Agnes Smedley
Agnes Smedley
Agnes Smedleywas an American journalist and writer, well known for her semi-autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth as well as for her sympathetic chronicling of the Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War. During World War I, she worked in the United States for the independence of India from the United Kingdom, receiving financial support from the government of Germany. Subsequently, she went to China, where she is suspected of acting as a spy for the Comintern. As the lover of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAutobiographer
Date of Birth23 February 1892
CountryUnited States of America
And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help.
There are many men - such as those often to be found among the Indians - who are refined until they have qualities often attributed to the female sex. Yet they are men, and strong ones.
Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.... I was learning that books and diagrams can be evil things if they deaden the mind of man and make him blind or cynical before subjection of any kind.
Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man ... the highest joy is to fight by the side of those who for any reason of their own making or ours, are unable to develop to full human stature.
So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital. There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.
I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
No one yet knows what a man's province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.
I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman. Friendship is far more human.
Now and then some Party member would announce a study circle, and I would join it, along with some ten or twelve working men and women.
I have lived in the homes of workers; they live on boiled potatoes, black bread with lard spread on it instead of butter, and rotten beer.
Gambling in the mark has been the great indoor sport of the capitalists for months, and consequently food has increased by 25 to 100 per cent.
I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.