Her father Benjamin Roscoe Gary was a doctor, her mother Willie Alberta Barham an artist, and her home "affluent," "middle-class and progressive."

She studied anthropology under Franz Boas, Melvin Herskovitz, and Franklin Giddings (the last Marxian but not a communist).

She also took a class under John Dewey at Columbia's Teacher's College and attended courses given by theologians Harry Emerson Fosdick and Henry F. Ward at Union Theological Seminary.

[1][2] While a graduate student, she became active in the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), which at that time championed reform in race relations.

Influenced by Social Gospel, she "developed an antiracist consciousness and chafed against the restrictions imposed upon her as a southern white woman.

"[1][7] Upon completing her master's degree in 1920, Page became a YWCA "industrial secretary" at a silk factory in Norfolk, Virginia, near her home town of Newport News and organized education for women workers.

[2][3][8][9] Giddings had introduced Page to the Rand School of Social Science, where she had met Anna Louise Strong, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Scott Nearing.

In 1921, she returned to New York from Norfolk and studied further under Nearing at Rand; at that time, she first read the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

After passing through New York City, in part to publish her book with Nearing, The Law of Social Revolution, via the Federated Press, she returned to Minneapolis by late September to reunite with her husband.

They immediately set about a "central trade union committee" of the Minnesota AFL and commenced "workers' education" in Duluth.

In 1926, the YWCA had helped fund her research on working conditions among garment workers in Greenville and Gastonia, North Carolina, and in 1929 again funded her to rewrite her doctoral thesis as Southern Cotton Mills and Labor (1929): "Many lines and quotes... appear later in my Gastonia novel, Gathering Storm.

[1][2][3][6] On March 30, 1929, the Loray Mill strike (also known as the "Gastonia Strike") broke out and lasted into August; Sophie Melvin (future wife of Simon Gerson) traveled there to join Fred Beal in organizing strikers on behalf of the Communist Party controlled National Textile Workers Union.

LRA's directors included: Anna Rochester, Bill Dunne, Grace Hutchins, Carl Haessler, and Charlotte Todes Stern.

[5][6] Upon their return to the States around November 1933, when the US recognized the USSR diplomatically, Page and her husband lived in Brooklyn, NY.

Page joined the editorial board of Soviet Russia Today, a Soviet-backed magazine edited by Jessica Smith, wife of Harold Ware.

On May 1, 1935, Page joined the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Alexander Trachtenberg of International Publishers, Frank Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, Bromfelds[who?

[2] In March 1937, she interviewed Andre Malraux for his views on the Spanish Civil War and Hallie Flanagan about the Federal Theatre Project.

In 1937, husband John Markey got a job as educational director of the Transportation Workers Union (TWU), a CIO member headed by Mike Quill.

"[1] In her memoir In a Generous Spirit, Page states that both she and her husband were members of the nascent Communist Party of the USA.

She does not state when, but from her description it seems they joined in 1928 during the height of factionalism within the Party between followers of Jay Lovestone, James P. Cannon, and William Z.

"[1][2] By the fall of 1930, after they had let their contracts to teach expire at Wheaton College, her husband "John and I began to work full-time for the movement," i.e., for the Party.

[2] Page and her husband first traveled to Moscow in the summer of 1928 (crossing Europe on foot), where they joined a group of visitors led by John Dewey.

Beal was later to write disaparagingly of those westerners who, like Page, were made comfortable in Moscow by the party-state bureaucracy he identified as a "new exploiting class".

[14][15] Page stayed through mid-year 1933,[2] by which time Beal in Kharkov, but not she in Moscow, witnessed the famine produced by Stalin's collectivisation policies.

During their second visit 1931–1933, Page claims to have not realized how privileged a life they led, living at the Lux Hotel and buying scarce good easily with valudas ("American-style paper money") instead of Soviet roubles.

Viking Press canceled publication of her novel Daughter of Man, despite the support of editor Pascal Covici and book agents Mavis Macintosh and Elizabeth Otis (who also represented John Steinbeck among others).

[2] She also added nuance to her decision: I'm resentful that people think we listened only to Moscow and that when Stalin was exposed by Khruschev we lost our idol and therefore quit the Path.

[2] Page recounts only mild bitterness over fallings-out with some friends and does little scandal-mongering (e.g., the affairs of Party leader Earl Browder with Kitty Harris and eventual wife Raissa.

She considers the account of Olive Tilford Dargan (writing under pen name "Fielding Burke"), Call Home the Heart well written though romanticized.

She considers Grace Lumpkin's book To Make My Bread equal to her own because they both "wrote from the same orientation" as Southern women who had seen poverty.