Gendering Radicalism

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Gendering Radicalism

Women and Communism in Twentieth-Century California

Beth Slutsky

Women in the West Series

286 pages
9 photographs, index

Hardcover

August 2015

978-0-8032-5475-6

$45.00 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

August 2015

978-0-8032-7860-8

$45.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

August 2015

978-0-8032-7862-2

$45.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

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.
 
In Gendering 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 Radicalism demonstrates the continuity and changes of the party both within and among three generations of its female leaders’ lives.

Author Bio

Beth Slutsky is an associate instructor of history at the University of California, Davis, and a program coordinator for the California History–Social Science Project.

Praise

"Slutsky's Gendering Radicalism is a good read. Whitney, Healy and Alexander's stories deserve to be told and retold, as their stories are in many ways also the stories of the California Communist Party. By highlighting these courageous lives, Slutsky humanizes the party. She paints a nuanced picture of an organization and its individual members deeply rooted in the American radical tradition, warts and all."—Tony Pecinovsky, People's World

“The three remarkable women in this book wrestled with some of the most compelling questions in the history of American reform movements. What was the best way to achieve social justice? Was economic inequality more important than sexism or racism? Slutsky’s original, nuanced book explains how these women discovered uniquely American answers to these questions.”—Kathy Olmsted, author of Real Enemies, Red Spy Queen, and Challenging the Secret Government

“[Gendering Radicalism] combines the study of twentieth-century women, California, and ‘radical’ politics in a way that has not been done before. Very well written and informative.”—Kathleen Cairns, author of Proof of Guilt: Barbara Graham and the Politics of Executing Women in America


Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1. Three Generations of American Communist Women

2. Parlor Pink Turned Soapbox Red: Charlotte Anita Whitney, the American Communist Matriarch, 1867–1955

3. Red Queen of the West: Dorothy Ray Healey and the Grounding of California’s Old Left, 1914–2006

4. The New Old Left: Kendra Harris Alexander, 1946–1993

5. American Communism after Three Generations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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