Ella Winter Stewart

Ella Winter Stewart (born March 17, 1898, Melbourne, Australia—died August 5, 1980, London, England) was an Australian-born journalist who devoted her life to radical causes, to the peace movement, and to support for struggling writers and artists.

After her parents moved to London in 1910, Winter attended the London School of Economics and in 1924 met her first husband, American journalist Lincoln Steffens, at the Versailles Peace Conference. Two years later they settled in California, and in 1930, increasingly committed to socialism, she visited the Soviet Union. Her book Red Virtue (1931) was one result of this experience. During the 1930s she was active in U.S. and international left-wing causes, playing an important role in the movement against fascism. After Steffens’s death in 1936, she married writer Donald Ogden Stewart and took his name. Her visit to the U.S.S.R. during World War II led her to write I Saw the Russian People (1945). The Stewarts left the U.S. during the McCarthy era and settled in Britain to continue their work for the peace movement. They visited Ghana in 1964 and organized an exhibition of African art on their return to London. Stewart published her autobiography, And Not to Yield, in 1963. She died in 1980, three days after her husband’s death.