has become a religion, a philosophy of life.”

Stern continued her mother’s advocacy of woman suffrage and was instrumental in directing the energies of the Socialist Party into the major New York suffrage campaigns of 1915 and 1917. She believed that suffrage was a sex, not a class, issue and encouraged the party’s cooperation with mainstream groups, including the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After the ratification of the suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Lilienthal edited a short-lived “New Citizens” column in the New York Call.

In 1915, Stern remarried. Her second husband, Ernest Lilienthal, was a German-born executive in the printing trade. After 1919 Meta Stern Lilienthal turned to the peace movement. She published an autobiography, Dear Remembered World (1947), focused on her New York childhood. Writing her memoirs shortly before her death, she raised for posterity her parents’ ideals, which she listed as “economic security, physical well-being, and personal happiness for the great mass of mankind.”

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