Page, Myra

PAGE, MYRA (1897-1993). Journalist and fiction writer, Communist and union organizer, Dorothy Page Gary took “Myra Page” as her pen name. She joined the Communist Party, with her husband, John Fordyce Markey, in the late 1920s and filled a variety of positions until they both resigned their memberships in 1953.

Page was born in Newport News, Virginia, into a prominent and, she later claimed, “progressive” family. She received a BA from the Westhampton College (University of Richmond) in 1918 and, after teaching school for a while, enrolled in Columbia University. There deepened her theoretical understanding of racial hierarchies by studying with the famed anthropologists Franz Boas, Melvin Herskovitz, and Marxist Franklin Giddins. At the same time, the local chapter of the Young Women’s Christian Association allowed her to develop, she later recalled, “an antiracist consciousness,” which informed both her academic studies, fiction writing, and activism. Classes at the Rand School of Social Science and a reading of the “Communist Manifesto” added a sturdy political framework.

After completing her Master’s work in 1920, Page began a period of factory work and union organizing, alternating with stints of teaching. She took a job in the Philadelphia garment industry and organizing for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. By 1924, Page was back in New York working as a teacher and organizing for the American Federation of Teachers. A skilled organizer, she attended several international labor conferences, in Austria, France, and England. In 1928, she received a PhD in sociology from the University of Minnesota and published her dissertation as Southern Cotton Mills and Labor in 1929.

Southern race relations and labor condition focused her fictional energies. Shortly after the famous Gastonia Strike at the Loray mill, she published her best-known novel. Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932) features a young woman who experiences a political awakening in the 1920s and, along the way, illustrates that special hardships women endure, including frequent pregnancies and unrelenting domestic demands. Unlike other novels on the Gastonia Strike, Gathering Storm focuses on race relations during the strike and in the community and even forecasts the coming of a “Soviet America.”

In the 1930s, Page and Markey resigned their college teaching positions in Connecticut to work full-time for the Left. Page excelled as a Communist journalist, writing for the Daily Worker, Working Woman, the New Masses, Labor Age, and the Southern Workman. She took over the editorship of the New Pioneer, published by the Young Communist League, USA. After two years working as a journalist in Moscow, she published Moscow Yankee (1935), a story about a young worker who escapes the Great Depression in the United States by taking a job in the Red Star truck factory in Moscow. The novel, which received positive reviews from liberal critics –“gripping, profound, thrilling”—served mainly as a vehicle for Page to heap praise on the Soviet experiment, the Five-Year Plan. After her return, she joined the League of America Writers, teaching classes for the League into the 1940s and, during some summers, for the Highlander Folk School.

In her posthumous memoir, In a Generous Spirit (1996), Page reveals working in the underground during her Moscow stay and also describes her gradual disillusionment with the Soviet Union. Blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Page abandoned adult fiction and, as “Dorothy Markey,” wrote two biographies for children. She died in Yonkers, New York.

Baker, Christina Looper. In a Generous Spirit: A First-Person Biography of Myra Page. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1996.

Mantooth, Wes. You Factory Folks Who Sing This Song Will Surely Understand: Culture, Ideology, and Action in the Gastonia Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargin. London: Routledge, 2006.

Myra Page Papers, 1910-1990. Collection Overview. The Southern Historical Collection. University of North Carolina Libraries. https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/05143/