The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist by Donna T. Haverty-Stacke

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist by Donna T. Haverty-Stacke James P. McCartin The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist. By Donna T. Haverty-Stacke. (New York: New York University Press. 2020. Pp. 312. $50.00. ISBN: 9781479802180.) This is a well-researched and nicely written account of a compelling and largely overlooked figure. It was in the 1930s, not long after Dorothy Day entered the Catholic Church, that Grace Holmes Carlson, then about thirty years old, found her way out the door. Where Day discerned a path from radical politics to the Catholic Church, Carlson did the opposite. Still, each continued to labor mightily to reconcile spiritual and political convictions which seemed, at times, to conflict. Ultimately, Carlson’s sojourn from Catholicism, which began before she became a founding member and national leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1938, concluded upon her return to the Church in 1952. Part of what makes Carlson so interesting is that, while her return spelled an end both to her SWP membership and to her second shot at a vice presidential candidacy on the Party’s national ticket, she never so much as hinted at renouncing her erstwhile comrades or her radical political commitments. An enduring vision of human [End Page 219] dignity, whose dual sources Donna T. Haverty-Stacke effectively locates both within the young Carlson’s working-class family and within the parishes and church-affiliated educational institutions of her youth, supplied what Carlson would call the “unified philosophy of life” (p. 35) which undergirded her spiritual and political values—and ultimately imparted a continuity to the long arc of her biographical narrative. It should come as no surprise that Carlson, a key Party leader and a sometime candidate for public office, found it untenable to maintain formal links both to the Church and to the SWP. Given the mutual antagonism between Catholicism and Marxism in this era, the pairing was remarkably difficult to square during the height of her involvement in the 1930s and 1940s—the more so since the very idea of a “radical Catholicism” simply failed to compute for many U.S. Catholics prior to the 1960s. Still, Haverty-Stacke spotlights a vital early twentieth-century network of radical Catholics and their fellow travelers in Carlson’s native City of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Notably, it was women religious who, as schoolteachers and professors, sowed seeds that later grew into Carlson’s full-fledged socialist and feminist critiques. And after her return to the Church, it was religious sisters who provided precious moral support, as well as gainful employment as a college instructor and administrator, that sustained her over the final four decades of her life. In spotlighting these elements of Carlson’s story, Haverty-Stacke highlights how educational institutions sponsored and led by women religious nourished multiple generations of twentieth-century Catholic women in their left-leaning political commitments and feminist consciousness, even if few alumnae (or their instructors) ever reached Carlson’s level of engagement. Haverty-Stacke underscores that, though her return to Catholicism was an act of central importance in her subject’s 85-year life, Carlson’s “story was more complex than just coming full circle” (p. 182). In the early 1960s, she spearheaded the founding of an innovative Catholic women’s junior college geared toward expanding higher education access to members of the working-class. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she focused particularly on mentoring young women, imparting her signature “hybrid Catholic Marxist approach” (p. 193) when it came to feminism and an array of other topics. Predictably, she opposed the War in Vietnam and the rise of the nuclear arms race, but she also critiqued fellow radical Catholics such as Daniel Berrigan for the direct-action protest tactics, which she pegged as sure to turn off the working-class due to their “mistaken, individualistic, petit bourgeois approach to social problems” (p. 191). Thanks to Haverty-Stacke, a new generation now has easy access to Carlson’s important story and to the insights she developed in the crucible of radical Catholicism across the span of the twentieth century. [End Page 220] James...