“I’m Becoming Redder by the Hour!” Personal Experience, Public Discourse, and US Women’s Pilgrimage to Russia, 1917–36

In a 1998 essay on “Manifest Domesticity,” Amy Kaplan comments upon how notions of foreignness shaped female interiority in the nineteenth century. Kaplan argues that ideas about foreigners and the actual fact of national expansion influenced the domestic realm (both home and homeland), and that women’s “domestic” writings, reflecting the perspective they internalized, also served imperial ambitions.  Extending her argument into an era of women’s global movements via tourism and journalism, my paper considers the meanings that American women attached to the “new Russia” created by the Bolshevik revolution. Reading personal and private writings of American women living and working in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s alongside published works, I suggest that private writings provide unique insight into women’s utopian longings as well as the self-doubts, criticisms, and conflicts that they felt unable to air publicly. Anna Louise Strong, for instance, published dozens of celebratory books and articles on the Soviet Union but also mused privately on the challenges of living in Moscow and of dealing with Soviet bureaucracy. Milly Bennett, who fashioned herself as a hard-boiled journalist, in private correspondence wrote about traveling to a work camp to visit the Russian man she had married after he was arrested for his “homosexual past.” Jessie Lloyd, even as she became “redder by the hour,” wondered why so many innocent people were arrested. Private and autobiographical sources illuminate narrow fragments of experience but also point to where the self intersects with the social, and how historical actors understand their role in making history. I argue that the ideal of a “new Russia”—an ideal ultimately undermined by the violence and repression that sustained it—produced emancipatory visions for a range of American new women. A patchwork of private musings makes this big picture visible in its true complexity.