Jessica Smith (editor)
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Jessica Smith (fl. early 20th century) was an American editor and activist.
Daughter of the painter Walter Granville-Smith of New York, Jessica Granville-Smith, as she was known in her early life, graduated from Swarthmore College and championed women's suffrage. She went to the Soviet Union in 1922 with a Quaker Mission.
In the early 1920s, Harold Ware met her in Moscow. They tried to establish a model collective farm in the Ural Mountains using American tractors. Back in New York, they were married by Norman Thomas. When Ware returned to Moscow for a time, Jessica Smith remained in the United States and became editor of Soviet Russia Today, and held the position for more than twenty years.
Ware died in an automobile accident in 1935. John Abt married Jessica Smith, Ware's widow, after his death. Abt died in 1991.
At the time of her death in October 1983, Smith was longtime member of the Board of Directors of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.
See The New York Times, December 8, 1938, p. 27; New York Times, October 19, 1983, p. D25; New York Times, August 13, 1991, B5. See also, Jessica Smith, "Woman in Soviet Russia" (pamphlet), New York: Vanguard Press, 1928.
