Red Feminism
American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The untold history of feminist activism in the American Communist Party from the 1930s–50s and its influence on the women's liberation movement (Publishers Weekly).
Drawing on substantial new research, historian and archivist Kate Weigand disproved the conventional wisdom that the American Communist Party disregarded women's issues. Weigand argues that, despite the devastating effects of anti-Communism and Stalinism on the progressive Left of the 1950s, Communist feminists such as Susan B. Anthony II, Betty Millard, and Eleanor Flexner managed to sustain many important elements of their work into the 1960s, when a new generation took up their cause and built an effective movement for women's liberation.
Red Feminism provides a more complex view of the history of the modern women's movement, showing how key Communist activists came to understand gender, sexism, and race as central components of culture, economics, and politics in American society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historians have generally contended that the American Communist Party of the 1930s-1950s had little interest in women's issues and that its party line stated that sex oppression was merely a by-product of bourgeois decadence. Weigand, an archivist at Smith College, overturns this conventional understanding by uncovering a history of feminist activity within the Communist Party and detailing its later influence on the women's movement of the 1960s and '70s. She argues that while such Communist women as Mary Inman, Betty Millard and Eleanor Flexner had to fight against party officials' refusal to admit that working-class men might abuse their wives, they also had to battle more banal instances of everyday sexism. For example, there was quite a controversy surrounding the Daily Worker's "cheesecake" photos of scantily clad women (with captions such as "Mrs. New York-- and she can cook too!") and the struggle to get such images removed from official party literature. Weigand argues that the writings of early Communist women helped shape the core values of second-wave feminism: a 1946 letter in the Worker, for instance, calling for "an end to the separation of `personal' and `party' life" profoundly anticipates the "personal is political" mantra of '70s consciousness-raising groups. Equally interesting is Weigand's discussion of the Party's antiracist work and its sometimes na ve attempts at promoting racial equality: in one effort to encourage desegregation, the party offered dancing lessons to white men so they wouldn't be embarrassed to ask African-American women to dance at party functions. Although this richly detailed study is academic in focus, it will appeal to general readers interested in the history of U.S. progressive movements and women's history.
