Partner Anna Rochester
Queer Places:
Columbia University (Ivy League), 116th St and Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Denison House, 93 Tyler St, Boston, MA 02111
171 West 12th Street, 10011, NYC, NY, USA
Grace
Hutchins (August 19, 1885 – July 15, 1969) was an American labor
reformer and researcher, journalist, political activist and
communist. She spent many years of her life writing about labor and
economics, in addition to being a lifelong dedicated member of the
Communist Party, along with
Anna Rochester, a
Marxist economist and
historian and her companion of 45 years.[1][2]
Together they were known for promoting radical
Christian pacifism in the United States,[3]
although Hutchins was also regularly involved in
strikes,
demonstrations and
labor disputes. The labour reformer
Anna Rochester, a ‘special agent’ for the New Jersey Consumers’ League
and the researcher for an influential report on poverty and infant
mortality, mortality, met her partner, Grace Hutchins,
through Vida Dutton Scudder and the Denison
House Settlement in Boston. Rochester and Hutchins’ shared 45 years embraced
most conceivable revolutionary enterprises, including a women’s commune,
‘the Community House’ shaped around an ethic of shared housekeeping, and
otherwise dubbed ‘the unsettlement house.’
Grace Hutchins was born in an
upper-class family in
Boston in
1885, the third daughter of five children to Susan (née Barnes-Hurd) and
Edward Hutchins.[4][5][6]
Her ancestors, originally from England, had settled in Massachusetts during
the colonial period. Her father was an attorney who helped found the
Legal Aid Society, while her mother was involved in various hospitals in
the city; they were both actively involved in the Episcopal
Trinity Church.[4][6]
Hutchins was privately educated, and accompanied her parents on a world
tour from 1898 to 1899. She then attended the
women's college at
Bryn Mawr, which was relatively new at the time. During her college
life, she "excelled" in basketball, field hockey, and tennis.[6][7]
Outside of sports, she was also involved in advocating for
women's suffrage. She graduated in 1907, and remained in touch with her
classmates later in life.[6][8]
Within a few years of leaving college, Hutchins became a
Episcopalian missionary teacher for
Church Missionary Society in China and taught at St. Hilda’s school in
South China in 1912, later becoming a
headmistress.[9]
During her time in China, she kept a diary on her observations of Chinese
women's social, educational, and medical conditions.[6]
During her stay in China, Hutchins became ill and returned to the United
States in 1916, partially due to parental concerns.[2]
Back in the United States, she was employed by a
social
training school.[2]
In response to the ongoing
Great War, Hutchins took an
anti-interventionist position and began shifting toward
socialism in her
political stance. When the US entered the war with the
Allies in 1917, she found herself in protests against the war. Her
political stance impacted her private life, and nearly led to her dismissal
from the school where she was employed.[2]
171 West 12th Street
85 Bedford St
Living in New York, Hutchins met Anna Rochester in 1919 at an annual
retreat when she joined the
Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross through her involvement with
teaching the
New Testament.[10]
Both Rochester and Hutchins were firm adherents to the doctrine of
nonviolence, and in 1920 Hutchins joined the
Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which promoted
pacifism
in the United States.[6]
She became a secretary and public speaker for the organization.[11]
She served as a press secretary from 1924 to 1926, during which time she
also served as a business executive while actively contributing to the
monthly magazine.[6]
From 1920 to 1921, she studied labor issues at the
New York School of Social Work, and then went on to
Columbia University's Teacher College for the following two years. It
was during this period that she was suggested to have "learned firsthand" on
many women's labor conditions by working "ten-hour days in a cigar factory".[2]
The Companions' reading lists for their annual retreats revolved around
the works of
Christian socialists such as
Walter Rauschenbusch and
Edward Carpenter, and Hutchins also read more traditional writers such
Karl
Marx and
Friedrich Engels. One contemporary influence appears to have been
Vida Scudder.[12]
Her career was focused upon the health and welfare of
working class women and children.[13]
According to Janet Lee, author of a biography about the two women, they
"were a part of [a] cohort of women whose commitment to social activism was
integrated with their lesbian orientation".[14]
In the early 1920s Hutchins and Rochester travelled through Europe
together on behalf of the FOR, eventually traveling as far as India and the
Far East.
