|
|
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, May-June 2010
In Memoriam
Mary Joan Schmidt (Mary Jo Grey)
(Nov. 30, 1943 - April 10, 2010)
The shockingly sudden, tragic death of Mary Joan Schmidt on April 10 made the talk she had given at News and Letters Library on Feb. 8 seem like a completely unintentional autobiographical epitaph to her long history of active participation in all the freedom movements of our day.
In looking ahead to a celebration of International Women's History Month, she began her presentation on "Women's Revolutionary Force and Reason Throughout the World" this way:
"I came to News and Letters Committees out of the Women's Liberation Movement, as well as the anti-Vietnam War movement, and N&L's positions on these issues were very important to me as a new young revolutionary. Needless to say, I was surprised but happy to see that Women's Liberation was cited in the News and Letters Committees Constitution, when it was adopted in 1956, as one of the four forces of revolution in the U.S., long before I knew there were so many revolutionary women's movements throughout history. The Constitution states: 'The rise of Women's Liberation, as a movement, is proof both of the correctness of our having singled out, in 1955, women as a revolutionary force, and of the inseparability of women's liberation as Reason, as well as force.'"
It was the revolutionary philosophy of Marxist-Humanism that she had met in 1972 which Mary Joan practiced in all her activities of thinking and doing from that moment forward and that became her life for the next four decades.
Even before she officially joined News and Letters Committees in 1972, she worked as a member of the Philosophic-Technical Committee (the PTC) of the paper, so named by Raya Dunayevskaya to stress that the technical work had to be inseparable from the philosophic concepts. The PTC does the work that transforms the thinking, planning, eliciting of material, typing and proofreading that are demanded, into the printed pages, ready to mail and distribute to the rest of the world.
Readers of N&L are most familiar with Mary Joan, however, not from this hard, creative labor, but as the author, for the past 20 years, of the column "Women Worldwide," which carries short segments about both oppression and/or revolutionary struggles of women around the world. In the conclusion to her talk, Mary Joan quoted one of Dunayevskaya's writings on the importance of all these struggles, "not because they are exciting events, but because they show…women in motion as shapers of history" and to stress that "what we need is a unity of philosophy and revolution to get out from under the whip of the counter-revolution today."
While her column was long recognized as one of the most-read sections of every issue, what may not until now have been fully recognized was the importance of her constant presence as the "office coordinator" whose warm voice was heard answering the phone every day the office was open, or asking you to "please leave a message" when it was not.
At the same time, although she never sought a so-called "leadership" position, she agreed to accept her election to the National Editorial Board, and fought hard and creatively to keep News and Letters Committees going through the many tests it has undergone in the 40 years she was such an important part of its life. Her unshakable determination to defeat attempts to stop the publication of N&L cannot be underestimated.
The great loss her death represents will be felt increasingly during the days of struggle ahead of us to win a new world based on the totally new human relations to which she had devoted herself.
We deeply mourn her passing and honor her life.
--Olga Domanski
|
Subscription for one year
$5
|
