A Forgotten Writer: Alice Beal Parsons and “Cross Purposes”

Abstract

During a 1920 court trial in Rockford, Illinois, one of America's most famous lawyers came to the defense of a wealthy housewife who was indicted for conspiring for the overthrow of the government by force and violence (Rockford). Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), who would become best known for his role in the 1925 Monkey Trial, was the lead lawyer in this case, which shook the small city of Rockford. Of those indicted, the housewife was under particular scrutiny, as a local paper reported:The radical utterances of Mrs. Parsons have been town talk for a long time. Her activities and associations with those inclined toward revolutionary proceedings were known to all her acquaintances and friends who deplored the situation deeply, but their admonitions and friendly counsel are said to have been of no avail. She appeared to glory in her fanaticism, they said, and to live largely for the purpose of devouring Red literature and apparently was saturated with the doctrines of the radical writers. (Seeking Reds 1)Mrs. Parsons, the wife of a successful business owner, risked her social status for the working men and women of Rockford when she joined the Communist Labor Party-a decision that would lead to her arrest, her divorce, and the loss of her home. Today she has been largely forgotten by history, as have been so many housewives, their personal struggles and triumphs seemingly insignificant in the larger historical narrative. What makes her particular absence surprising, however, is that Parsons went on to have a career as a prolific radical writer who published fiction and nonfiction in an array of periodicals, such as the American Mercury, The Dial, Harper's, Scribner's, Survey Graphic, the Woman Citizen, the World Tomorrow, and the Yale Review. Even as she wrote regular book reviews for Harper's and The Nation, she saw her own novels reviewed in periodicals such as the Chicago Sunday Tribune, the New York Times, and the Saturday Review of Literature. She was compared to Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), praised by reviewers such as Mark Van Doren (1894-1972), and admired by fellow writers such as Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945); in short, Parsons's work was well known and well received (Bryant).1 Yet, only her book Woman's Dilemma (1926) has received critical attention, having been cited by social scientists,2 whereas the rest of her work has remained unexplored.Alice Beal Parsons's (1886-1962) importance lies in her participation in a movement of radical writers who examined the role of the middleclass woman in socialism, within which she produced a number of novels, stories, and articles about the topic. She was part of a small contingent who argued that a true engagement with the socialist cause could occur only if the writer completely shed the ideological trappings of her former, bourgeois life. When writing about her decision to renounce her in Rockford after her arrest, Parsons used language that suggests a reawakening or a rebirth, a bubbling life (Trial 239) inside her that could rise only once her past had died (44). In this regard, Parsons may have found a kindred spirit in other women writers of the period, such as Meridel Le Sueur (1900-1996), another middle-class writer who believed that involvement in socialism could be like a rebirth; when describing her own experience joining a labor strike, Le Sueur declares, I feel most alive (I Was 163). Le Sueur writes in another article, It is a hard road to leave your own class and you cannot leave by pieces or parts; is a birth and you have to be born whole out of it. In a complete new body. None of the old ideology is any good in it (The Fetish 303).3 Parsons, indeed, left her class in what Le Sueur calls a full belief (303) and gave up everything for socialism. Looking in as the narrator of her autobiographical novel, Parsons comments on that beginning of her new life: Now her lost selves were being released from captivity (Trial 411). …