On August 15, 1946, Emily Hartshorne Mudd (1898–1998), a key pioneer in the history of marriage and family counseling in modern America, boarded a Swedish plane at New York City’s La Guardia airport for a month-long visit to the Soviet Union. Accompanying her were Robert Leslie, business manager of the American-Soviet Medical Society (ASMS), and her husband, University of Pennsylvania microbiologist and ASMS president Stuart Mudd. The trip, ostensibly a fact-finding mission designed to acquaint Leslie and the Mudds with Soviet science and medicine, was the last such visit of Americans to the USSR during the brief era (1943–47) of officially friendly relations between the Soviet Union and the United States over the sharing of biomedical knowledge. The trip soon plunged all three into the heated arena of early Cold War politics and ultimately scuttled Emily Mudd’s efforts to convince Americans to adopt Soviet policies toward women, children, and health care in general.

After visiting schools, libraries, hospitals, orphanages, kindergartens, and day-care centers, and after meeting dozens of Russian scientific and medical dignitaries in Moscow, Leningrad, and Georgia, Leslie and the Mudds returned to the United States. They and their ASMS colleagues dubbed the trip the “Medical Mission to Moscow,” a clear allusion to the 1941 pro-Soviet book Mission to Moscow by former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph Davies, and to the 1944 visit of U.S. scientists A. Baird Hastings and Michael B. Shimkin, called the “Medical Research Mission to the Soviet Union.”Footnote ¹

Once the Mudds returned to the United States, they, like Davies, sought to persuade audiences that the Soviet experiment deserved the full sympathy of all Americans. However, just as the Mudds arrived back on U.S. soil, the Cold War between the two superpowers was starting to unfold and they soon became targets of American anticommunist sentiment. Threatened with the loss of funding for their research projects, the Mudds resigned from the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship (NCASF), the parent organization of the ASMS, and publicly denied ever being communists or participating in “subversive activities.”Footnote ² The ASMS itself, plagued by an abrupt drop in membership, folded in 1949, closing a dramatic chapter in the Mudds’ own lives and marking the beginnings of a lengthy interruption in U.S.-Soviet collaboration in biomedical science.

Thus, the events surrounding the “Medical Mission to Moscow” provide a case study of how and why public policy change often does not occur. This chapter from Cold War history demonstrates how swiftly moving events can mobilize public and official opinion and hence affect the opportunities for policy reform, how those like the Mudds who wish to influence policymaking sometimes misjudge the temper of their times, and how crucial timing was to advocates for the liberalization of social policy in Cold War America. The roots of the “permissive society” of the 1960s and 1970s may stretch back to the 1940s and 1950s, as Alan Petigny has trenchantly argued, but the transition between the two eras was often far from smooth.Footnote ³

To date, scholars have paid little attention to either Emily Mudd or these dramatic events affecting policy history, the history of medicine, and the history of Cold War politics. One historian has written that the ASMS in general and the 1946 “Medical Mission to Moscow” in particular were casualties of both rising U.S. anticommunism in the late 1940s and policy decisions by the Soviet Politburo regarding cooperation between U.S. and Russian medical scientists. As far as it goes, this is a reasonably accurate interpretation of the transition from collaboration to confrontation in biomedical research between the world’s two superpowers in the post–World War II era.Footnote ⁴

However, this account and Emily Mudd’s own retrospective version of her brush with Cold War politics tend to stress the Mudds’ victimization, political naïveté, and nonpartisan commitment to the mutual exchange of value-free medical information and the peaceful coexistence of nations in the dawning nuclear age.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, the Mudds may well have believed that by pooling their knowledge, U.S. and Soviet scientists could help to build a better world. However, evidence from Emily Mudd’s personal papers and other archival collections suggests that when it came to the Soviet Union she was far from disinterested. By capitalizing on the good press the Soviet regime enjoyed between 1941 and the onset of the Cold War in 1947, Mudd sought to persuade Americans to follow Soviet policies because she was predisposed to see in the USSR a blueprint for reforming the status of women in American society. Emily Mudd was inclined to agree with Johns Hopkins University physician Henry Sigerist, ASMS co-founder, historian of medicine, and the most eminent apologist for Soviet medicine in the 1930s and 1940s, who argued that the West should copy Soviet health-care policy. As Sigerist put it in 1937, “Socialism works in the medical field too.”Footnote ⁶ Although it is unlikely that Emily Mudd and her husband fully shared Sigerist’s socialist political views, the evidence strongly suggests that she, like Sigerist, was “determined to find in the Soviet Union what [she] thought was lacking in America,” in the words of historian John Hutchinson, particularly as it pertained to state day care and women in the workforce.Footnote ⁷ In Emily Mudd’s opinion, both before and after her trip to Russia, women in the Soviet Union were far more liberated than they were in the United States.Footnote ⁸

In other words, Emily Mudd believed that in the Soviet Union she saw the future of women, and to her it worked. She was a good example of what historian Kate Weigand has called “activist” U.S. women who, though not necessarily members of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), between 1946 and 1956 belonged to a “large progressive movement” whose “center” was the CPUSA and which struggled to change American attitudes and policies toward marriage, motherhood, and women’s work. Their views about Soviet women were mainly colored by their own politicized interpretations of the status of U.S. women.Footnote ⁹

Nonetheless, the early Cold War years dashed Emily Mudd’s hopes for a rapid overhaul of public policy governing the status of American women along Soviet lines. The course of events soon determined that Emily Mudd and her husband became largely unwitting pawns in a propaganda campaign orchestrated by officials in the highest reaches of Soviet power, sabotaging her efforts to reform marriage and the family in America according to the Soviet model. In the process, research in the field of marriage and family living, like that in physiology, psychiatry, and psychology, became a “Cold War battlefield.”Footnote ¹⁰

I

By the time of the “Medical Mission to Moscow,” Emily Mudd had emerged as one of the foremost spokespersons for the fledgling profession of marriage and family counseling in modern America. Born in Merion, Pennsylvania, into a socially prominent family with Quaker roots, she studied landscape architecture in Boston and there met the young scientist Stuart Mudd, whom she married in 1922. She spent the next decade working as her husband’s unpaid laboratory assistant at Harvard, New York City’s Rockefeller Institute, and Philadelphia’s Henry Phipps Institute. Emily Mudd co-authored fourteen scientific papers with Stuart, all the while raising three of their four children. In the meantime, Stuart, who accepted a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, became a world-renowned microbiologist hailed for his work in freeze-drying blood plasma and preventing patient infections in hospital.Footnote ¹¹ Although Stuart Mudd’s field was medical research and Emily’s marriage counseling, they tended to agree on most broad social and medical issues, and as Emily carved out her own successful career they were widely regarded as what later generations would call a “power couple.”

