Cindy Jaquith

Cindy Jaquith (1948–2020) joined the Young Socialist Alliance in the mid-1960s while a student at Carleton College in Minnesota. Like thousands of other young people of her generation, she was inspired by the Cuban Revolution and the proletarian fight to overthrow Jim Crow segregation. She was a member of and...

Cindy Jaquith (1948–2020) joined the Young Socialist Alliance in the mid-1960s while a student at Carleton College in Minnesota. Like thousands of other young people of her generation, she was inspired by the Cuban Revolution and the proletarian fight to overthrow Jim Crow segregation.

She was a member of and helped build the party’s trade union fractions in a number of cities, served stints as editor of the Militant, and took major responsibility for the party’s work in the women’s liberation movement beginning in the early 1970s.

Jaquith first joined the staff of the Militant newspaper in 1972. As part of her responsibilities, she frequently traveled to the Kentucky coalfields during the Brookside United Mine Workers organizing drive, a fight portrayed in the movie Harlan County USA. She participated in and reported on the historic march of 100,000 for the Equal Rights Amendment for women in Washington, D.C., on July 9, 1978.

In January 1979, when workers and farmers in Iran took to the streets in their millions and a month later brought down the hated US-backed shah, Jaquith was assigned to cover the unfolding revolution. Over the next year, she traveled back and forth to Iran, collaborating with fellow communists to get eyewitness coverage of this working-class upsurge into the hands of working people around the world.

She interviewed garment workers, soldiers, and other working people at the forefront of making the revolution. She wrote about the mass mobilizations of women fighting for their liberation, and the organization of workers into factory committees to defend their interests. Jaquith covered the press conference that announced the formation of the Socialist Workers Party of Iran. Upon her return, she toured the US giving public forums on the Iranian Revolution.

From August 1985 to November 1987, Jaquith headed up the Managua Bureau of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, the paper’s Spanish-language sister publication. The bureau was established in August 1979, one month after the victory of the Sandinista Revolution. She returned to direct the bureau in mid-1990 until it closed in December that year.