Book Review: Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins

Julia Allen in Intimate Commitments recovers the life stories of Anna Rochester (1880–1966) and Grace Hutchins (1885–1969), women who in their early lives found multiple liaisons with social work and later became prolific writers and activists within the U.S. Communist Party. Allen writes,

In 1995, I came upon the papers of … Rochester and … Hutchins in the Special Collections at the University of Oregon. Filed among copious materials on the structures of capitalism and women in the labor force were eloquent expressions of devotion—letters, poems, notes—offering a glimpse of the forty five year partnership of Rochester and Hutchins. I wanted to know more about these women, whose love for each other so clearly fueled their work to create a more egalitarian world (p. 1).

Intimate Commitments is a treasure, an unfolding of lives rarely told and of commitments to each other and to revolutionary change that dominant discourses so often turn away from. Hutchins and Rochester, who grew up in comfortable New England settings, in their 20s fervently explored ways to honestly unite religious conviction, their commitment to women, and revolutionary change. Hutchins attended the New York School of Social Work, and Rochester worked for years with Julia Lathrop at the U.S. Children’s Bureau. In the 1920s, they founded “Community House” in New York City, an effort to live together with women in a poor neighborhood. But as economic conditions worsened and the failures of capitalism seemed ever more apparent, they like so many of their generation steadily moved left. Returning from a round-the-world ocean trip with stops to explore worsening conditions in Japan, China, India, Germany, and the Soviet Union, they joined the U.S. Communist Party. For the next decade and a half, they wrote, spoke, campaigned, and lived Party life and by virtue of their commitment and extraordinary writing abilities became widely known—to friends and foes alike.

The intersection of 20th century U.S. queer, women’s, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT), and revolutionary histories, so well explored in Intimate Commitments, offers a wealth of insight into the painful choices that persons like Hutchins and Rochester whose commitments were multiple and never fully realized in any organization or work setting faced. Many readers will identify with this—I certainly did.

Allen makes much of Hutchins’ and Rochester’s failure to talk about their love for each other more openly. The women never hid the fact that they lived together, but neither did they define the relationship as non-heternormative, let alone lesbian. The Communist Party would not have permitted that—homosexuality was considered bourgeois decadence (It’s notable, though, that there was a fairly high level of acceptance of Hutchins and Rochester for their skills and courage). In that decision, which in those years was one that nearly every LGBT person made, they perhaps failed a rising generation. But I am loathe to make that conclusion, for the times were very hard for both queers and communists and what they contributed in their lives so great.

The book is not without its problems. Hutchins and Rochester produced an enormous number of pamphlets, studies, and books, especially during their years in the Party, and Allen recounts them at length, and the detail is valuable for historians eager for archival evidence. It’s sometimes tedious though, and worse, the larger story goes missing.

But overall, Julia Allen has done everyone specially those who were gay and left, an enormous service. Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester finally occupy the place of honor they so deserve, a place where all that they were, and struggled for can come together.

Social work has also not claimed—to any real degree—its gay and lesbian forebears. Nor has it claimed its communist ones. Julia Allen in Intimate Commitments holds a mirror for us to see who in our professional portrait has been elided.