Jeannette D. Pearl surveys the place of women in the workforce and the labor movement a few years after the 19th Amendment, with suggestions on relating to existing women’s organization, and how to organize women Communists to win working women to their ranks. Pearl was a left voice of the Socialist Party since at least 1911, who would write for the New Review and many other publications. With her then partner Louis C. Fraina, she be active in the formation of the U.S. Left Wing and one of the founding women of U.S. Communism. Also writing as Jenny Dean, she would later be a field organizer of Workers International Relief and the Committee to Protect the Foreign-Born. I would very much like to know more about Comrade Pearl, any information would be appreciated.

‘The Alignment of Revolutionary Women in the Class Struggle’ by Jeannette D. Pearl from the Daily Worker Saturday Supplement. Vol. 2 No. 204. November 15, 1924.

Generally speaking the broad masses of women may be classified as a part of the unskilled labor supply of the country. As unskilled laborers, the difficulty of organizing women becomes at once apparent. Of the four million workers in trade unions, only a quarter of a million are women. The A.F. of L. calculates the organizational strength of women at 5 per cent, to demonstrate how difficult is the task of organizing women. This calculation of the A.F. of L. is no doubt brought into evidence to conceal its own guilt in having sabotaged the unionizing of women. As unskilled workers the A.F. of L. practically made no attempt to organize women while such of the skilled women that sought membership in the A.F. of L. were excluded from many of the unions as competitors, threatening the job trust of the A.F. of L.

The discrimination against women is not a matter of sex as is contended by the feminists, but is based on economic grounds, the source of practically all discriminations. The increasing number of women entering industry, their attempt at organization, make them a factor that must be reckoned with, industrially as well as politically.

Women are organizable. There are over eight million women (of all classes) organized in social and civic clubs throughout the country. In the last presidential election, the eligible voting women, voted to the extent of 43 per cent.

The calculation that the organizational strength of women in trade unions is but 5 per cent is incomplete. Since women constitute but one fourth of the working population, the 5 per cent should be multiplied by four. Male workers are organized in proportion to men employed to the extent of 11 per cent, women to the extent of 2.5 per cent. The organizational strength of working women compared with working men may be taken as 20 per cent.

The number of working women organized in trade unions is not a constant factor. Two thirds of women in industry, according to the women’s bureau at Washington, are continually leaving industry because of marriage.

That proportion may also be assumed for organized women, so that the constant factor for organized women is roughly 100,000 with 160,000 as a perpetual fluctuating figure. But even the 100,000 is not altogether a constant factor, because psychologically working women in the main regard their work as a temporary condition.

The apparent temporary character of women’s employment, her comparative newness to industry, her lack of skill, together with the peculiarities arising out of her maternal functions and duties, have all materially contributed in checking the class solidarity of women.

To draw working women into the class struggle, the peculiarities arising out of sex differences (that does not mean sex inferiority) together with the social and political inequalities must be carefully studied. An apparatus should be created to consider the entire woman’s problem in its relation to the class struggle, with the view of establishing closer contact with the broad masses of working women, to develop their social and revolutionary psychology and to draw the class conscious women into our party.

The Women’s Bureau should be made up of comrades in sympathy with the work. The secretary of the bureau should sit at the executive sessions of the C.E.C., or a member of the C.E.C. should be in the bureau. All woman’s work should be under the jurisdiction of the Women’s Bureau subject to the approval of the C.E.C. The functions of the bureau should be to study conditions peculiar to women’s activity, to carry on work of education, agitation and organization among the broad masses of women and to equip Communist women for that task—a proper psychological approach. The women’s work is not to make for the organization of a women’s political party.

Every branch should have a women’s committee, reports on women’s work should be rendered at all branch meetings and all other subdivisions of the party. At every party conference and convention women’s work should be on the agenda of the day. In our national program of action, an eighth division should provide for woman’s work.

The duties of the women’s committee of the branches should be to study the local conditions of the district as they effect women and to make plans how to best serve the revolutionary movement thru the local conditions prevailing at any given time. The study should include industrial conditions incident to sex differences and discriminations, social and political inequalities, problems effecting housewives and mothers, the public school system as it effects the children of the working class, etc. All women of the branch must be mobilized for women’s work.

Women Communists should penetrate all working women’s organizations, openly join as members of the W.P. and act as standard bearers, tactfully portraying the Communist viewpoint, bringing the principles of the W.P. to the attention of an ever-increasing number of women and so create sympathy and confidence in our party and its leadership.

In every strike, our women must be ready at a moment’s notice to organize relief committees among strikers’ wives and sympathisers and support the strike thru the W.P.

Women W.P. members must systematically engage in the industrial work and strive to draw industrial women into the union and shop nuclei. Women of little social contact respond more freely when approached by members of their own sex.

Working class housewives represent a constant factor in society and deserve serious consideration. Entirely ignored by the A.F. of L., greatly influenced by the church, they are the conservative props of things as they are. They not only exert a retarding influence upon their husbands, they also exert a most reactionary influence upon their children. We must rescue the children, thru an approach to the housewives and mothers.

The housewives’ problems center around prices. That interest should be linked up with the organizational possibilities inherent in co-operatives and civic clubs. There exist in many trade unions women’s auxiliary organizations, composed of workers’ wives. These in reality are social clubs but these clubs should be given labor and political impulses. The T.U.E.L. ought to take it upon itself how best to organize such women’s auxiliaries for the purpose of the class struggle.

Any plan regarding women’s work must necessarily be in the nature of an experiment. A real working plan can only grow out of our experience with work among women. We must not study women as a sex but rather as a subdivision of a sex. Each grouping should be separately studied in order to adopt a more effective approach.

General agitation throughout our press should be started in the woman’s work. Our interest of built literature must be up on an intensive study of the women’s problems in relation to Communism, out of which will follow methods best adapted for the drawing of women into the revolutionary ranks.

The Saturday Supplement, later changed to a Sunday Supplement, of the Daily Worker was a place for longer articles with debate, international focus, literature, and documents presented. The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

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