Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical.

Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical. Janice R. MacKinnon, Stephen R. MacKinnon. University of California Press, $25. If it hadn't been for the reissue of her brilliant autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, in 1973, by The Feminist Press, Agnes Smedley would have been relegated to oblivion by now. Since then, many of her books-especially her reporting on China, which appeared in magazines ranging from The Nation to, of all places, Vogue-have found their way back into print. Even so, judging by her absence from books such as Radcliffe College's voluminous Notable American Women, she seems to be considered neither notable nor quotable by some of those who should admire her most. Smedley ought to be considered one of America's most impressive radicals, that rare breed of activist who moved to the heart of the revolutionary struggle without allowing her judgment to get swept away.

The MacKinnons spent 14 years, two of them in China, rediscovering Smedley's migrations from an impoverished and brutalized childhood in a Colorado mining town in the 1890s to the socialist and feminist circles of Greenwich Village in the 1910s to her years spent reporting on the Chinese revolution. They ask: Was she also running away-from her family, her working-class background, her relationships?

Smedley did not fail to ask these tormenting questions of herself. In the middle of her life they forced her to slow down for several years of psychoanalysis. She wrote Daughter of Earth as part of the process. The result is a marriage of personal and political insight. Her title reflects her feeling that she grew up raw, "primitive as a weed," in a family that struggled for survival in lawless western towns and mining camps. One time her father ran a team of horses for six months-only to be taunted by his employer with a "contract" that he had unknowingly signed that forfeited payment. He expressed his rage in drinking, abusing his wife, and often abandoning his family. In his absence the family was rescued by a feisty aunt who worked as a seamstress and, according to Smedley, sometimes as a prostitute to support them. Smedley's mother died young, from malnutrition and lack of medical care as much as anything else.

This left Smedley with an ambivalent anger at her father that carried over to all men, and an equally ambivalent contempt for the weakness of women. In her first marriage, to a beloved friend and mentor, she sought to avoid sex for months; when she became pregnant she reacted with attempted suicide and finally had an abortion, Her whole life was marked by conflict between her need to be loved and her terror of entrapment.

There was no place where she truly fit in. Smedley groaned in exasperation when idealistic socialists alternately preached to the poor or romanticized the uneducated-she knew that knowledge was liberating. She formed strong personal relationships-and love affairs-with nonWestern revolutionaries whose views on women and marriage did not agree with hers. As a foreign correspondent, she reported on the military-but also on sexuality and the family. In China, though she devotects herself to the revolution, she could measure its costs in repression.

If her political commitments were in pan formed out of personal need, maybe Smedley found a valuable way to unite her created self with her painful past, healing herself by helping the world. -Deirdre English