10 Facts About Mary Inman

Ida Mary Inman, known as Mary Inman, was an American political activist and writer.

Ida Mary Inman, known to her friends as "Mary," was born June 11,1894, in the state of Kentucky.

In 1900 the family moved to the Indian Territory, part of today's Oklahoma, and Mary Inman remained there for the next 17 years.

Inman's mother died in 1905 and her older sister followed two years later, forcing Mary to begin assuming primary homemaking tasks for the large family at an early age.

Mary Inman met her future husband, J Frank Ryan, an organizer for the Oil Workers' Union of the Industrial Workers of the World not long after.

Frank went to work for the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company and Mary Inman rented a small office in Los Angeles, where she set to work writing a book on women's labor, emphasizing women's work in the home as a worthy pursuit.

Mary 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.

From 1943 to 1946, Mary Inman published an edited a newspaper called Facts for Women, into which she incorporated much of her journalistic energy.

Mary 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.

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.