Meta L. Stern, Hebe, recognizing the historic nature of the gathering, frames the upcoming New York State Socialist Women’s Conference.

‘The First Conference of Socialist Women’ by Hebe from The New York Call. Vol. 1 No. 28. July 1, 1908.

An Event in the History of the Socialist Movement in this Country–Advance In Women’s Thought Is Marked by this New Departure–Great Results Looked For.

The first State Conference of Socialist women, which will be held on July 4 and 5 at the Labor Temple in this city, in conjunction with the State Convention of the Socialist Party, marks an event in the history of the Socialist movement of this country.

Until recently the absence of women in the rank and file of the party has been a deplorable fact. We have had some unusually capable women always among us as writers and lecturers, as agitators and organizers, but the number of women on the membership list of the party and the number of women attending the business meetings and lecturers was so small, as to give intelligent foreigners the impression that American women were far less advanced and far less progressive in thought and spirit than their European sisters. This was all the more surprising when one remembers that American women enjoy a greater amount of social and political freedom than the women of most European countries, and that their education and general training is such as to give them an amount of independence and self-reliance as the women of no other nationality possess. We can only explain this past indifference on the part of our women by the same causes that explained the slow growth of the Socialist movement, even among workingmen, during the first decades of its existence on American soil. Firstly, that conditions were not yet ripe for Socialism, that capitalism had not yet reached that stage of development where its evils must impress themselves on the mind of the most conservative worker, and secondly, that the cosmopolitan character of the population of our great industrial centers, made our organization of the workers an unusually difficult task.

Socialist Party Now a Recognized Factor.

But during recent years the development of social and economic conditions has been such, that the Socialist Party, which at first was ridiculed and then was ignored, has come to be a recognized factor in American politics. The American politics. The American workingman has awakened, and is awakening in ever greater numbers year by year, and now the American working woman is beginning to awaken too. She is of course far slower to recognize her own advantage and to find the road to her own liberation than her brother toller. But this is not surprising. It is, on the contrary, the natural course of events. Men are naturally more progressive than women, owing to their broader life, their greater experience in common enterprise, and their political power. Women, tied down by their political disabilities, hampered by their inexperience and general ignorance of public life, and burdened by cares and interests of the most petty kind, are naturally conservative and slow to widen their horizon. But when women do widen their horizon, when they do tread a new path and embrace a new idea, their ardour and devotion and capacity of self-sacrifice are such, that they are sure to give an immense impetus to the cause they serve. Therefore let all Socialists rejoice at the awakening of our American working-class women!

Women Are Awakening.

A general wave of progress has swept over the womanhood of this country during the past year. The American woman’s suffrage movement which for decades has been in an almost dormant condition, has experienced a general reawakening, and the American Suffragists, guided by the splendid example of their, progressive English sisters have tried entirely new methods of propaganda unknown heretofore. There have been meetings in public squares and street corner speeches: there have been parades and agitation tours by canal boat and trolley car. The American woman’s suffrage movement has ceased to consist of parlor meetings and pink tea parties and has become a truly progressive and militant movement; and yet this movement of bourgeois and middle class women cannot fully satisfy the earnest, thinking, class-conscious working woman. For the working woman who bears all the economic burdens of her class besides bearing the social and political iniquities of her sex, needs something more and beyond the possession of the ballot. She needs amelioration of her economic conditions; she needs social legislation to shorten her working hours, and to increase her wages, to take her children out of the factory, and to improve the tenement in which she lives; she needs a party to represent her interests as a member of the exploited class. The usual battle-cry of the suffragists, “no taxation without representation,” has little meaning to her, for she is not a tax-payer. Her battle cry must be: No class privilege and no unearned increment: No perpetuation of a society that means luxury to the idlers and misery to the toilers!

The New York Call was the first English-language Socialist daily paper in New York City and the second in the US after the Chicago Daily Socialist. The paper was the center of the Socialist Party and under the influence of Morris Hillquit, Charles Ervin, Julius Gerber, and William Butscher. The paper was opposed to World War One, and, unsurprising given the era’s fluidity, ambivalent on the Russian Revolution even after the expulsion of the SP’s Left Wing. The paper is an invaluable resource for information on the city’s workers movement and history and one of the most important papers in the history of US socialism. The paper ran from 1908 until 1923.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/the-new-york-call/1908/080701-newyorkcall-v01n28.pdf