Mary Inman

Ida Mary Inman (1894–1985), known as Mary Inman, was an American political activist and writer. Inman is best known for her 1940 book, In Woman's Defense, which was a pioneering effort to legitimize the domestic labor associated with homemaking as worthy and respectable field of human endeavor.

Biography

Early years

Ida Mary Inman, known to her friends as "Mary," was born June 11, 1894, in the state of Kentucky. She was the youngest of nine children. In November 1917 the couple found themselves forced to flee Tulsa to avoid anti-IWW vigilantes.

Inman and her husband moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where, in an attempt to keep government agents and anti-IWW vigilantes at bay, they assumed Mary's surname rather than his. Inman expanded upon the observation of CPUSA women's leader Margaret Cowl that "all women are in an unequal position with men in all countries," making the novel argument that in addition to the exploitation they suffered on the basis of their class position, women as a whole were additionally members of a super-exploited social group based upon their gender.

While Inman's work was at first warmly received by several top Communist women leaders, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Ella Reeve Bloor, the mood changed in 1941 when the CPUSA leadership began an official attack on Inman's work for purported ideological deviation. Among Inman's unrealized ideas was a desire to form an organization of housewives called the Union of Labor-Power Production Workers (housewives).

Inman's alienation from the Communist Party reached its peak in 1949 when she published a bitter mimeographed polemic against the CPUSA's policy towards women, entitled Thirteen Years of CPUSA Misleadership on the Woman Question.

Inman's final book was published in 1964, entitled The Two Forms of Production Under Capitalism. Inman remained dedicated to the so-called "Woman Question," engaging CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall with a 66-page letter in 1972 and writing a lengthy article for the party's theoretical magazine, Political Affairs, in 1973.

Death and legacy

Mary Inman's papers are housed in five archival boxes, one folder, and one folio volume at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Use of this material is open to researchers.

Works "The Role of the Housewife in Social Production (1940)", Viewpoint Magazine 5 (October 2015). In Woman's Defense. Los Angeles: Committee to Organize the Advancement of Women, 1940. Woman Power. Los Angeles: Committee to Organize the Advancement of Women, 1942. Thirteen Years of CPUSA Misleadership on the Woman Question: Documented. Los Angeles: Mary Inman, 1949. The Two Forms of Production under Capitalism. Long Beach, CA: n.p., 1964.