Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation (Reconfiguring American Political History)

By: Kate Weigand

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Synopsis: 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.