National Women's Commission

NATIONAL WOMEN’S COMMISSION. Preceded in 1922 by a Women’s Department, the National Women’s Commission was formed by the Communist Party, USA, in the early 1930s to coordinate agitational and trade union work among women. In 1933 the U.S. Communist Party estimated that women constituted about sixteen percent of its membership of twenty thousand; by decade’s end, when the Popular Front was in full swing, the Party claimed that women represented nearly forty percent of the total. To address and enlarge this constituency, the Women’s Commission invited representatives from local Communist Party organizations throughout the country. Its policies and programs appeared in its official organ, Working Woman, and in its Popular Front magazine, Woman Today.

Directed in the 1930s first by Anna Damon and later by Margaret Cowl, the Women’s Commission interpreted its Third Period role as counteracting the appeal of “bourgeois” feminism, especially the Equal Rights Amendment. Much of its work centered in support for working women and recruitment drives around International Women’s Day. During the Popular Front, the Women’s Commission played greater attention to housewives. By the late 1930s, the Daily Worker ran a “Household Corner” column that offered advice to housewives on family finances and health matters. Around the same time and in a few cities, the Communist Party introduced special local organizations to focus agitational work on these issues. These women’s organizations involved mainly housewives in community affairs, and they campaigned for improvements in social services and especially for better schools. Anti-fascism also rallied women, who raised considerable funds to support the Spanish Loyalists.

During the Popular Front the concerns of mothers and children played an important role in the activities of the Women’s Commission. Using the Soviet model of maternal protection, American Communists demanded a similar “Mother’s Bill of Rights” that would establish in the United States free birth-control clinics, day-care centers, maternal insurance, and an extensive program of social services to assist working mothers.

In 1936 the Women’s Commission joined several mainstream women’s groups opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment to sponsor an alternative program known as the “Women’s Charter.” Drafted by Mary Anderson of the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor and social worker Mary Van Kleeck, the Women’s Charter advocated equal opportunity for women in all areas of economic, political, and social life as well as protective legislation, including special wages-and-hours laws and maternal insurance.

The Women’s Commission’s participation in the short-lived Women’s Charter movement reflected its relatively open Popular Front policy toward middle-class women and mainstream organizations. Director Cowl wrote that “while the Party places central importance on the role played by working-class women, it does not ignore the importance of other sectors of the women’s movement....” Such previously maligned groups as the Women’s Trade Union League and the Young Women’s Christian Association now gained a legitimacy in the Party press for their efforts in behalf of working women. The Hitler-Stalin Pact, however, closed this chapter in its history, and the Party leadership dismantled the Women’s Commission in 1940.

The Communist Party reestablished its Women’s Commission in 1945, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn served as its chair until 1953. The role of women in civil rights and in peace movements became its central focus in the postwar period. During the early 1950s the Women’s Commission sponsored a woman’s page in the Sunday Worker, edited by Peggy Dennis and written on alternative weeks by Dennis and the Women’s Commission’s secretary, Claudia Jones. In 1976, the Communist Party USA formally endorsed the ERA. International Women’s Day, however, remained a staple in their celebrations, fully supported by the party’s Women’s Equality Commission.

Cowl, Margaret. “Women’s Struggle for Equality.” Political Affairs 53 (May 1974).

Lynn, Denise, “The Women’s Charter: American Communists and the Equal Rights Amendment Debate,” Women’s History Review, published online April 23, 1914.

Shaffer, Robert. “Women and the Communist Party, USA, 1930–1940.” Socialist Review 9 (May–June 1979).

Ware, Susan. Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

http://polisci.emory.edu/home/neh_2018/documents/Women_and_CP.pdf