For Beatty, women’s suffrage was directly tied to the plight of labor, exemplified by the crusade for an eight-hour workday, a measure on the ballot in California. “To protect human life costs money. It cuts down on profits,” she wrote. “[T]he question for humanitarians to consider is not how to make it possible for women to work more than eight hours, but how they may secure sufficient wages for eight hours’ work to enable them to live.” The primer echoes with insights gleaned from Beatty’s time in Goldfield, where radical organizers like the IWW’s Vincent St. John had led the fight for workers while also portending the internationalist valence of the emergent radical suffragist movement in America.
The Red Heart of Russia
Socialism’s “international character” took on new meaning for Beatty several years later, when she convinced her superiors at the Bulletin to send her to the heart of the Russian Revolution as a war correspondent. She set forth by steamship from San Francisco in April 1917, just two months after the Revolution. The country was, she described in a farewell column to readers, entrenched “in the most dramatic moment of its history…freeing itself from the bondage which all the world–save Russia–accepted as its inevitable and changing fate.”
For feminists like Beatty, the Russian cause was intimately tied to that of the suffragists. Historian Julia L. Mickenberg writes that in June 1917, the National Woman’s party (NWP) picketed outside of the White House as President Woodrow Wilson met with Russia’s provisional government to gain the country’s support in the fight against Germany in the First World War. “America is not a democracy,” their signs read. “Tell our government that it must liberate its people before it can claim free Russia as an ally.”
That same month, Beatty arrived in Petrograd (modern-day St. Petersburg) on the Trans-Siberian Express, at a time when “[f]reedom was young…like the spring, like the leaves on the trees.” She soon found that “the Revolution that overthrew the Tsar and absolutism was a simple thing, beautifully logical, gloriously unanimous.” What came after was more fraught as the Russian people “began to be specific” about the kind of freedom they desired. “Revolution was to every man the sum of his desires,” Beatty reflected later.