page_title: Louise Bryant
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Louise Bryant / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Louise Bryant as she appeared in a Chi Omega sorority photo in 1909 at the University of Oregon, United States.
context_page_description: Louise Bryant, an American feminist, political activist, and journalist, became best known for her sympathetic coverage of Russia and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of November 1917. Bryant, who married fellow journalist John Reed in 1916, wrote about Russian leaders such as Katherine Breshkovsky, Maria Spiridonova, Alexander Kerensky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. Her news stories, distributed by Hearst during and after her trips to Petrograd and Moscow, appeared in newspapers across the United States and Canada in the years immediately following World War I. A collection of articles from her first trip was published in 1918 as Six Red Months in Russia. Over the next year, she defended the revolution in testimony before the Overman Committee, a Senate subcommittee established in September 1918 to investigate foreign influence in the United States. Later in 1919 she undertook a nationwide speaking-tour to encourage public support for the Bolsheviks and to denounce armed U.S. intervention in Russia.
  Born Anna Louise Mohan, as a young girl she began using the last name of her stepfather, Sheridan Bryant, in preference to that of her father.
context_section_description: Anna Louise Mohan was born in 1885 in San Francisco, California. Her father, Hugh Mohan, born in Pennsylvania, became a journalist and stump speaker involved in labor issues and Democratic Party politics. Moving to San Francisco, he continued to write for newspapers, and in 1880 he married Louisa Flick, who grew up on the ranch of her stepfather, James Say, near Humboldt Lake in Nevada. The Mohans had two children, Barbara (1880) and Louis (1882), before the birth of Anna Louise. Later in 1885, the family moved to Reno, where Mohan continued his journalistic career but drank heavily. One day he departed and never returned to his wife and children. Louise's mother divorced him in 1889 and married Sheridan Bryant, a freight conductor on the Southern Pacific railway. The couple had two children, Floyd (1894) and William (1896). Although the family lived in Wadsworth, Nevada, Louise accepted an invitation from James Say to live at his ranch. She remained there for three or four years, returning to Wadsworth at her mother's insistence at the age of 12. Bryant adopted her stepfather's last name, but never changed it legally from Mohan.
  Attending high school in Wadsworth and Reno and college at Nevada State University (now known as the University of Nevada, Reno), Bryant developed interests in journalism, debate, illustration, social life, dancing, and basketball. She edited the "Young Ladies Edition" of the Student Record in 1905, wrote a short story, "The Way of a Flirt", for a literary magazine, Chuckwalla, and contributed sketches to it and another publication, Artemisia. Depressed after the death of her step-grandfather in 1906, Bryant left school for a job in Jolon, California, where for a few months she boarded at a cattle ranch and taught children, mostly young Mexicans.  That summer she moved to Eugene, Oregon, where her brother Louis worked for the Southern Pacific.
  After learning that she could transfer her college credits from Nevada, she enrolled at the University of Oregon, in Eugene. Popular at the school, which then had a total student enrollment of less than 500, she helped start a small sorority, Zeta Iota Phi (a chapter of Chi Omega), and served as its first president. During her time in Eugene, she produced poems and pen-and-ink sketches for the Oregon Monthly. In a small city steeped in "puritan moralism", she was the first to wear rouge on campus; she had multiple boyfriends, and she wore clothes that Miriam Van Waters, the editor of the Oregon Monthly, and Luella Clay Carson, the dean of women, considered improper. Taking off the spring semester of 1908 to teach in a one-room schoolhouse on Stuart Island, one of the San Juan Islands near the U.S. border with Canada, she returned to Eugene to finish her bachelor's degree in history, graduating in early 1909. Her senior thesis was on the Modoc Indian Wars.
caption: Bryant in a sorority photo at the University of Oregon in 1909
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