Grace Hutchins

• Grace Hutchins
• Born: August 19, 1885
• Died: July 15, 1969

Writer, researcher, and labor economist, was born in Boston, the third of five children and the third daughter of Edward Webster Hutchins, a prominent Boston lawyer, and Susan Barnes (Hurd) Hutchins. Her two sisters died in childhood. On both sides of the family she was a descendant of early New England settlers of English stock. Her father had founded the Legal Aid Society and was one of the original incorporators of the Boston Bar Association. Her mother was active in philanthropic work in Boston, especially in behalf of the Home for Aged Women, the Baldwinsville Hospital for Crippled Children, and the Society of Colonial Dames. The Hutchinses were members of Boston’s social elite and belonged to Trinity Episcopal Church.

Grace Hutchins was educated in private schools, and from 1898 to 1899 she undertook a world tour with her parents. She was admitted to Bryn Mawr College and was graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1907. During her years at Bryn Mawr she became attracted to the woman suffrage movement, but her parents did not approve of her dedication to this cause. Desiring to do missionary work, she went to China in 1912, serving as a teacher and principal of St. Hilda’s Episcopal School for Chinese Girls.

Returning to Boston in 1916 in poor health, Hutchins joined the American labor movement and taught in a training school in New York City. When America entered World War I, she became, in protest, a member of the Socialist party, and was nearly dismissed from her teaching post. In 1920 she studied labor problems at the New York School of Social Work and the following academic year she attended graduate school at Teachers College, Columbia University. During this period she took a job in a cigar factory in New York City to study firsthand the working conditions of women.

At this time Hutchins met Anna Rochester, a Marxist historian and economist born in New York City in 1880. Rochester had been educated at the Dwight School for Girls in Englewood, New Jersey, and in 1897 she entered Bryn Mawr College. However, two years later her father died, and she was forced to withdraw from college to take care of her mother. Reared as an Episcopalian, she was active in church work. In 1908, after a meeting with the social reformer Vida Scudder, Rochester became converted to Christian Socialism; the following year she took up residence in a settlement house in Boston. Developing an interest in the working conditions of women and children, she became a member of the Consumers League’s New Jersey branch, and in behalf of that group she lobbied in 1911 and 1912 for a bill calling for a nine-hour working day for women employed outside the home. For the next three years Rochester worked as a researcher and writer for the National Child Labor Committee, investigating the working conditions of children, and in 1915 she joined the United States Children’s Bureau as an analyst. Hutchins and Rochester became close friends, and eventually coworkers, and for over forty years they shared an apartment in Greenwich Village in New York City.

A pacifist, Grace Hutchins became a member of a Christian pacifist group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, serving as press secretary from 1924 to 1926 and as business executive from 1925 to 1926. She also became contributing editor, from 1922 to 1924, of The World Tomorrow, the Fellowship’s monthly newspaper. Accompanied by Rochester, the newspaper’s editor in chief (1922-26), Hutchins traveled, lectured, and wrote for the fellowship. In 1922 the two women collaborated on Jesus Christ and the World Today, a book on contemporary social problems facing Christians. Traveling was not confined to the States, and in the 1920s they were in Europe, the Far East, India, and the Soviet Union. In 1927 Hutchins and Rochester left the church and joined the Communist party. To some degree this was a response to the increasingly conservative editorial policies of The World Tomorrow, but there were also impressed by the social reforms they observed on their trip to the USSR (1926-27). Hutchins also became a reporter for the Federated Press.

From 1927 to 1928 Hutchins worked as an investigator in the New York State Department of Labor’s Bureau of Women in Industry. In 1927 Hutchins, Rochester, and their friend Robert W. Dunn, the economic writer and cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union, organized the Labor Research Association (LRA), which provided economic information and analyses on American labor for trade unions. (Dunn served as executive secretary of the association until 1975.) Hutchins edited seventeen issues of the LRA’s biennial reference series, Labor Fact Books, and also its publication Railroad Notes, from 1937 to 1962.

After taking part in textile strikes in the Northeast, Hutchins wrote an account of industrial conditions entitled Labor and Silk (1929); in 1933 she published the first of three editions of Women Who Work (the two later editions were published in 1934 and 1952), which detailed the fight to improve working conditions in America. From 1940 to 1956 she was co-owner of the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker.

In all her work Hutchins was strongly influenced by Rochester’s Marxist leanings. In addition to her work for the Labor Research Association, Rochester was on the executive committee of the League for Industrial Democracy and was affiliated with the Rand School of Social Service’s Department of Labor Research. A prolific author, she published numerous works, including Rulers of America: A Study of American Finance Capital (1936); Lenin on the Agrarian Question (1942), The Nature of Capitalism (1946), American Capitalism, 1607-1800 (1949), and Why Farmers are Poor: The Agricultural Crisis in the United States (1949). In her work Anna Rochester had the ability to take complex information, especially statistical data, and make it readily accessible to the American public.

Grace Hutchins remained an active member of the Communist party, and as that party’s nominee she tried unsuccessfully to run for several New York State governmental offices including lieutenant governor in 1938. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s she continued to back Socialist and left-wing organizations including the International Labor Defense and the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born. She was also treasurer of the Communist National Election Campaign Committee in 1936 and trustee of the Bail Bond Fund of the Civil Rights Congress. In the latter position she posted bail for Communist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn who had been indicted in 1951 under the Smith Act. Thirteen years later Hutchins became secretary of the Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Memorial Committee.

Hutchins also remained on the staff of the Labor Research Association until 1967, writing on issues involving women, children, and labor. Two years later she died from arteriosclerosis at the age of eighty-three in New York City. There was no funeral service. Anna Rochester had died three years earlier (May 11, 1966) from pneumonia also in New York City at the age of eighty-six.

Grace Hutchins, Anna Rochester, and Robert W. Dunn papers are on deposit at the University of Oregon Library. Additional papers on Hutchins can be found at Swarthmore College Library Peace Collection and at Bryn Mawr. Hutchins’s works include Youth in Industry (1931), Children Under Capitalism (1933), Women and War (1933), Japan’s Drive for Conquest (1935), The Truth About the Liberty League (1936), and Japan Wars on the United States of America (1941). There is no full length account of Hutchins’s life. Her career must be pieced together from scattered sources. The best modern sketch is to be found in Notable American Women: The Modern Period (1980) which contains information on Rochester. See also S. Streat, “Grace Hutchins—Revolutionary,” Daily Worker, September 16, 1935; B. Feldman, “Grace Hutchins Tells About ‘Women Who Work’,” The Worker, March 1, 1953; M. A. Zeligs, Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss (1967); and The Communist Party of the United States of America: What It Is, How It Works; a Handbook for Americans (1955), issued by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. For information on Anna Rochester see Who Was Who Among North American Authors, 1921-1939(1976); S. Peabody, “Rochester Papers, Please Copy!” Daily Worker, April 29, 1940; J. Martin, “Greetings to Anna Rochester,” The Worker, March 27, 1953; and J. S. Allen, “Anna Rochester—Marxist Scholar,” The Worker, May 24, 1966. Obituaries on Grace Hutchinson appeared in The New York Times on July 16, 1969 and The Daily World on July 17, 1969. Those on Anna Rochester were published in The New York Times on May 12, 1966, The Worker on May 24, 1966, and The Publishers’ Weekly on June 20, 1966. See also the obituary of Robert W. Dunn in The New York Times on January 23, 1977.