Eugene Debs on the “New Woman”

Eugene Debs’s commitment to gender equality came early. In his mid-twenties, with women’s voting rights still four decades away, Debs personally brought Susan B. Anthony to speak in his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana; in 1883, he invited a local female writer to start a “Women’s Department” in the union newspaper he edited. While the future socialist was relatively conservative at the time — deeply skeptical of strikes, solicitous toward business leaders — “the woman question” was an exception.

By the fall of 1895, when the following article was published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Debs’s politics had changed. He was a socialist in all but name. And his feminism, to use a contemporary label, persisted. Writing from jail — he was serving a six-month term for leading the massive Pullman Strike — Debs didn’t mince words. “Men have . . . assumed and exercised all authority, and woman’s sphere has been limited to meek submission.” He welcomed the “new woman” to “take her place side by side with man in the great struggle for social, economic, and intellectual emancipation.”

— Shawn Gude

We hear much nowadays about the “new woman.” The theme is an inviting one. It breathes of a “good time coming,” when woman shall be at least the equal of man. And the Lord knows this is not claiming much for her. For, as millions of men are [wage] slaves, so millions of women are the slaves of slaves. In respect to woman, man has not risen above animal creation. He is the stronger and therefore rules; and woman only has what he has seen fit to “allow” her. Conceal it as we may the haggard fact stands forth that men have by virtue of superior strength kept women in…