Women of the World

The flower of Red womanhood assembled in Rome last week. Theirs was the semi-annual executive meeting of the Women's International Democratic Federation, a Communist front formed three years ago to the battle cry: "Women of the world, unite!" Beneath two white cardboard doves, 31 ladies representing 52 nations met to compare notes on women's rights. Another chief purpose: to prepare a campaign against warmongers in the U.S., Britain and "the countries which dance to their tune."

Many of the women had spent years fighting for Communism as members of the party, among them Bulgaria's Tsola Dragoicheva and Jeannette Vermeersch Thorez (sturdy helpmeet of France's Communist leader). A self-declared exception was the U.S.'s small, intense Muriel Draper,* noted dilettante whose salons in London and Manhattan were once brilliantly haunted by the world's famous, from Henry James to Gertrude Stein. Amid her drably dressed fellow delegates she appeared in a white-stitched black linen Clare McCardell creation. She explained that the dress was really quite inexpensive. (She always-has style, rarely has money.) But Comrades Nina Popova and Zinaida Gurina, Russia's loyal daughters, were not noticeably pleased.

Mrs. Draper told about terror in America. At the recent battle of the Roxy theater where she had picketed The Iron Curtain (TIME, May 24), her son Paul barely managed to rescue her from beneath "the feet of police horses."

Later, she darted off to address workers in Naples. "They wept and threw their arms around me because I wasn't selling the Marshall Plan or telling them how to vote," she reported on her return. "They acted as though I were the last American democrat . . . We've become the old country when we ought to be at the peak of our youth and beauty."

After her return to the old country, Mrs. Draper hopes one day to own a Persian-style house on the New England shore, to be designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

*Sister-in-law of Monologist Ruth Draper and mother of Dancer Paul.

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