They regularly met other activists of social reform, as well as visiting
factories to observe; they were not only "appalled by what they saw," but
kept up a regular correspondence in the American press regarding the poor
working conditions they witnessed. By 1927, Hutchins was employed by the
Federated Press.[6]
At this time, she and Rochester were also traveling through the
Soviet Union. In contrast to the poverty and poor conditions she had
witnessed in India, Hutchins was impressed by their collective attempts
under communism to overcome the deprivations the country faced.[6]
However, their views clashed with the views of FOR, and they consequently
left the organization for good on their 1927 return to the United States,
instead joining the Communist Party.[6]
During this time, Hutchins observed the textile strikes of New Jersey and
Massachusetts in 1924 and 1928 respectively.[6]
In 1927, she was employed as a researcher for the Bureau of Women in
Industry by the
New York State Department of Labor. Due to her health conditions
however, she had to resign from the position five months later. Later that
year, Hutchins and Rochester along with
Robert W. Dunn founded the
Labor Research Association (LRA), the purpose of which was to compile
and collate facts, statistics and reports for
trade unions and writers. Hutchins remains associated with LRA until
1967. During that time, she was once arrested for demonstrating against the
executions of
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Boston.[6]
Already a treasurer for the Communist Party's national campaign financing
group, she ran for state office as Alderman (1935), Controller (1935), and
Lieutenant-Governor (1948), although she lost each election. A Communist
party candidate, she ran for state comptroller in 1936.[15]
Hutchins was also a trustee of the Bail Bond fund of the
Civil Rights Congress, which supported people who were defending
themselves in the
Smith Act trials. She personally posted the $10,000 bail for
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn after the latter's 1951
indictment.[6]
The significance of their joint work, it has been suggested, is that they
believed and worked towards "revolution not reformation," and that that
accounted for their many switches between organizations.[12]
It has been suggested that what brought the two women together was "the
waged and political work" that they shared.[16]
Hutchins's writings focus primarily on labor conditions for women and
children. She co-edited several reference series for the group, as well as
editing the group's own magazine, Railroad Notes between 1937 and
1962. In addition, she published three books during her lifetime. Jesus
Christ and the World Today was written with Rochester and published in
1922.[6]
Labor and Silk (published in 1929) concerned working conditions in
the textile industry, and was the direct result of her experiences during
the strikes of the 1920s.[6]
Women Who Work (first published 1933) was used by both the Communist
Party and
US unions as a campaign reference work.[17]
It was re-published three times, the latest being in 1952.[6]
Hutchins is known to have had a close personal relationship with Anna
Rochester, and their friendship lasted forty years, both as co-workers and,
from 1924, as cohabitants in New York's
Greenwich Village.[2]
In 1924, the couple moved into an apartment at 85 Bedford Street, where they
lived the rest of their lives.
She has been described as "exud[ing] warmth, building families among
those near her, shaping her feminism around women's traditional and
potential strengths and insisting on women's economic independence as the
key to liberation".[12]
Conversely, in 1948, during the
Alger
Hiss
espionage trial, she was accused by
Whittaker Chambers—who had spied on the Communist Party—of threatening
to kill him after he left the Party. Hutchins denied the offence, and
condemned the accusations in various interviews and publications.[6]
Her father did not approve of her political activities, and he was
disappointed about her 1927 arrest. Regardless, he did continue to provide a
good allowance for her livelihood and, when he died, remembered her in his
will.[6]
In 1951, she testified before a
House Un-American Activities subcommittee due to her contributions to
Communist publications, like
The New Masses and
Daily Worker, and her political campaigns for the Community party.[15]
Hutchins herself believed, as she told The Worker, that
Marxism
"explained the economic basis for the exploitation of women workers as no
one ever did before."[6]
She was a
shareholder in the communist
Daily Worker from 1940 to 1956.[6]
After having been ill for an extended period, she died at her home on
July 15, 1969.[18]
Hutchins has been noted, by the 1930s, as one of a few women who still
saw women as being oppressed, and later as one of the few who "worked to
keep feminism alive in the United States during the 1930s to the 1950s."[12]
Her papers were collated in the Special Collections and University Archives
at the
University of Oregon,[14]
along with Rochester's.[19]
My published books:
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