Reproductive Sovereignty in Soviet and American Socialism during the Great Depression

It was a warm summer night in August 1935 when Dorothy Sherwood walked into the Newburgh, New York police station with her son’s murdered body. Earlier that day, Sherwood took her 2-year-old son Jimmy to a creek and held his face under the water. She then took his body home, where she changed him into clean clothes and brought his body to the police station where she admitted her crime to an “astounded” police lieutenant. Sherwood told the police that she had recently fallen on tough times and had been abandoned by Jimmy’s father. After failing to find permanent employment and facing eviction, Sherwood decided to take her son’s life because it was “too hard to make a living” for herself and her children. Reporting for the American Communist Women’s magazine, The Woman Today, Dorothy Dunbar Bromley zeroed in on what led Sherwood to murder her own son. It was poverty, a poverty unique to women and children. Bromley argued that despite Sherwood’s best efforts, she did not have “even half a chance.” Sherwood grew up without her mother, and her father left her with any family member that was willing to take her in. He used his daughter in a barter system, selling her labor to his family members who would treat her not as a relation but as a domestic. After caring for other people’s homes and children for several years, Sherwood left and traveled with a Salvation Army family for a time. She also tried her hand at waitressing. Eventually, she found herself working with a burlesque troop, an occupation the press immediately zeroed in on. But that too did not last. Sherwood struggled to find steady work and had no home to speak of. But, then, she met her husband, and for a few years of her life, there was stability. At 20-years old, Sherwood gave birth to her first child, a little girl, and for a time she was happy and settled. Until her husband contracted tuberculosis and soon after died, leaving Sherwood to care for herself and her child. Attempting to recreate the years of stability she found with her husband, Sherwood took up with a man who, according to Dunbar Bromley, “promised to look after her and her baby,” but instead he “left her cold” and with another child. Alone and with two children, Sherwood desperately tried to secure work, but that proved difficult. She tried to have her young son placed in a