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For White Men Only: The Socialist
Party of America and Issues
of Gender, Ethnicity and Race
Sally M. Miller 1
University of the Pacific
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This article examines the experience
of distinct groups within the Socialist Party of America, considering
the period from its founding in 1901 to the eve of World War One.
The Socialist Party, befitting its membership in the international
socialist movement of that era, was committed to representing
the workers of the world in the Marxist struggle to achieve political
and economic equality within a cooperative commonwealth. Accordingly,
variables of gender, ethnicity and race were subsumed within the
Social Question. Ideally, workers in every capacity and of all
backgrounds would march together under the Red Flag and create
a new egalitarian society. While, indeed, many lawyers, ministers
and others of the middle-class belonged to the Socialist Party
and often held office within it, thereby derisively being likened
by critics to an assemblage of dentists, the party was very much
working class in composition, as shown by James R. Green and others.2
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The Socialist Party in its official
statement, offered a gender-free and colorblind invitation to
membership. Reflecting the policies of the Socialist International,
it endorsed equal civil and political rights for men and women.
While the two major political parties in the United States had
not yet endorsed female suffrage, the Socialist Party's constitution
favored equal political rights without regard to gender, and it
elected women to offices and to convention delegations, again
in contrast to the Republican and Democratic parties. The socialists
were undoubtedly influenced in their pioneering position on gender
equity by the fact that since the founding conference of the Second
International, in 1889, international socialism had endorsed rights
for women. Moreover, and of fundamental importance, Marx and Engels
themselves had called socialists' attention to the exploitation
of women in capitalist societies. Eugene Debs, the party's perennial
standard-bearer and often seen to embody it to public opinion,
echoed their views, and wrote that the socialist movement was
the first to "pledge itself unqualifiedly to abrogate. .
.The injustice of sex distinction in reference to the rights,
privileges and opportunities of civic and social life."3
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