The Lives of Agnes Smedley

The Lives of Agnes Smedley
Author: Ruth Price
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2005-01-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0195343867

Was she a selfless political activist? A feminist heroine? A gifted writer who rose from poverty to become a leading journalist and author of the cult classic Daughter of Earth? A spy for the Soviet Union? Or all of these things? Drawing on fifteen years of intensive research and unprecedented access to previously unpublished documents, this vibrant book brings to life one of the twentieth century's most fascinating women. Ruth Price traces Agnes Smedley's unlikely trajectory from a small Missouri town to the coal country of Colorado; to Berkeley and Greenwich Village; to Berlin, Moscow, and China. Fueled by a fury at injustice, Smedley threw herself headlong into the crucial issues of the time, from Indian independence to birth control, women's rights, and the revolution in China. Her friends included such figures as Margaret Sanger, Langston Hughes, Emma Goldman, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mao Zedong, and many others. Perhaps most important, Price uncovers an astonishing truth: Smedley, long thought to be the unfair target of a Cold War smear campaign, was indeed guilty of the espionage charges leveled against her by General Douglas MacArthur and others. Smedley worked to foment armed revolution in India and gathered intelligence for the Soviet Union, seeing it as a bulwark against fascism. Price argues that Smedley acted out of a passionate idealism and that she exhibited a courage and compassion worthy of a renewed, if more complicated, admiration today. Epic in scope, painstakingly researched, and unflinchingly honest, The Lives of Agnes Smedley offers a stunning reappraisal of one of America's most controversial Leftists and a new look at the troubled historical terrain of the first half of the twentieth century.

The Lives of Agnes Smedley

The Lives of Agnes Smedley
Author: Ruth Price
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2005-01-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 019514189X

Drawing on 15 years of intensive research and unprecedented access to previously unpublished documents, this vibrant book brings to life one of the 20th century's most fascinating women.

Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution

Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution
Author: Agnes Smedley
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
Total Pages: 242
Release: 1976
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780912670447

Agnes Smedley worked in and wrote about China from 1928 until 1941. Her journalism and fiction capture the massacre of short-haired feminists in the Canton commune, the lives of silk workers of Canton charged with being lesbians, and the story of Mother Tsai, a peasant who leads village women in smashing an opium den. The Village Voice praised the volume for having "captured brilliantly... the forces of the old and new China struggling in each person she describes."

Agnes Smedley

Agnes Smedley
Author: Janice R. MacKinnon
Publisher:
Total Pages: 425
Release: 1988
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780520066144

Describes Smedley's work as a teacher, birth control pioneer, journalist, political activist, and writer and discusses her special interest in China

Women and Appletrees

Women and Appletrees
Author: Moa Martinson
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1985
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780935312386

About this novel, which focuses on two young women early in the 20th century, both victims of sexual abuse, as they struggle to gain for themselves and their children the rights and opportunities usually denied to poor women, Tillie Olsen said, "I love and am ineradicably grateful for this book, this writer, as I have been but to a few dozen others in my lifetime... Images, scenes, relationships, comprehensions portrayed here will never leave us. She is a writer of international stature and significance."

Transpacific Community

Transpacific Community
Author: Richard Jean So
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2016-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 023154183X

In the turbulent years after World War I, a transpacific community of American and Chinese writers and artists emerged to forge new ideas regarding aesthetics, democracy, internationalism, and the political possibilities of art. Breaking with preconceived notions of an "exotic" East, the Americans found in China and in the works of Chinese intellectuals inspiration for leftist and civil rights movements. Chinese writers and intellectuals looked to the American tradition of political democracy to inform an emerging Chinese liberalism. This interaction reflected an unprecedented integration of American and Chinese cultures and a remarkable synthesis of shared ideals and political goals. The transpacific community that came together during this time took advantage of new advances in technology and media, such as the telegraph and radio, to accelerate the exchange of ideas. It created a fast-paced, cross-cultural dialogue that transformed the terms by which the United States and China—or, more broadly, "West" and "East"—knew each other. Transpacific Community follows the left-wing journalist Agnes Smedley's campaign to free the author Ding Ling from prison; Pearl Buck's attempt to fuse Jeffersonian democracy with late Qing visions of equality in The Good Earth; Paul Robeson's collaboration with the musician Liu Liangmo, which drew on Chinese and African American traditions; and the writer Lin Yutang's attempt to create a typewriter for Chinese characters. Together, these individuals produced political projects that synthesized American and Chinese visions of equality and democracy and imagined a new course for East-West relations.

12319 Battle Hymn Of China

12319 Battle Hymn Of China
Author: Agnes_smedley Agnes_smedley
Publisher: Legare Street Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-10-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781015588165

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Great Road

Great Road
Author: Agnes Smedley
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 483
Release: 1972
Genre: History
ISBN: 0853452067

Chu Teh, one of the legendary figures of the Chinese Revolution, was born in 1886. He was commander in chief of the People's Revolutionary Army, and this is the story of the first sixty years of his life. As a supreme commanding general, he was probably unique; surely there has never been another commander in chief who, during his years of service, spun, wove, set type, grew and cooked his own food, wrote poetry and lectured not only to his troops on military strategy and tactics but to women's classes on how to preserve vegetables. Evans Carlson wrote that "Chu Teh has the kindness of a Robert E. Lee, the tenacity of a Grant, and the humility of a Lincoln." More than a biography, this work by a great American woman journalist, who took the account from Chu Teh himself, is a social and historical document of the highest value.

Calling Home

Calling Home
Author: Janet Zandy
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 1990
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780813515281

Working-class women are the majority of women in the United States, and yet their work and their culture are rarely visible. Calling Home is an anthology of writings by and about working-class women. Over fifty selections represent the ethnic, racial, and geographic diversity of working-class experience. This is writing grounded in social history, not in the academy. Traditional boundaries of genre and periodization collapse in this collection, which includes reportage, oral histories, speeches, songs, and letters, as well as poetry, stories, and essays. The divisions in this collection - telling stories, bearing witness, celebrating solidarity - address the distinction of "by" or "about" working-class women, and show the connections between individual identity and collective sensibility in a common history of struggle for economic justice. The geography of home, identity, parents, sex, motherhood, the dominance of the job, the overlapping of private and public worlds, the promise of solidarity and community are a few of the themes of this book. Here is a chorus of working class women's voices: Sandra Cisneros, Barbara Garson, Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, Barbara Smith, Endesha I. M. Holland, Mother Jones, Nellie Wong, Agnes Smedley, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Sharon Doubiago, Carol Tarlen, Hazel Hall, Margaret Randall, Judy Grahn, and many others! The aesthetic impulse is shaped by class, but not limited to one ruling class. What connects these writers is a collective consciousness, a class, which rejects bondage and lays claim to liberation through all the possibilities of language. Calling Home is illustrated with family photographs as well as images of working women by professional photographers.