Communist Feminism Consumer Culture And Superpower Politics In The United States During The Early Cold War

Between 1945 and 1956, American Communist women, members of the largest leftist organization in the United States, engaged in some of their most sophisticated and oppositional theorizing and protest actions. As a contribution to growing scholarship on labor and rhetoric, this study analyzes discourse circulated in Communist publications and mainstream national political and popular sources as a lens on changing conceptions of work, womanhood, and political activism. Confronting conservative gender and race politics alongside a male dominated and ideologically rigid leadership structure within the Party, Communist women demanded that the Party pay attention to unique forms of oppression emanating from gender and race, in addition to class. Drawing on theories about gender performance, subjectivity formation, and constitutive rhetoric, this dissertation argues that radical women negotiated their doubly disempowered position by gradually claiming a voice within the Party. Communist women began with using humor to temper their critiques of consumer culture and men while linking femininity and domesticity to Communist class critique. From there, they marshaled their knowledge of Communist theory to demonstrate allegiance to Party goals while propounding intersectional analysis of oppression. Communist women connected this theory to practice by building transnational coalitions during a petitioning drive. The success of this organizing effort spurred the U.S. government to arrest them, which provided a platform for Communist feminists to speak personally about citizenship and dissent. The shifts in their rhetorical strategies and goals reflect the gradual acceptance of their advocacy among their Communist comrades and the consolidation of a Communist feminist collective identity within the Party. By 1956, Communist women had definitively changed the rhetoric and organizing practices of the American Communist Party. Their creative resistance to sexism in the Party and to normative visions of womanhood provided the foundations upon which women in the 1960s and 1970s built, and their rhetorical maneuvers provide insight into how political movements develop and change. The ability of Communist feminists to make themselves heard while drawing rhetorical resources from popular and political culture, Communist theory, and lived experience speaks to their continued relevance in a world where capitalism's critics are often silenced.