Comrades and Partners: The Shared Lives of Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester

Grace Hutchins (1885-1969) and Anna Rochester (1880-1966), reformers and Communist intellectuals, were a remarkable couple in their time. Both were born to patrician Northern families in the late 19th century, both began their lives as dutiful Christian daughters, but as faith became transformed into action, they became Christian socialists and then members of the Communist Party. Lee asserts rather than explains the transition from church volunteer to socialist, noting simply that between 1905 and 1908 Rochester ""became very interested in the teachings of socialism,"" that she was ""taken by"" Eugene Debs and read Das Kapital. One wishes for a longer discussion of how the couple met and decided to live together. However, no one will be disappointed with Lee's commitment to historicizing lesbianism; she describes the women's relationship as a romantic friendship in an era when such intense relationships between single women were accepted as natural, especially among social activists. Lee litters the book with boxed asides, presenting quotes from her ""research diary"" and other self-conscious reflections on the process of writing: at one point, she offers a description of her first encounters with Hutchins and Rochester's papers; at another, she reflects that her subjects were in India during the month her own mother was born. The idea, presumably, is to take the reader behind the scenes into the writing of the book--but more often than not, these asides prove distracting rather than illuminating. Rochester and Hutchins's story is so fascinating, however, that, despite its many pitfalls, this account is worth reading. (Jan.)