Emily Mudd’s chief contribution to the marriage counseling movement in modern America occurred in 1933, when she founded the Marriage Counsel of Philadelphia (MCP), which, in the words of historian James Reed, “played a role in the development of marriage counseling in the United States analogous to that played by [Margaret] Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau in contraception.”Footnote ¹² Since time immemorial, people have been talking to other people about their family problems. For centuries, priests, physicians, village elders, and the like considered it their duty and prerogative to dispense advice on family matters. Yet only in the twentieth century did a profession emerge whose primary purpose was to deal with problems between family members, particularly spouses. Growing out of early twentieth-century trends in psychiatry, social work, sexology, eugenics, and the social hygiene movement, marriage counseling originated in Weimar Germany (1918–33), but as the century unfolded it rapidly became an American-led occupation that affected the lives of literally millions of men, women, and children.Footnote ¹³

Marriage counseling had gained a foothold in America in the late 1920s, when biologist Paul Popenoe and the husband-wife team of physicians Abraham and Hannah Stone opened the first two U.S. family counseling clinics.Footnote ¹⁴ Mudd’s own MCP was the third to open in America and in 1952 it affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, the first of its kind in the country to do so. Meanwhile, Mudd had obtained a Master’s in Social Work and in 1950 she was awarded a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Four years later, Emily Mudd became the first woman to be promoted to full professor at the University of Pennsylvania medical school. She also taught the first course on sexuality at a U.S. medical school.

Besides blazing a trail for American women in a nontraditional career path, Emily Mudd was one of the four people most responsible for the 1945 founding of the American Association of Marriage Counselors (AAMC), a national organization dedicated to establishing counseling standards and fostering research into marital and family relations. In 1951, she was one of the first to publish a book on the field and in 1958 she collaborated on writing the first case book.Footnote ¹⁵ Sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who later relied heavily on her expertise in training marriage counselors, said that “more than anyone else Emily Mudd encouraged and helped shape the field of marriage and family-life education, and was among the first to address the dimension of sexuality as a vital factor in family life care.”Footnote ¹⁶ Mudd’s emphasis on women’s right to sexual happiness through the use of contraception was a pivotal part of her overall approach to marriage and the family. Long before Betty Friedan and other figures of the women’s movement were talking about the “problem that knows no name,” Emily Mudd was advocating reforms to marriage and family life aimed at achieving equality for women in the home, workplace, and society.Footnote ¹⁷

A major source of Emily Mudd’s interest in women’s issues was the example of her mother, Clementina Hartshorne (1871–1970). One of Mudd’s most vivid memories involved accompanying her mother to a “Votes for Women” demonstration when she was ten years old. What stuck in her mind was the spectacle of some male onlookers who threw eggs and tomatoes at the marchers. “Mother was never daunted. She went on marching,” Mudd reminisced.Footnote ¹⁸ The memory of that event apparently taught Mudd that the struggle to reform the conditions of life for women in America was likely to be hotly contested and would require concerted courage and single-minded commitment. The opposition her mother had faced trying to win the vote for U.S. women left Emily with the firm impression that the status of women in twentieth-century America compared poorly with that of women elsewhere, including, as we shall see shortly, the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin.

Emily Mudd’s commitment to women’s issues also derived from her own experience as a working mother. While bearing and raising her children, she worked as her husband’s laboratory assistant and as a community activist. As she recalled later in life, balancing work and family after her first child meant that she “experienced personally the question of nursing babies and working wives. … We had not worked this out in this country and I think never have, because a mother who wants to nurse her baby either has to give up her job or give up nursing the baby. So I gave up working for about three or four months and my husband got into quite a state at this because he needed the help so finally I said … well, I’d try going back to work and having somebody give the baby a bottle. The minute I went back to work I lost my milk.” She had to make private arrangements for her children’s day care, and she was “always … in conflict as to what might be happening to them if she was working.” Thus, the issue of child day care was highly personal for Emily Mudd, so much so that when she visited communist Russia in 1946 she marveled at “how cleverly [the Soviets] worked that out.”Footnote ¹⁹

By the 1940s, then, Mudd had come to believe that Americans’ policies toward motherhood, marriage, and women’s work had to change and that the profession of marriage counseling could be a vehicle for such reform. In other words, Emily Mudd linked the development of the marriage counseling field to advances in the status of women.

II

As Emily Mudd labored to improve the fortunes of marriage counseling during the interwar period, interest in improved relations between the Soviet Union and the United States grew. In the years after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, communist Russia enjoyed scant sympathy in America outside radical political circles. However, beginning in 1933, when Washington extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union, and throughout the 1930s, U.S. attitudes toward Soviet Russia grew more positive, especially as the international situation darkened due to the escalating threat of war in Europe. Thousands of scholars, scientists, intellectuals, educators, and artists traveled to the Soviet Union as guests of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), founded in 1925. Many visitors were eager to like what they saw in the Soviet Union and convey to others their belief that the Bolshevik experiment was succeeding.

