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Among women across worlds : North Korea in the global Cold War
In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim explores the transnational connections between North Korean women and the global women's movement. Asian women, especially communists, are often depicted as victims of a patriarchal state. Kim challenges this view through extensive archival research, revealing that North Korean women asserted themselves from the late 1940s to 1975, before the Korean War began and up to the UN's International Women's Year. Kim centers on North Korea and the \"East\" to present a new genealogy of the global women's movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women's Union (KDWU), part of the global left women's movement led by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), argued that family and domestic issues should be central to both national and international debates. They highlighted the connections between race, nationality, sex, and class in systems of exploitation. Their intersectional program proclaimed \"no peace without justice,\" \"the personal is the political,\" and \"women's rights are human rights,\" long before Western activists adopted these ideas. Among Women across Worlds uncovers movements and ideas foundational to today's era.
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Communist rhetoric and feminist voices in Cold War America
This book tells the story of a group of women affiliated with the United States Communist Party (CPUSA) who used a variety of rhetorical resources to build credibility and transform the party into a vibrant dwelling place for feminist discourse and activism during a conservative period. It evidences Communist women’s significant and creative resistance to Cold War society and its visions of appropriate, “normal” womanhood alongside their pleas for class and race consciousness in a country that took for granted the white, middle-class aspirations of citizens. Drawing on Marxist theory, transnational coalitions, and Cold War culture, Communist women’s rhetorical strategies were incredibly powerful, and this book provides insight into how they catalyzed changes in a rigid political movement by establishing a platform for their radical ideals.
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Left of Karl Marx : the political life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915–1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.
Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, \"Half the World,\" for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones's thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones's own narration of her life with the federal government's. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.
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Red star tattoo : my life as a girl revolutionary
\"From hardscrabble Milwaukee to dreamy Hawaii, from turbulent Montreal to free-spirited California, Red Star Tattoo is Sonja Larsen's unforgettable memoir of a young life spent on the move. By the age of 16, Sonja joins a cult-like communist organization in Brooklyn in a spirit of idealism and hope--unaware of the dark nature of what awaits her. A small, skinny 8-year-old-girl holding a teddy bear stands by the side of a country road with a young man she barely knows. They're hitchhiking from a commune in Quebec to one in California. It is 1973 and somehow the girl's parents think this is a good idea. Sonja Larsen's is a childhood in which family members come and go and where radical politics take over her mother's life and her own. As a pregnant teen her mother had been thrown out of home in Milwaukee by her evangelical preacher father. Her aunt Suzie is gripped by schizophrenia, her behaviour so erratic she eventually loses custody of her daughter. And then there is her cousin Dana, shunted back and forth long-distance between her parents--Dana, whose own need to escape leads to unspeakable tragedy. Looking for a sense of family, searching to belong, to have your life mean something--this is what all these girls and young women have in common. As a teenager, Sonja finds herself embracing her mother's commitment to an organization known publicly as the National Labor Federation and privately as the Communist Party USA Provisional Wing. Over her three years embedded within the NLF's national headquarters in Brooklyn, Sonja becomes the youngest member of the organization's militia and part of its inner circle. She works sixteen-hour days and is not allowed to leave. She soon becomes a mistress of the Old Man, the organization's charismatic leader. As she and the other members count down the days until their American revolution is set to begin, Sonja's doubts about the cause and the Old Man become increasingly difficult to ignore. Red Star Tattoo explores the seductions and dangers of extremism and, in prose that is both poetic and unsentimental, asks what it takes to survive a childhood scarred by loss, abuse and the sometimes violent struggle for belonging.\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Passionate Commitments
Winner of the 2014 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
presented by the Publishing Triangle Developing their
rhetorical skills in early-twentieth-century women's organizations,
Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, life partners and heirs to
significant wealth, aimed for revolution rather than reform. They
lived frugally while devoting themselves to several organizations
in succession, including the Episcopal Church and the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, as they searched for a place where their efforts
were welcomed and where they could address the root causes of
social inequities. In 1927, they joined the Communist Party USA and
helped to build the Labor Research Association. There they engaged
in research and wrote books, pamphlets, and articles arguing for
gender and racial equality, and economic justice. Julia M. Allen's
Passionate Commitments is a love story, but more than
that, it is a story of two women whose love for each other
sustained their political work. Allen examines the personal and
public writings of Rochester and Hutchins to reveal underreported
challenges to capitalism as well as little-known efforts to
strengthen feminism during their time. Through an investigation of
their lives and writings, this biography charts the underpinnings
of American Cold War fears and the influence of sexology on
political movements in mid-twentieth-century America.
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Navigating the Zeitgeist : a story of the Cold War, the new left, Irish Republicanism, and international communism
\"The personal account of an American woman, born into an Irish-Catholic family in the thick of the McCarthy era who, after entering a convent, transformed herself into an atheist, feminist, and Marxist\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Gendering Radicalism
In 1919 Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy white woman, received one of the first Communist Labor Party membership cards for the charter group of the northern California Communist Labor Party. Less than a decade later in Berkeley, California, a Jewish woman named Dorothy Ray Healey became a card-carrying member of the Young Communist League. Nearly forty years later, in 1966, Kendra Claire Harris Alexander, a mixed-race woman, enlisted with the Los Angeles branch of the Communist Party, determined to promote class equality.
InGendering Radicalism, Beth Slutsky examines how American leftist radicalism was experienced through the lives of these three women who led the California branches of the Communist Party from its founding in 1919 to its near dissolution in 1992. Separately, each woman represents a generation of the membership and activism of the party. Collectively, Slutsky argues, their individual histories tell the story of one of the most infamous organizations this country has ever known and in a broader sense represent the story of all women who have devoted their lives to radicalism in America. Slutsky considers how gender politics, California's political climate, coalitions with other activist groups and local communities, and generational dynamics created a grassroots Communist movement distinct from the Communist parties in the Soviet Union and Europe. An ambitious comparative study,Gendering Radicalismdemonstrates the continuity and changes of the party both within and among three generations of its female leaders' lives.
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