Leonore Sophie Winter Steffens Stewart was an Australian-British journalist and activist. Her parents were Freda Lust and Adolph Wertheimer from Nuremberg in Germany, who lived in London, Melbourne, Australia and again in London, when they changed their name to Winter. Their children Rudolph, Rosa and Eleanora were born in Melbourne. Fredric Wertham was a relative. She studied at the London School of Economics in England. She met the U.S. journalist and 'muckraker' Lincoln Steffens at the Versailles Conference, where she was secretary to US Supreme Court JusticeFelix Frankfurter. Winter and Steffens married in 1924. They moved to Italy, where their son, Peter, was born in San Remo. Two years later, they moved to the largest art colony on the Pacific Coast, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, where their friends and neighbors included photographer Edward Weston, poet Robinson Jeffers, philosopher/mythologist Joseph Campbell, nutritionist/author Adelle Davis, short story writer/poet Clark Ashton Smith, marine biologist/ecologist Ed Ricketts, Nobel prize winner Sinclair Lewis, and novelists John Steinbeck and Henry Miller. Carmel was sharply divided between conservative and liberal factions; the latter quickly coalesced around the Steffenses, who publicly debated the most controversial topics. The Irish poet and folklorist Ella Young, as well as the local press, described the relaxed social intercourse in this counterculture world. In 1928 the Steffenses helped to create The Carmelite, a publication that was offered as an alternative to the town’s somewhat stodgy local paper, the Carmel Pine Cone. With contributions by numerous leftist literati, including Jeffers, Martin Flavin, Lewis and the Steffenses, along with theatre, dance and art reviews by feminist artists such as Alberta Spratt, Jennie V. Cannon and Roberta Balfour, The Carmelite became one of California’s most controversial publications. Its illustrations ranged from Weston’s enigmatic photos to the “anarchist” prints of James Blanding Sloan. The Steffenses also arranged for public exhibits of Europe’s most avant-garde art, including Dada, Surrealism and the paintings of Paul Klee. Ella wrote on various topics and once reported on the very unusual meeting between the popular Modernist artists John O’Shea and Frederick O’Brien. The Steffenses' support of the art community extended to their own home where they entertained local painters and offered to display their work. Ella loved publicity and when two Carmel reactionaries, artist William Silva and writer/editor Perry Newberry, tried to ban the local chapter of her “communist” John Reed Club as well as her “socialist reading room,” she made sure that the press as far away as Los Angeles was apprised of the violation of her civil rights. The Steffenses also joined controversial national campaigns, including the Scottsboro Boys Defense Fund which sought to free nine black men who were still incarcerated after the Supreme Court of the United States twice reversed their convictions for rape. Lincoln Steffens died in Carmel in 1936. She wrote her first book, Red Virtue, after visiting the Soviet Union. Her autobiography, And Not to Yield, was published in 1963. In 1939, Winter married the screenwriter and humorist Donald Ogden Stewart and became stepmother to his sons, Donald and Ames. They lived in California and then in Hampstead, London.
