Myra Page

Dorothy Markey (born Dorothy Page Gary, 1897–1993), known by the pen name Myra Page, was a 20th-century American communist writer, journalist, union activist, and teacher.

Background Page was born Dorothy Page Gary on October 1, 1897, in Newport News, Virginia. Her father's ancestors, the Garys, came from Wales to the Tidewater region in 1720. Her mother's ancestors, the Barhams, came to Jamestown, Virginia. Her father Benjamin Roscoe Gary was a doctor, her mother Willie Alberta Barham an artist, and her home "affluent", "middle-class and progressive".

In 1918, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History from Westhampton College (now the University of Richmond). Both Boas and Herskovitz "challenged the prevailing theories about racial hierarchies." She also sat in on a short story writing course taught by Helen Hunter. In 1920, Page earned an MA degree; her thesis analyzed the effects of New York newspaper coverage on the Spanish–American War.

Giddings had introduced Page to the Rand School of Social Science, where she met Anna Louise Strong, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Scott Nearing. In 1921 she returned to New York from Norfolk, and studied further under Nearing at Rand. She was reading, for the first time, the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. She initially worked at a Wanamaker's department store. The union helped her get a job in a clothing sweatshop, where she participated in an ACW-led strike. She became a pants seamstress—good enough that the ACW sent her to New York City for training in making button holes. Next, she and others were sent to St. Louis, Missouri, to help unionize the city's biggest garment sweatshop, Curlee's. During a slump in 1923, she took a secretarial job and went home to Newport News for a few months. In the spring of 1924, she returned to the New York area and was hired as a schoolteacher of American history in Teaneck, New Jersey.

In fall 1924, she got a teaching fellowship in the History Department of the University of Minnesota, chaired by F. Stuart Chapin. Pitirim Sorokin, former secretary to Alexander Kerensky and a Menshevik leader, was a professor there. She married fellow teacher John Markey, and together they joined the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union. They both encouraged garment workers to unionize in the Twin Cities area (Minneapolis and St. Paul). as well as Alfred J. Brooks, Dale Zysman, Benjamin Mandel, and Rachel Ragozin. In July–September, 1926, she attended first an International Teachers' Union conference in Vienna, Austria, several related teachers' union conferences in Paris, France, and then, with Nearing, a British trade union Conference in the UK. After passing through New York City, in part to publish her book with Nearing, The Law of Social Revolution, via the Federated Press, she returned to Minneapolis by late September to reunite with her husband. They immediately set about a "central trade union committee" of the Minnesota AFL and commenced "workers' education" in Duluth.

Page spent two years in Moscow, whence she wrote for American socialist journals as well as for the Soviet communist publication Moscow News. She also gathered material for her novel Moscow Yankee (1935) while living there.

Page stayed through mid-year 1933,

By the "late 1920s", she chose the pen name "Myra Page" (after a cousin with the same name) because: I could be freer in what I wrote without a name that would be immediately identified with my parents... Another reason for the pen name was that I couldn't very well teach sociology in a university and write radical journalism and fiction at the same time... I could teach as Dorothy Gary and write as Myra Page. Only later during the McCarthy period did I begin to write again under my real name. The transformation continued in the first edition of Gathering Storm, where the author is listed as "Dorothy Myra Page". (By the 1930s, husband John Markey also adopted a pen name as "John Barnett": "the Party advised him to use a pseudonym so he could resume a regular teaching career.")

Works

In her posthumously published memoir, Page describes the anger she felt during childhood when witnessing racial discrimination of her Black friends. She wrote about this experience in her first published piece, "Colorblind" , included in The Crisis magazine by its editor and Page's future friend W. E. B. DuBois while she was studying at Columbia. : "I did not see the novel as propaganda", she later said of it. Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (as "Dorothy Myra Page") (1932) Soviet Main Street with photography by Abram Pogovsky (Soyuzphoto) (1933) Moscow Yankee (1935, 1995) With Sun in Our Blood (1950) Reissue: Daughter of the Hills: A Woman's Part in the Coal Miners' Struggle, introduced by Alice Kessler-Harris and Paul Lauter, afterword by Deborah S. Rosenfelt (1950, 1986)

Short stories, chapters, articles: "American Working Women," Workers' News (Fall 1934) "Leave Them Meters Be," Workers' News (Fall 1934) "Water," Workers' News (Fall 1934) "The Girl Who Was Afraid," Southern Worker (1934) "Men in Chains," The Nation (as "Myra Page") (1935) "Pickets and Slippery Sticks", chapter in New Pioneer Story Book (1935)

Juvenile Biographies: The Little Giant of Schenectady: Charles Steinmetz (1956) (as Dorothy Markey) Explorer of Sound: Michael Pupin (1964) (as Dorothy Markey)

Articles, Chapters: "Colorblind", The Crisis magazine (as "Dorothy Gary") "The Developing Study of Culture" (as "Dorothy P. Gary"), Trends in American Sociology (1929) "Bourgeois Apologists and the South" (reviews), The Communist (September 1930) "Grey-Wash" (review), The Communist (May 1931) "The Cropper Prepares", The New Masses (February 11, 1936) "Malraux on Spain", Daily Worker (March 7, 1937) "Hallie Flanagan," (publication unknown) "Cardenas Speaks for Mexico", The New Masses (August 30, 1938) "Cornish Miners (review), The New Masses (November 18, 1941) "Farm Saga" (review) Myra Page, The New Masses (March 3, 1942)

Autobiography: In a Generous Spirit: A First-Person Biography of Myra Page with Christina Looper Baker (1996)