By contrast, as Josef Stalin tightened his political grip over the USSR, the Soviets increasingly viewed bilateral contacts with foreign dignitaries with deep suspicion. This trend, predating Stalin’s ascension to power in the late 1920s, saw the Soviet regime strictly control its scientists and exploit such contacts in order to achieve propaganda victories on both the international and domestic fronts. By the time of the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on August 22, 1939, VOKS was nearly moribund and the Soviet state had erected formidable barriers against collaboration with foreign scientists.Footnote ²⁰

Relations between the United States and the USSR took an abrupt turn after the June 22, 1941, Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and America’s entry into World War II the following December. With Soviet Russia locked in a life-and-death battle to defeat Hitler’s Germany, Americans shipped enormous amounts of military aid as well as other forms of war relief, including medicines, food, and clothing. By 1943, government, press, and Hollywood were extolling the accomplishments of the Soviet people and heralding an age of peaceful coexistence between the two countries. Accounts such as Joseph Davies’s Mission to Moscow praised the courage and determination of the Soviet Union, but tended to elide the grim reality of life under Stalin’s rule.

The climate of official friendship between the United States and the USSR fostered the formation of American organizations dedicated to warm relations with the Soviet Union, such as the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship (NCASF), which began in 1938 as a small body called the American Council on Soviet Relations, located in New York City. A three-day celebration in New York City in November 1942 of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution marked the launching of the NCASF. National and international dignitaries from different levels of government, as well as prominent clergymen, business leaders, university presidents, and trade-union officials attended the gala event.Footnote ²¹

Another highpoint for the NCASF came in 1944, when, at its dinner held to mark the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Soviet Red Army, Generals Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Pershing, and Clark sent their congratulations. Ultimately the NCASF spawned about thirty local chapters across the country, as well as numerous special committees, including its Committee of Women (which the Mudds later joined). Worldwide, there were as many as sixty similar friendship societies.

The NCASF’s stated purpose was to “promote better understanding and strengthen friendly relations between the United States and the Soviet Union as essential to the winning of the war, and the establishment of world-wide democracy and enduring peace.” The NCASF leadership declared that the key to promoting U.S.-Soviet cooperation was the “education of the broad masses of the American people about the Soviet Union.” Yet the NCASF found it difficult to distinguish between educating the U.S. people about the Soviet Union and pro-Soviet propagandistic efforts to alter U.S. foreign policy governing the course of World War II and the postwar diplomatic settlement. Groups such as the America First Committee and the Friends of Democracy accused the NCASF of being the “Voice of Stalin in America.” By the late 1940s, many Americans were growing suspicious of the fact that NCASF “educational” efforts overwhelmingly denounced American but not Soviet positions. When critics pointed out these trends, friendship societies typically accused them of being unpatriotic and admirers of Nazism.Footnote ²²

The NCASF’s honeymoon with U.S. officialdom did not last long. In 1946 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched a formal investigation of the NCASF and its two principal members were cited for contempt of Congress. In 1947 the NCASF was indicted for failure to register with the Subversive Activities Control Board and in November 1947 the group was placed on the U.S. Attorney-General’s list of 82 subversive organizations proscribed for federal employees.Footnote ²³

III

An important event in early NCASF history involving Emily and Stuart Mudd occurred in 1943, when some group members, notably Henry Sigerist, launched the American-Soviet Medical Society. Sigerist, whose Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union (1937) was a relentlessly positive account of health care in communist Russia, was born in Paris in 1891 of Swiss parents and graduated with a degree in medicine in Zurich in 1917. Between 1932 and 1947, Sigerist taught medical history at Johns Hopkins University. In 1944, his report on health-care services in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan served as the basis for the decision of Saskatchewan’s government to provide free hospitalization for all citizens through tax revenues, the first step in North America toward Medicare.Footnote ²⁴

Sigerist, along with ASMS co-founders Robert Leslie and physician Abraham Stone, were keen to establish working relationships with Soviet medical agencies and individuals. When the ASMS was founded, Sigerist later wrote, “We were at war; Russia was our powerful ally that had gained much experience in war medicine. Even the best of our medical libraries were poorly supplied with Russian medical literature. It was felt, therefore, that a group organized to exchange medical information and make Russian medical literature available to our doctors in English translation would perform a real service to the country.”Footnote ²⁵

The ASMS was headquartered in New York City, in the same building as the American-Russian Institute for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union, which in 1947 U.S. attorney general Thomas C. Clark labeled a “communist front” and “subversive” organization.Footnote ²⁶ Nonetheless, Sigerist protested, the ASMS had no “official support, either financial or moral,” and had no “political ties of any kind.” Its main activity was its journal, the bimonthly American Review of Soviet Medicine, which translated, published, and reviewed the work of Soviet biologists and medical scientists (in 1948, its fifth and final year, it became a quarterly). The ASMS, working with Soviet officialdom, hosted several meetings at which visiting Soviet physicians were given the opportunity to present their work. The New York oncologist Jacob Heiman, a CPUSA member, was the ASMS representative at the anniversary celebration of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow in June 1945. The festivities were attended by 122 delegates from eighteen different countries, and on the final day their Soviet hosts threw a lavish banquet for them in the Kremlin, attended by Stalin himself.Footnote ²⁷

Until 1946, there was no clear indication that the U.S. government disapproved of the activities of the ASMS. In fact, on December 14, 1945, President Harry Truman extended his personal “greetings to the [second] annual meeting of the American-Soviet Medical Society and my good wishes for a successful session. May the good offices of the medical profession help to bring about the betterment of humanity and assist in the building of a broader understanding as a foundation for a lasting peace.”Footnote ²⁸ Because the ASMS tended to focus on the fields of science and medicine and avoid overtly political matters, it enjoyed a relatively uncontroversial reputation.

