IN A GENEROUS SPIRIT: A First-Person Biography of Myra Page (Women in American History) - Softcover

Baker, Christina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252065433 ISBN 13: 9780252065439

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1996

Synopsis

Dorothy Markey's family and culture prepared her to be a proper southern lady. Yet Markey broke free of her cultural bonds and became, instead, a feminist, a communist, and, under the pen name Myra Page, a radical journalist and novelist. Her activism on behalf of social justice, racial equality, and women's rights spanned the 1920s through her death in 1993.
Page's work carried her far from her Virginia home to Moscow, Mexico, the rural South, and New York. As a journalist she wrote for the Daily Worker, the New Masses, Working Woman, and Southern Worker. Her novels captured workers' struggles in an authentic voice: The Gathering Storm, Daughter of the Hills, and Moscow Yankee.
With consummate skill, Christina Baker weaves together historical research, her own and others' conversations with Page, and Page's letters and other writings. The resulting narrative is a vivid recreation of the life of an uncommon woman and her more than seventy years of striving for the things she believed in.

About this title

About the Author

Christina Looper Baker is a professor of English in the University of Maine system.

From Library Journal

In a narrative that reads like a polished transcript, Baker (English, Univ. Coll. of the Univ. of Maine) narrates the life of Myra Page (Dorothy Page Gary, 1897-1993), the journalist, novelist, and Communist Party member. Baker admiringly presents Page's advocacy of racial equality, trade unionism, women's rights, and socialism and her rejection of the values of her middle-class white, Southern culture. Based on various sources, including interviews by Baker and others with Page, this "first-person biography" richly details Page's experiences and reflections on the personalities of the American Old Left. But it lacks a thorough historical analysis of Page's life within a political and social context and in relation to various social groups, e.g., middle-class white Southern women. Recommended for libraries with in-depth collections on the American Old Left.?Charles L. Lumpkins, Bloomsburg Univ. Lib., Pa.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0252065433
• ISBN 13: 9780252065439
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312