Working Woman/Woman Today

WORKING WOMAN/WOMAN TODAY. The magazines Working Woman and Woman Today were the voices of the National Women’s Department of the Communist Party of the United States, and their women writers were the key group articulating a Communist position on women’s rights. Working Woman grew from the 1920s organ of New York’s United Council of Working Class Women. In 1929 it began national publication as an obscure monthly, its readership confined to the Party’s hard core of ethnic clubs and women’s auxiliaries in the industrial belt. Though as fiercely militant and worker-oriented as the rest of the Party press at that point, Working Woman, edited by Women’s Department head Anna Damon, was the one Party text in which the worker’s world was not a wholly masculine space. Short stories and readers’ letters sounded notes of contradiction and identity beyond the war of class against class. Other than photos of Soviet flyers and female strikers, it had no visual embellishment to its rough newsprint columns.

In the early 1930s, as the Party shifted away from workerism and toward neighborhood and family-centered resistance, Working Woman vividly chronicled women in bread and meat boycotts, miners’ strikes, and the struggle to save the “Scottsboro boys,” wherein the firsthand experience of Black women was a major theme. In 1934 the publication adopted a more modern and attractive magazine format as Margaret Cowl became secretary of the Women’s Department and editor.

As a magazine, Working Woman blended an appeal to women as housekeepers (its “Household Corner” column) and young single workers (its regular “Fashion Letter”) with an aggressive defense of women’s equal role in the labor movement versus husbands and anyone else who would keep them at home. Graphically it approximated the boldness of a good leaflet; for example, the July 1935 cover drawing of massed placards called for “Free Birth Control Clinics,” “Equal Pay for Equal Work,” “Fight against War and Fascism,” “Reduce Meat Prices,” and “Free Milk for Workers’ Children.”

Woman Today replace Working Woman in March 1936 with a dramatic art-deco look. This change signified the Party’s attempt to forge an alliance with radicalized middle-class and intellectual sectors, including feminists. Lasting only until 1938, it championed woman’s “democratic rights,” under assault internationally by fascism, in the name of New Deal progressivism “for a better world.” By contrast to the class-conscious wisecracking of Working Woman, Woman Today was cosmopolitan and even literary, with an impressive list of non-Party contributors and sponsors (Mary Van Kleeck, Freda Kirchwey, and Josephine Herbst, among others).

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

Shaffer, Robert. “Women and the Communist Party, USA, 1930–40.” Socialist Review 45 (May–June 1979).

Weigand, Kate. Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

The Working Woman & The Woman Today. Marxists International Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/wt/index.htm