However, once tensions mounted between the two superpowers, many who had joined the ASMS or subscribed to the American Review of Soviet Medicine lost interest in Soviet medicine. According to Sigerist, this was a case of people trained in “scientific methods of thought” being swayed by political pressure, such as the remarks of Morris Fishbein, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who accused the ASMS of being “propagandists” for Soviet medicine, even though “competent physicians have found that the Russian standards of scientific achievements are below that of our own.”Footnote ²⁹ In early 1948, Sigerist vowed that the ASMS would carry on “in spite of all momentary difficulties,” but by the end of the year the ASMS was virtually defunct.Footnote ³⁰

Meanwhile, in 1945, Stuart Mudd had succeeded the renowned physiologist Walter Cannon as ASMS president. No mere figurehead, Stuart Mudd plunged into the day-to-day operations of the ASMS and toward the end of the 1940s was still actively trying to revive the fortunes of the organization, drawing Sigerist’s warm admiration. Mudd took a leading role in planning the Medical Mission to Moscow and securing the official invitation from VOKS. His ties to Alfred Newton Richards, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical School, and later president of the National Academy of Sciences, proved to be crucial. Richards, whom Mudd described as eager to cultivate exchanges between U.S. and Soviet scientists, had been instrumental in arranging the 1944 visit to the USSR of U.S. scientists A. Baird Hastings and Michael Shimkin.Footnote ³¹

To its executive, no ASMS endeavor was more important than the 1946 Medical Mission to Moscow. The trip represented a highly important stage in the group’s effort to build bridges between the scientific establishments of the two world powers. Yet the Mudds, particularly Emily, were predisposed to like much of what they saw of Soviet life. As Emily Mudd wrote two months before leaving for the Soviet Union: “I hope to establish friendly contacts with Russian women and learn something of the advances made in women’s activities in the Soviet Union.”Footnote ³² Mudd knew of the writings of NCASF stalwart Rose Maurer, who in 1943 had published a book arguing that Soviet women were better off than their U.S. counterparts.Footnote ³³ What Maurer had to say about Soviet women dovetailed with Mudd’s own vision for women’s emancipation and doubtlessly affected the latter’s expectations of what she would witness in Russia.Footnote ³⁴

IV

The ASMS delegation’s visit to the USSR coincided with the Soviet state’s massive effort to rebuild the country in the wake of four years of total war against Hitler’s Germany. Millions of Soviet soldiers and citizens had perished in the struggle against Nazism and huge swathes of the nation’s cities and countryside had been devastated. It was also a time when the Soviet leadership was tightening its political grip over the everyday lives of Russian men, women, and children. The many Russians who during the war had hoped that the Stalinist state would reward them for their enormous sacrifices by easing the political terror of the late 1930s were bitterly disappointed after 1945.

America’s atomic monopoly was a further reason for the Soviet state to clamp down on the activities of its citizens, especially in their dealings with representatives from the Anglo-American world. While frantically trying to develop its own atomic weapons, the USSR was engaged in a propagandistic campaign to assert the superiority of Soviet medicine and science on the international stage. When Soviet scientists Nina Klyueva and Grigorii Roskin appeared to develop a breakthrough cancer cure, the state government trumpeted it as a counterweight to the success of the U.S. atomic bomb program. Thus, the arrival of the Mudds and Robert Leslie in Russia in August 1946 occurred at a time when the Soviets were acutely sensitive about the issues of medicine and health care and how they affected the country’s image abroad. Indeed, while in the Soviet Union Stuart Mudd toured Kylueva and Roskin’s laboratory and described meeting the two scientists as “a high point scientifically” of the entire visit.Footnote ³⁵ Concerned about the public relations surrounding science and medicine, the Soviet leadership was fully informed of the Medical Mission to Moscow and was keen to exploit it for any propagandistic purposes it might serve.Footnote ³⁶

For her part, Emily Mudd was aware that the people she met and the conditions of life she encountered might not be accurate reflections of Soviet reality. Rose Maurer had advised her that if she wanted to get a true glimpse of Soviet life, particularly for the nation’s women, it was important to avoid the “big wigs” and talk to “the average Soviet woman.” Maurer was skeptical about Stalin’s commitment to women’s rights and questioned why the nation’s leadership did not appoint women to represent the Soviet Union at international gatherings, including the United Nations Committee on the Status of Women.Footnote ³⁷ Thanks to Maurer’s comments, Emily Mudd had to know that her Stalinist hosts might present a false picture of life in the Soviet Union. In the very least, Mudd must have suspected that the “big wigs” might not be entirely forthcoming when it came to divulging accurate information about social conditions in the Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, Maurer’s advice to seek out “the average Soviet woman” seemed to have little impact on Emily Mudd, whose Soviet contacts during her visit were overwhelmingly officials and professionals. If she was aware of the political repression and the likely staged quality of her tour of Stalin’s Soviet Union, she showed no signs. She confessed that time and again she “marvelled” at the number of women she encountered in a wide variety of professional capacities. “Wherever we went in Russia,” the Mudds wrote in 1947, “we were impressed by the women workers and the amount of responsible and creative work they accomplished.” As she recalled thirty years later about Soviet society, “Women were taking their place as essential and, obviously, had won the respect, admiration and cooperation of the men with whom they worked. In Leningrad we saw a large commercial vessel … freighter of some kind … that was completely manned by a crew of women, from the captain on down. We saw women lifting bales and baggage, storing it in the boat. We saw women rebuilding buildings that had been bombed in Moscow. We saw them climbing ladders to manmade scaffolds and putting in mortar between stones. All the street cleaners were women. There were women everywhere.”

Two aspects of life for Soviet women appeared to stand out in Mudd’s eyes: (1) that even in “high-up institutions for research there seemed to be as many women at the level of top research as there were men”; and (2) that Russian women with children from all walks of life “participate[d] so continuously and actively with so little apparent conflict and tension” in Soviet society. The differences between her own experience as a mother and career woman in the United States and the ostensible lives of Russian women could hardly have escaped her attention.Footnote ³⁸

During the course of her visit, Mudd objected to virtually nothing about Soviet society, culture, or science. Although Soviet citizens certainly faced severe deprivations, their sufferings, the Mudds contended, were entirely due to the German invasion and had nothing to do with either Russian communism or Stalin’s rule. To the Mudds, Soviet society from top to bottom was grimly determined to rebuild the nation and wanted only peace to accomplish this task. Their pro-Soviet viewpoint implied that political dissent was scarcely imaginable in Stalin’s Russia. How could there be when, in the Mudds’ eyes, working Soviet women with children seemed to enjoy so many more rights than their sisters in the United States?

