Anna Louise Strong

Anna Louise Strong
Anna Louise Strong at the time of her recall from the Seattle School Board in 1918.
Born	(1885-11-24)November 24, 1885 Friend, Nebraska
Died	March 29, 1970(1970-03-29) (aged 84) Beijing
Alma mater	Bryn Mawr College Oberlin College University of Chicago
Spouse(s)	Joel Shubin (1931–1942)
Parent(s)	Sydney Dix Strong

Anna Louise Strong (November 24, 1885 – March 29, 1970) was a 20th-century American journalist and activist, best known for her reporting on and support for communist movements in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

Strong was born on November 24, 1885, in Friend, Nebraska. Her father, Sydney Dix Strong, was a Social Gospel minister in the Congregational Church and active in missionary work. An unusually gifted child, she raced through grammar and high school, then studied languages in Europe.

She first attended Pennsylvania's Bryn Mawr College from 1903 to 1904, then graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio where she later returned to speak many times. In 1908, at the age of 23, she finished her education and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago with a thesis later published as The Social Psychology of Prayer. As an advocate for child welfare for the United States Education Office, she organized an exhibit and toured it extensively throughout the United States and abroad. When she brought it to Seattle in May 1914, it attracted more than 6,000 people per day, culminating with an audience of 40,000 on May 31.

At this point, Strong was still convinced that problems in the structure of social arrangements were responsible for poverty and the like. In this Progressive mode, she was 30 years old when she returned to Seattle to live with her father, then pastor of Queen Anne Congregational Church. She favored the political climate there, which was pro-labor and progressive.