Trying to Hold Up Half the Sky: Three Revolutionary Women in Interwar China

This paper explores the transcontinental networks of three women: Song Qing-ling, Agnes Smedley, and Tatyana Moiseenko. The three women—from China, the United States, and the Soviet Union, respectively—lived and worked in Shanghai at the same time in the early 1930s, and moved in many of the same anticolonial, pro-communist circles. Each was connected with networks of revolutionary women that literally spanned the world, from Soviet Comintern agents to Chinese communists to European and American fellow-travelers. The paper traces their complex networks outward from Shanghai, demonstrating the active and vital importance of women at every point along the way.