V

Armed with her positive impressions of Soviet women, Emily Mudd returned to America at a time when health-care policy debates were heating up in the United States, notably over national health insurance. American interest in national, publicly funded health insurance had begun mounting during the 1930s, when amid the widespread unemployment of the times voluntary plans had failed to protect millions. During World War II, the Social Security Board drafted a bill providing for health insurance for all persons paying Social Security taxes, as well as to their families, but the bill died in committee. Nonetheless, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s support for an “economic bill of rights,” including a right to adequate medical care, as well as his successor Harry Truman’s proposal of a single health insurance system, encouraged many Americans to believe that with the end of the war sweeping health-care insurance reform was imminent.

Yet, despite Truman’s protests that his program was not “socialized medicine,” opponents labeled government-sponsored health insurance “sovietism,” in the words of the AMA’s Morris Fishbein. In 1946, Republican senator Robert Taft of Ohio proclaimed Truman’s plan to be “the most socialistic measure this Congress has ever had before it.” Organized medicine shared these sentiments. When in 1948 Truman promised that if reelected he would push for national health insurance, organized medicine mobilized after his surprise victory to thwart health insurance reform. The AMA spent over $2 million and hired a public relations firm to try to convince the public that the health needs of the country could be better met through voluntary insurance plans than through “socialized medicine.” The campaign paid off in the 1950 off-year congressional elections, during which the AMA succeeded in defeating several candidates who had refused to renounce their earlier defense of national health insurance. By that point, the idea of national health insurance was widely and firmly equated with “sovietism.”Footnote ³⁹

The 1940s were also a time when the national debate intensified over day care for women in the workforce, a cause in which Emily Mudd had a deep emotional investment. Day care drew support from a handful of national luminaries, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Prior to the Depression, the prevailing view throughout U.S. government and society was that a father’s wages should support his wife and children. Yet in the midst of widespread unemployment in the 1930s, many male breadwinners found themselves out of a job and reliant on their spouses’ participation in the workforce. Some social workers, private charity nursery workers, and early childhood educators began to argue that government had a responsibility to pay for day-care centers for children. A handful of reformers maintained that day care was a fundamental need for families from all socioeconomic classes and could be an educational, not just custodial experience. Nonetheless, as the 1930s unfolded, for New Deal policymakers in Washington, the male breadwinner remained the focus of their attempts to construct a welfare state. Educators likewise appeared uninterested in making day care a part of the nation’s public school system.

World War II proved to be an important watershed in the history of day-care policy. After the nation entered the war in December 1941, about six million women who had never worked outside the home eventually joined the workforce in war-related industry and services. Thousands of women enlisted as nurses in the army and navy, or joined the army’s WACS or the navy’s WAVES. The mobilization of women at home, at work, or in the armed services led various employers, government officials, social workers, and everyday Americans to think about the need for publicly funded day care. As one editorialist asked: “After the boys come marching home, and they marry these emancipated young women, who is going to tend the babies in the next generation?”Footnote ⁴⁰ People on both sides of the debate wrestled with questions such as: What was the relationship between motherhood and citizenship? Were marriage and motherhood the most satisfying jobs that women could do? Was motherhood chiefly a private obligation to one’s husband and children? If not, what obligations did mothers owe the state?Footnote ⁴¹

The idea of federal programs providing day-care facilities met stiff opposition from government officials and some faith-based communities. Opponents of public day care argued that it “weaken[ed] family responsibility” and offered only substandard care. Child development expert Arnold Gesell warned that day-care facilities for working women followed the examples of authoritarian nations such as Japan, Germany, and Soviet Russia, where the “values of the family” were secondary to those of the state. Others, including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the National Catholic Welfare Conference, praised full-time motherhood, discouraged government efforts to provide day care, and tended to prefer foster day care provided by one woman for several children in her own home rather than group-care situations. Unpaid mothering itself, they argued, was a patriotic task more important than work in a war industry.Footnote ⁴²

Despite these and other voices of opposition to public day care, some defense contractors such as Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo and Kaiser Industries in Portland, Oregon, opened nursery and day-care centers for their employees in an effort to recruit and retain women workers. Day-care activists often appealed to national priorities when explaining “why the day nursery exists. … [It] is as sure a weapon as the gun on the battlefield.” Some women’s auxiliary groups within organized labor also advocated for day care, although much of the trade-union leadership remained cool to the idea. Occasionally, voices such as that of journalist Susan B. Anthony II (grand-niece and namesake of the nineteenth-century suffragist) defended public day care as a tool of women’s emancipation, but if there was any official support for the policy it was typically couched in terms of the nation’s needs for women laborers during wartime rather than the educational needs of children or the emancipation of women.Footnote ⁴³

The need to mobilize women’s wartime labor led to Washington’s halting reforms in this policy area. Federal funding for day care became a reality thanks to a 1942 amendment to the Communities Facilities Act, also known as the Lanham Act and originally passed in 1941. Complaints soon arose over various features of the Lanham Act day-care program, including the slow application process, the locations of some centers, and the low wages and training levels of nursery staff. Even at the height of the program in 1944, when funding supported roughly three thousand nurseries, the Lanham program served only about one percent of all children under fourteen with working mothers.

