The socialist press naturally reported national and international events, but its moral emphasis was on the eclipse of the republic and the promise of socialism. An awakened citizenry had to educate itself to the history and destiny of civilization. Perhaps the emergence of an indigenous women’s Socialist sector best expressed this fundamental aspect of Debsian socialism. (Quint 1994) Women’s socialism first blossomed where nineteenth century reform traditions had remained strong, in the small towns of the Midwest and West. Tinged by spiritualism and its offspring, it resumed the Protestant mission for a purified world with woman’s moral influence assured. For a time, in spite of a determined resistance by male Socialists, their movement flourished; their own press, with a circulation of 10,000, conveyed a unique socialist message through the schoolteachers, ministers’ wives and aging gender agitators. (Quint 1994)
Marxism abstractly, and the socialist party concretely, had made possible the preparatory training women needed in order to take hold of their own collective destiny. Alliance with the working classes would bring reconciliation between the sentimental values of the past and a Bellamyesque future. (Bell 1972) Socialist women had the right and the duty to demand their own share of the work and the glory, their own definitions of Socialism. In truth, the contemporary European avant-garde with its appeal to individual woman’s emancipation did not aspire nearly so far or so radically as these stiff-backed, semi-rural women. (Bell 1972)
The Socialist educational program, most popular in the Midwest and Plains states among native-born men and women in early middle age, demanded new kinds of books and new ways to read them. One may judge the movement’s intellectual character by the most important educational text supplied to English language socialists, The Struggle for Existence (1904) by former Populist educator Walter Thomas Mills. (Quint 1994) Interpreting the history of the universe in one grand sweep, this widely circulated work simplified religion, culture, Spencer, Darwin and a little Marx into a graspable whole. Study questions following each chapter allowed little circles of disciples, meeting in public schools, union halls and taverns, to rehearse their own understandings and to raise their collective self-confidence. The local Socialist newspapers provided Marxism its first extensive popularization (or vulgarization), the most sweeping ever conducted in the English language, and pressed readers to go on to the books themselves.
