‘Socialist Women Jailed in Los Angeles’ from The Socialist Woman. Vol. 2 No. 15. August, 1908.

The Los Angeles Herald asks, editorially, “Why arrest scholarly, refined, delicately nurtured, women, mothers of families, and irreproachable members of society, and allow men to exercise with impunity the right of free speech?…Salvation Army speakers, evangelists, and other reformers are not interfered with…The worst feature of all this wretched display of prejudice and lack of good judgment is in the fact that all the leading newspapers of the land—ALL—have published accounts of the arrest of the little women and the immunity of the big men, and are commenting on it unreservedly. Los Angeles may well afford to do without this kind of advertising, and we think the chamber of commerce should call a special meeting to review this whole subject, and set our city right before the United States of America.”

In the meantime, the “little women” are doing a good stroke of agitation work for the Socialist movement. They are advertising the Los Angeles movement as it was never advertised before, and are creating sympathy where it never before existed. A daintily gotten-up “At Home” card sent out by them, reads as follows:

Mrs. Dorothea Johns, Mrs. Bertha. M. Dailey, Mrs. Alice V. Holloway, Mrs. Helen A. Collins will be “At Home” in the city jail where they are temporarily staying for exercising their right of free speech as guaranteed by the constitution of the United States and of the State of California. Friends will be welcomed Thursdays and Sundays from 10 to 12 a. m. and 2 to 4 p. m. from July 14 until further notice. No refreshments served. Those unable to attend are requested to send regrets to A. C. Harper, mayor of Los Angeles, California, or the police commissioners.

Verily, the women of the Socialist movement are of the same stuff from which heroes are made; they are leading the world a pace it never knew before, and are scattering the scales from the eyes of the ignorant masses.’

Progressive Woman replaced The Socialist Woman. 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/080800-socialistwoman-v2w15.pdf