In Emily Mudd’s hometown of Philadelphia, Lanham funds helped the city open twenty day-care centers, with a peak of 1,262 students in April 1945, though its Board of Education originally planned for thirty such facilities. One Philadelphia opponent of public day-care centers declared: “Mothers should be sent home to look after their children. The idea of day care centers is copied directly from Russia.” Such resistance led the National Commission for Young People, a day-care advocacy group, to warn in 1943 that “here we have a great opportunity to build an efficient program of child care and we are letting it fail.”Footnote ⁴⁴

As one historian has observed, the United States “was probably closer to having a national child day-care policy in 1945” than any time since.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nonetheless, the return of peace in 1945 witnessed a cutoff of federal funds for day care, sparking protests in Philadelphia and elsewhere that pressured Congress into extending funding until March 1946. In 1948, the Philadelphia Bulletin reported that the city’s day-care program had had a “stormy history, punctuated by indignant mothers’ marches on City Council, skirmishes with the police, political recriminations and repercussions, and the like.” When federal funding ran out, protesting mothers failed to convince Philadelphia City Council to pay for the day-care centers, but the mayor stepped in and used his own budget to keep them operating. Thanks to expedients such as these, city officials were able to keep some of the city’s day-care centers open for another twenty years. Yet by 1949 the issue had ceased to draw much media attention in Philadelphia, likely because groups linked to the labor movement, which had helped to organize the protests, had fallen on hard times.Footnote ⁴⁶

One such organization was the short-lived Congress of American Women (1946–50), a group that claimed 250,000 members by 1949. The CAW—whose motto was “ten women anywhere can organize anything”—was the official U.S. branch of the pro-Soviet Women’s International Democratic Federation, founded in Paris in 1945 by two French communist resistance leaders.Footnote ⁴⁷ Like the NCASF, both the CAW and WIDF routinely supported Soviet foreign policy during the early Cold War.Footnote ⁴⁸ The CPUSA helped to chart the course of the CAW virtually from its inception as part of its effort to depict communism as nothing more than “twentieth-century Americanism.” Nationally known communist women such as Claudia Jones, Eleanor Flexner, Betty Millard, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn occupied key CAW leadership roles. Communist publications such as the Daily Worker repeatedly celebrated the CAW’s goals and activities. The three major concerns of the CAW, following those of the WIDF, were international peace, child welfare, and the status of women. The CAW regularly identified with political causes involving women, such as state day care, equal pay for equal work, and civil rights. The CAW’s “Resolution on the Family” asserted that America needed “homes and playgrounds, not battleships. We need milk, bread, and meat, not atom bombs.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Although some of the group’s members were traditional in their views about women’s social roles, the organization tended to teach that discrimination, not biology or personal preference, kept women from participating fully as citizens in the workforce. Led by Susan B. Anthony II, the CAW lobbied for a national housing program and government-funded, twenty-four-hour child care. The CAW attracted U.S. women who were worried that they would lose the economic and employment gains of the war years.

By 1950, when the U.S. Department of Justice ordered the CAW to register as a foreign agent, many CAW original members had left the organization disenchanted about Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe. At that point the CAW had become largely communist-dominated and focused on foreign policy, not domestic issues. Its members voted to disband, but in the meantime, thanks to the widening public perception that the CAW was a communist front organization, child day care—like national health insurance—was broadly identified as a made-in-the-Soviet Union policy.

VI

In her own way, Emily Mudd helped to conflate communism and day care in early Cold War America. When in the immediate postwar era she spoke out in America in favor of Soviet-style day care, she was wading into a highly charged debate with numerous political overtones, not the least of which was the mounting opposition to anything that smacked of communist-inspired policy reform.

The view that the Soviet people stood loyally behind their government and that they enjoyed more constitutional freedoms and social security than Americans were the major themes of Emily Mudd’s numerous public lectures after she returned to the United States, including events at the American-Russian Institute for Cultural Relations in New York City and the Philadelphia Council of American-Soviet Friendship in November 1946. In late 1946, to a reporter with the New York Herald-Tribune, Mudd said the Russian people were “far more unified in support of their government than we are,” and that though they desired peace with the United States they would willingly fight another war if that was the Kremlin’s command.Footnote ⁵⁰ Mudd’s comparison of U.S. and Soviet unity echoed a common refrain in postwar “progressive” and Communist circles; for example, the head of the Chicago CAW chapter declared to the WIDF in February 1947 that, far from united, in reality the United States was dominated by a reactionary and imperialist elite comprising only ten percent of the population.Footnote ⁵¹

Emily Mudd’s venture into early Cold War politics, however, was mainly devoted to hailing the seeming advances of Soviet women and their children. The huge loss of Soviet servicemen during the war had meant that Russian women had filled many of the jobs men had once occupied, notably in the fields of medicine and science. Mudd attributed the high visibility of women in the Soviet workforce to a combination of war conditions and the superiority of the Soviet social system. “Equal pay for equal work and no sex discrimination” reigned in the Soviet Union, Mudd insisted, and women enjoyed “economic security.” Thanks to the 1936 Soviet Constitution, they had “an equal right with men to work, payment for work, rest, and leisure, social insurance and education, and … state protection of the interests of mother and child, pre-maternity and maternity leave with full pay, and the provision of a wide network of homes, nurseries, and kindergartens.” Women’s work had “authority, recognition, and honor equal to that of men.” She hardly ignored the dismal living conditions for the vast majority of Russians, but at least their “poorness [was] shared,” she added. Footnote ⁵²

To Mudd, the Soviet system of institutions for war orphans and nurseries for working women showed how highly the USSR regarded children and “the family unit.” What particularly impressed her were the yaslis, “really day care centers set up adjoining every factory in Moscow.”Footnote ⁵³ Not only did the yaslis provide working women with a vital social service, according to Mudd, but they put children “always in groups and always with the idea that our life is part of the life of the country and our job is to be helpful, not to ourselves as an individual—not to find our individual identity; but our identity was found through relationship with the group and through dedication to improving the conditions in their country—the Soviet Union.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, in her defense of how the Soviets taught their children, she expressed her favoritism for a collectivist rather than individualist approach to defining the relationship between the state and its citizens.

