An early biography of Caroline A. Lowe, a founder and leader of National Women’s Committee in the Socialist Party of America. A Left Winger Lowe later became an in-house lawyer for the I.W.W., working on many of the well known cases of the Red Scare.

‘Comrade Caroline A. Lowe’ from The Socialist Woman Vol. 2 No. 18. November, 1908.

Ideas possess men and women and carry them into walks of life that they little dream of entering when they begin their work in the school of experience. Old ideas and plans may seem so well established, that to follow them is but a matter of course, until some thought, revolutionary, comes our way and suddenly the whole plan of life is changed, and all things become new. Institutions that we thought sacred become profane, and associates that were once congenial disappoint us more and more as the new idea takes hold.

The subject of this article is one of those possessed with the new idea, and has come forth from among the old institutions and friends to add her little or great might as it may happen in bringing about the better day for the down-trodden human race. Caroline A. Lowe, is one of the many women that is waking to the fact that woman’s slavery has its beginning where all slavery begins, that is in the economic world of production and distribution. She has learned that for the race to be free we must study our relationship to the institutions at which, and with which we labor. She has learned that to be politically free, socially free, we must first be economically free, and so this idea has possessed her that the working class must be aroused to see its slavery.

The woman of the race has been subject to the man of the race. She has been the isolated part and her expression has been only as man allowed, or was forced to allow by the rising intelligence of a few brave women who dared to protest against not having any voice or part in the affairs of the world. It has been the habit of man to look upon woman as a commodity, purchasable for a price to be set between the father and the suitor. This mental idea is not dead yet and so woman has to awaken woman to the fact that to get social and political recognition she must arise and strike the blow for her economic emancipation. To do this a few women have learned that only in organization is there strength.

‘Following the lead of the national convention of the Socialists in Chicago in appointing a woman’s committee of the party, Kansas has placed in the hands of Comrade Lowe the task of organizing the women of Kansas. We feel sure that the work is in the hands of the right person. “By our fruits we are known” and her work so far has been very successful, having organized the women of Ft Scott, Englevale, Ashley, Pittsburg, Girard, Coffeyville, and Sycamore. At each place a personal visit is made to the teachers and an urgent invitation extended them to attend the meetings. The members of the woman’s committee must be dues paying members of the party.

The work is not being rushed, but plans are being carefully laid. Every person who shows any signs of wanting to help is receiving a letter. The state oflice is giving every aid possible and under Comrade Lowe’s directions Kansas bids fair to take the lead in woman’s committee organization work.

There is an impression abroad that to-day we work only for a money compensation; but once a person becomes thoroughly imbued with an idea, this idea causes him or her to drop the best paying work in the world and to go forth to do battle for that which they love. Comrade Lowe had taught school for a number of years, when it began to dawn upon her that the social body was unclean and wretched. She saw the stricken human beings who toil from sun to sun and whose lives are blighted with the curse of poverty, coined into the profits of the present system. Although her entire life had been spent in the school room and she had risen to the position of vice-president in the Teachers’ Association of Kansas City, Mo., she left it all to come into the work of lifting the burden of the workers that is grinding the life out of all society.

To meet Comrade Lowe is to meet earnestness and a soul devoted to a cause that is bound to win because it is right, and for the reason that such as she are enlisted to fight its battles.

The Socialist Woman was a monthly magazine edited by Josephine Conger-Kaneko from 1907 with this aim: “The Socialist Woman exists for the sole purpose of bringing women into touch with the Socialist idea. We intend to make this paper a forum for the discussion of problems that lie closest to women’s lives, from the Socialist standpoint”. In 1908, Conger-Kaneko and her husband Japanese socialist Kiichi Kaneko moved to Girard, Kansas home of Appeal to Reason, which would print Socialist Woman. In 1909 it was renamed The Progressive Woman, and The Coming Nation in 1913. Its contributors included Socialist Party activist Kate Richards O’Hare, Alice Stone Blackwell, Eugene V. Debs, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and others. A treat of the journal was the For Kiddies in Socialist Homes column by Elizabeth Vincent.The Progressive Woman lasted until 1916.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-woman/081100-socialistwoman-v2w18.pdf