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2013 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allen, Julia M., 1947
Passionate commitments : the lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins / Julia M. Allen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4687-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Rochester, Anna. 2. Hutchins, Grace, 18853. Women social reformersUnited StatesBiography. 4. Women labor leadersUnited StatesBiography. 5. Women communistsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
HQ1412.A45 2013
303.48'4082dc23
2012025921
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Foreword
Passionate Commitments recovers two life stories that, as told here, emphasize intersections between histories that are not often treated togetherthe history of the American Left, women's histories, and queer histories. Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester, born into wealthy nineteenth-century East Coast families, spent the first half of the twentieth century in love with one another and at work agitating for social and economic justice. They researched and wrote for labor unions, donated hours and money in support of a free press, raised bail for friends and comrades, ran for public office, and always insisted on women's independence. They left behind a rich archive of letters, books, and essays that chronicled public lives, deep private commitments, and constant personal reinvention as they moved ideologically away from institutional Christianity and women-centered service organizations, which were the sites of careers for many middle-class women of their era, toward mixed-gender organizations and labor activism. This dual biography describes, with affection and meticulous scholarship, Hutchins's and Rochester's love for one another and their many accomplishments. It describes, as well, the principle by which they lived and transformed themselves, their rhetoric of the whole person, in which every part of their livesfrom their writing and their partnership to their living arrangements and financial choices, even including their choices in clothingcontributed, without contradiction, to their revolutionary aims.
The central mystery of Allen's book is an utterance by Hutchins that seems to stand out as a shocking exception to her diligent efforts to live through a coherent social justice rhetoric. In 1949, she accused Whittaker Chambers, who was acting as an informant for anticommunist federal agents, of being a homosexual pervert. This utterance defies easy explanation. It is not easily explained away as evidence that Hutchins and Rochester had an asexual partnership, as Allen shows. Nor is it understandable as navet: by the time Hutchins made this comment, Freud and the sexologists had popularized the notion of same-sex partnerships, such as that of Hutchins and Rochester, as sexual (if often pathologically so). Nor can the utterance be understood in terms of scapegoating; Hutchins was not trying to draw attention away from her own homosexuality by accusing someone else, as did many in the era about which Allen writes. This utterance, moreover, reveals a broader ideological mystery: but for the important example of their lives together, which was openly acknowledged by many who knew them, Hutchins and Rochester did not directly advocate for freedom for those who, like themselves, chose same-sex partners. Given their rigorous attention to a rhetoric of the whole person, how do we understand this failure to incorporate the class newly being identified as homosexuals into their social justice platform? Neither navet nor self-defense serves as an adequate explanation here. Moreover, the choice to attribute Chambers's anticommunist lies to his homosexuality, combined with Hutchins's silence about her own partnership with Rochester, made it more difficult for Hutchins to intervene to defend herself or others against the simultaneously antihomosexual and anticommunist government attacks that increased in intensity during the 1950s. This silence, in turn, Allen argues, substantially delayed the inclusion of rights for homosexuals into the Left platform for change.
So how do we understand thisthe biggest rhetorical mistake of Hutchins's life, as Allen describes it? How did Hutchins and Rochester understand themselves, and how did their partnership inform those identities? In her search for answers, Allen links the development of Hutchins and Rochester's identities to the writing of the sexologist Edward Carpenter. Allen thus writes her subjects into an often-told history of the development of contemporary gay and lesbian identities. As Michel Foucault enables us to tell this history, contemporary gay and lesbian identities are products of sexological writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which same-sex sexual behavior accrued meaning-making power. One of the effects of sexological writing was an increase in explicit legal and social disapprobation of homosexuality, such as that experienced by Hutchins, Rochester, and Chambers; another effect was the emergence of a homosexual minority that could recognize itself and thus advocate for civil rights based on a shared identity.
Carpenter's writing about the relationship between sexuality and identity, however, is more multidimensional than this version of sexology, which has become part of queer history. Carpenter was a Christian socialist who argued for the existence of a sexual minoritya third sexdefined not only by same-sex erotic choice but also by a heightened commitment to social justice and to alliance, in the name of social justice, across difference. Carpenter's delineation of a third sex asserts that homoerotics and heightened ethical sensibilities are mutually constitutive. Following Carpenter, Hutchins and Rochester saw their work in social justice as a more significant meaning-making characteristic of their lives than their sexuality. This is not the same thing as saying that sexuality did not matter to them or isn't important for those who tell their stories; rather, in the absence of labor toward social justice across gender, class, race, and nation, sexual behavior is not meaning-making.
In the early twenty-first century, when the face of civil rights is often the gay man or lesbian who would like to marry and whose claim to the right to do so is made based on his or her choice of a same-sex partner, the stories of Hutchins and Rochester told here provide a reminder about the pitfalls of single-issue politics.