Emily Mudd may have sincerely believed that women were better off in the Soviet Union than in America, but other U.S. visitors came away with distinctly different interpretations of the lot of women in Stalin’s USSR. “Sure we have equality,” a young Soviet woman told the Women’s Home Companion in 1946, “equal rights to go out and kill ourselves working hard all day and then the right to come home and do all the housework and washing and cooking and shopping for food in the evenings. Besides getting the kids to bed.” A reporter from the right-of-center Washington Daily News noted in 1947 that “the typical women of Russia … are the tens of millions who rise from childbirth to shovel snow, fell trees, work roads, sow, till, and harvest in the fields and pull their weight in industrial gangs. They are the mothers of Mother Russia—old at 30, as always silently, ploddingly, carrying a burden of the dark land they love.” The Washington Post reported that the sight of Moscow women “with shawls around their skinny faces” jostling frantically at government stalls for unrationed bread did not prove that “all Moscow women have to struggle for extra food or that all Moscow or Russia is underfed. But women do not usually struggle for a half loaf of bread, as these women did, unless they or their families are hungry.” “Communist Russia boasts that its women have equal rights with men,” another reporter wrote, “and they certainly have—particularly when it comes to heavy work.”Footnote ⁵⁵

On a broader scale, Emily Mudd agreed with Sigerist’s advocacy of preventive medicine and his outlook on the state’s responsibility for public health, what one historian called Sigerist’s overall taste for “medical totalitarianism.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Sigerist believed that the Soviet blueprint was worth copying because it supposedly came closest to his ideal of state supervision over all aspects of medicine, a cradle to grave system of health care that subjected individual lifestyle to complete state control. In 1947, Mudd, quoting Sigerist, wrote approvingly that the “general intent” of Soviet medicine “is to supervise the human being medically, in a discrete and unobtrusive way, from the moment of conception to the moment of death. Medical workers and medical institutions are placed wherever anyone, in the course of his life, may be exposed to danger. Medical supervision begins with the pregnant woman and the women in childbirth, proceeds to the infant, the pre-school and school child, the adolescent, and finally the man and woman at work.” “Emphasis in all phases,” Mudd added in her own words, “is on the prevention of disease.” While Mudd conceded that Soviet health care and educational opportunities “are still far from guaranteeing a really acceptable standard of living,” she added that the Soviets “continue[d] to adjust to life,” which ought to prove “provocative to other non-static societies,” presumably the United States.Footnote ⁵⁷

The Mudds’ many glowing testimonials in favor of the Soviet Union coincided with the three-month-long visit to America of Vasilii Parin, head of the medical section of VOKS and Vice Minister of Health for the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. On October 16, 1946, Parin traveled to the United States having been invited by the American embassy in Moscow on behalf of the U.S. surgeon general at a time when both governments appeared keen to exchange biomedical scientific information. Parin had been the Mudds’ host during their visit to the Soviet Union two months earlier. Before departing the United States, Parin toured several universities and clinics and during a visit to Philadelphia stayed at the Mudds’ own home. On December 21, 1946, Parin also joined Stuart Mudd at the ASMS third annual meeting.

Parin departed the United States in January 1947, but unbeknown to the Mudds and the ASMS, events were moving swiftly in Moscow. By that time, the Politburo under Stalin’s firm direction had decided to end Soviet contacts with Western scientists. In typical Stalinist fashion, and because of his close identification with a policy that was now discredited, Parin, upon returning to Russia, was charged with being an American spy and abruptly disappeared into the Stalinist prison system.Footnote ⁵⁸ His fate signaled that a chill had descended on Soviet-American scientific relations and the window of opportunity for realizing the Mudds’ goal of reversing public policy on women’s issues in America was closing rapidly.

Meanwhile, the Mudds’ effusive comments about the Soviet Union were drawing hostile attention from domestic sources. Mainly because of Robert Leslie’s membership in the CPUSA and Sigerist’s warm praise for the Soviet Union dating back to the 1930s, the FBI had been investigating the ASMS. In the eyes of the U.S. intelligence community, the Mudds’ close identification with both the ASMS and the NCASF was reason alone to suspect them of “un-American” activities. Other observers detected a distinct whiff of pro-Sovietism surrounding the Mudds. Colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania called Stuart Mudd “Dr. Muddski.”Footnote ⁵⁹ As a reporter commented in January 1947 after Emily Mudd spoke at Bryn Mawr, “Some might have felt that her account was one-sided in expressing the advantages of the Russian educational and recreational system and not the disadvantages.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Shortly thereafter, Collier’s magazine withdrew its offer to print an article by Mudd on her positive impressions of Soviet women and children.Footnote ⁶¹

The final chapter in the history of the Medical Mission to Moscow was written in late 1947, when Alfred Richards, Stuart Mudd’s Dean at Pennsylvania’s Medical School, informed him that an anonymous donor to the university was withholding his contribution while the Mudds’ names remained on the letterhead of the Philadelphia NCASF. On December 5, 1947, Stuart wrote to Richards that, though they still believed in the contribution of Soviet science to “world peace” and “the possibility of friendship” between the two superpowers, “I assure you that neither Mrs. Mudd nor myself is, has been, or ever expects to be a Communist, or in any way a willing participant in subversive activities. We are thoroughly in sympathy with the European Reconstruction Plan of the American government and believe that the misrepresentation of American motives in the Soviet press and by the political representatives of the Soviet government and the obstructive tactics employed by these political representatives are abominable.”

