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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Janet Lee, Comrades and Partners: The Shared Lives of Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) |
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GRACE HUTCHINS and Anna Rochester shared a life together for nearly 50 years. For 40 of those years, they were members of the Communist Party: a Party that repeatedly condemned same-sex relationships. Despite the incipient tension between their ideological commitments and their lifestyle, each found the Party a comfortable intellectual home, and, as Janet Lee reveals, in this creatively-conceived biography, each used it as the staging ground for a series of remarkable achievements. |
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Rochester, born in 1880, and Hutchins, born in 1885, both came from prominent and wealthy families; each attended Bryn Mawr College, though only Hutchins graduated; each migrated through different routes to Christian socialism in the early 1920s, when they settled down together. Rochester worked with and for Denison House (a social settlement), then the National Child Labor Committee, and the US Children's Bureau, associating with the likes of Florence Kelley and Julia Lathrop as she did so. Hutchins went to China as a missionary in 1912, returning after four years to a European world at war that, she claimed, converted her to pacifism. The two settled into a communal household together in 1921, and when it disintegrated three years later, they established a home of their own that they would maintain for the rest of their lives. They became activists for peace — working first for Christian groups like the Fellowship of Reconciliation — and then abandoning Christian socialism to join the Communist Party in 1927. Within the party, they took separate trajectories. Hutchins focused on labour, particularly on women's wage-work; Rochester devoted herself to issues of immigration, and then to economic analysis. Although they largely supported themselves by writing and editing, parental allowances and inheritance expanded their capacity to devote themselves fully to their political lives. Both distinguished themselves as authors and activists; and both remained loyal to the Communist Party throughout their long lives. Rochester died in 1966, and Hutchins three years later. |
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Lee's strategy in writing this biography is to focus on "the process whereby subjects are formed through historically defined processes." (4–5) "While Hutchins and Rochester were constituted as political actors across widely differing ideological landscapes," she tells us, "these landscapes molded them in particular ways that I explain throughout the book." (5) This search for the creation of the persona poses an exciting challenge to the reader eager to understand the creation of a life (or two lives in this instance); yet it is never fully realized in the book. And the attention Lee pays to the task of constructing the subjective experience seems in the end to be somewhat counter-productive: to detract from her willingness to engage with issues of growth and change, of contradiction and tension. |
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For example, we are repeatedly reminded that the bourgeois backgrounds of these women, their class privilege, licensed their travels, their exposure, and their capacity to live well. Strong loyalties, Lee writes, "were possible because of their socioeconomic privilege. They lived their faith because they could live their faith." (109) Towards the ends of their lives, when McCarthyism played havoc with the Party apparatus and the lives of its members, their substantial financial means enabled them to campaign on behalf of civil liberties and to bail friends out of jail. But while their resources help us to understand how Hutchins and Rochester survived, they do not offer much in the way of explanation. Many privileged women lived dissolutely, and many unprivileged women found ways to live their faith. If bourgeois privilege helped the pair to retain their economic independence during the difficult McCarthy period, it does not explain why they kept faith with communism long after the Party's bloody purges became public knowledge in 1956. |
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Lee tells us that Grace and Anna did not see themselves as lesbians (166) at least partly because "they had strong incentives not to do so." This remarkable statement is followed by a discussion of the Communist Party's early and increasing opposition to homosexuality — position that Hutchins and Rochester apparently supported despite their own experiences. Are there not issues here that require exploration? Their companionship, the lifestyle and the relationships that ensued from it are part of an explanatory framework that might help us to understand their politics. We learn of individual friends and friendships; but despite close connections with networks of women around World War I, Hutchins and Rochester do not seem to have maintained many women friends after the disruption of their commune in 1924. Is this connected to their apparent lack of feminism? Lee comments on their lack of feminist insight, and tells us how excited she is when she catches them taking a feminist position she likes. (117, 173). But she has a hard time explaining how their own relationships to women's issues may have served them well both in the Party and among other women of their day. The pair fit comfortably into a social feminism that was not unusual among educated women in the mid-20th century — a position that the author acknowledges in the text yet dismisses as "liberal" in the accompanying box. (116) |
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Equally troubling is the way Lee inserts herself into the narrative both in the text and in a series of "boxes" sprinkled throughout the text. Lee uses these boxes to comment on her own thoughts as she engaged with her material. She raises questions about biography as a genre; ruminates about her doubts and decisions; evokes her own subjective experiences in relation to those of her protagonists; and shares her fantasies and wishes about Hutchins and Rochester. The boxes appear on nearly every page, occasionally two to a page, sometimes informative, occasionally insightful, and inevitably distracting the reader from the argument in process. While I appreciate the post modern concern for identifying the subject-position of the writer, I wonder about the effectiveness of a strategy that draws so much attention to the writer at the expense of insight into the subject. At one point, we are told, for example, that Grace and Anna were in India when Lee's mother was born. (136) What are we meant to make of this? At another, Lee interrupts a perceptive analysis of the development of Hutchins' and Rochester's thought to introduce her own concerns about whether she might have constructed herself as a "fictive character" in this book. I would be willing, even eager, to read about that in an introductory essay, but I am irritated when my eye is drawn to it in the midst of something substantive. |
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In the end I am left confounded. These lives raise crucial issues that promise to illuminate much about the history of 20th century American politics, including the transformation from religious faith to party loyalty; the contradictions between lifestyles financed by inherited wealth and commitments to ideologies of equality; and the tension between lesbian sensibility and membership in a party apparatus that rigidly espouses heterosexuality. Janet Lee opens all these questions, and more, to examination. For this, as well as for introducing us to two fervent and passionate lives, I am grateful. But in Comrades and Partners, she leaves the big questions for others to explore, turning Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins into effective vehicles for an experiment in biographical inquiry rather than the centerpoints of a significant historical moment. Readers interested in the project of biography writing will find this attractive, but I confess to disappointment in my search for the larger meaning of these two very important lives. |
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Alice Kessler-Harris
Columbia University
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