Smedley, Agnes

Smedley, Agnes

(1894–1950) journalist, social activist; born in Osgood, Mo. After an early life of deprivation and self-education, she took up revolutionary and pacifist causes, first being jailed in India (1918) for working for liberation from Britain. She went to China for a German newspaper in 1928 and lived there until 1941, openly identifying with the Chinese Communist movement in her reporting and in her best-known book, Battle Hymn of China (1943).