Stuart Mudd wished the Philadelphia NCASF well, but informed the group that he and Emily were withdrawing their memberships. He explained that because “the research work of my department, and also of the Marriage Council of Philadelphia is dependent on grants-in-aid received … from government sources,” the end of such funding would “cripple … our professional work.” Emily too asked that her name be stricken from the NCASF Women’s Committee. “As part of my professional work is in research from which grants are received from government sources,” she reasoned, “I do not feel that I have any right personally to jeopardize the funds for the family counselling work for which I have a responsible position.” Thus by the end of 1947, Emily Mudd’s glowing admiration of the conditions of Soviet life had become so well known that she faced an anticommunist backlash that seriously threatened her career.Footnote ⁶²

In reflecting on this turn of events, Emily Mudd was certainly correct that U.S. attitudes toward the Soviet Union—friendly only three years earlier—were becoming increasingly negative in 1947. Nonetheless, like her husband and their colleagues in the ASMS and NCASF, she maintained that American anticommunism was largely to blame for the situation. With the memories of her “Medical Mission to Moscow” still fresh in her mind, she continued to view the Soviet Union through rose-colored glasses, a prime reason why her attempts to solve the policy challenge of balancing work and family for American women fell far short of success.

VII

The failure of the Medical Mission to Moscow proved to be only a minor setback in Emily Mudd’s long-term ascent within the marriage and family counseling field. If by the late 1940s her plans to use the Soviet blueprint to advocate for publicly funded day care, greater work opportunities for women, and a state-run system of health care in twentieth-century America were in shambles, other horizons soon opened up. In the early 1950s, Mudd, elected president of the American Association of Marriage Counselors in 1953, collaborated closely with sexologist Alfred Kinsey, providing him with hundreds of case histories for his studies and serving as a consultant in the writing of Kinsey’s second major volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).Footnote ⁶³ Mudd was also a close friend of William Masters and Virginia Johnson and served as the associate director of continuing education for their Reproductive Biology Research Foundation from 1970 to 1981. In the early 1970s, Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania appointed Mudd co-chair of the Pennsylvania Abortion Law Commission, which urged the liberalization of the nation’s laws governing women’s access to abortion services, paving the way for the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which ruled that women enjoyed a constitutional right to an abortion.

When Stuart Mudd died in 1975, Emily remarried in 1980 to publisher Frederick Gloeckner. By the time she died in 1998, Mudd had watched the United States undergo the revolution in reproductive rights for which she had worked assiduously since the 1920s. Yet reproductive rights was only one part of her overall life’s work as an advocate of women’s rights to emotional happiness in marriage, motherhood, and the workplace.

These events in Emily Mudd’s later life and career serve as background to an analysis of her participation in the Medical Mission to Moscow. By touring the USSR in 1946, were she and her husband “fellow travelers” in both the literal and figurative senses? While some members of the ASMS and NCASF were CPUSA members, there is no evidence that the Mudds were. Nor, as the FBI discovered, was there a shred of evidence that the Mudds were engaged in any espionage on behalf of the Soviet government.Footnote ⁶⁴ If they were sympathetic toward the USSR, their willingness to speak out in defense of Stalin’s Russia could be traced more to the barrage of pro-Soviet propaganda to which the American public had been exposed during the war years than any pro-communist ideological presuppositions. As World War II wound to a close, it was easy for many Americans of “progressive” views to believe that U.S. attitudes toward the Soviet Union had changed and that drawing comparisons between the two countries that favored the Soviet Union would be no liability.

However, Emily Mudd’s views on Soviet women were largely the product of her own severe disenchantment with the status of women in the United States. As she told an interviewer in 1974, “My interest [in the Soviet Union] was to try to interpret to professional and lay groups in this country the kinds of facilities which were made routinely available to working women and for the care of the children of working women in the Soviet Union, because we had nothing of the kind in the U.S. at the time. I felt that this was where our social order fell down drastically... In the Soviet Union [women] had to work and they had these marvellous day care centers.”Footnote ⁶⁵

As we have seen, Mudd was drawing on her personal experience as a career working woman and she was certainly right that the U.S. “social order” provided nothing similar to the Soviet day-care system. However, it is one thing to identify what one imagines are one’s own country’s shortcomings, and it is quite another to compare them invidiously with a totalitarian regime whose official ideology was radically different than America’s. Having actually visited the Soviet Union, she had few excuses to be swept away by propaganda about the nature of life for Soviet women. The key factor appears to have been the Mudds’ active participation in the ASMS, many of whose members also belonged to the CPUSA or, in the least, came from socialist backgrounds, like Sigerist, Heiman, Leslie, and the Stones. As Kate Weigand has argued, it was hard to miss the communist influence exerted on such “progressive” groups engaged in fostering closer relations with the Soviet Union. If the Mudds shared a common mind-set, it was certainly close to the “communism is twentieth-century Americanism” attitude so widespread in left-of-center circles in the late 1940s.

By serially celebrating aspects of Soviet society, Emily Mudd may also have served Soviet propagandistic purposes. In the shadow of the U.S. atomic monopoly, the Soviets were scrambling to “dull its brilliance in the eyes of the world community,” and thus the Mudds’ statements about how fortunate women in the USSR were and how much better Soviet health care was had a distinct “symbolic value as a propaganda counter-weight to the U.S. nuclear bomb,” in the words of historian Nikolai Krementsov.Footnote ⁶⁶ Their best of intentions notwithstanding, the Mudds ended up as mouthpieces for Stalinism not because they were communists but because they wholeheartedly believed women were much better off in the Soviet Union than in the United States.

When Stalin and the Politburo decided in early 1947 to end all cultural relations with the United States, the Mudds’ usefulness to the Soviet Union ended. As Sigerist and Leslie ruefully admitted, VOKS refused to answer their letters. Yet to the Mudds and the ASMS executive, the chief blame for Soviet behavior lay with their own American government. In this respect, they were conforming to the standard NCASF response as the 1940s wore to a close: if international tensions were on the rise, it was Washington’s fault, not Moscow’s. Their overemphasis on America’s culpability was just another example of their misreading of history and current events. When it came to either Cold War diplomacy or the real conditions of life for women with children in the Soviet Union, Emily Mudd proved that her real expertise lay in giving advice to troubled married couples rather than changing the course of policy history for working women in Cold War America.