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Chapter 1 Gender, Politics, and the Emerging Cold War Until recently “nice” women just didn’t mingle much with party politics. —Susan B. Anthony II, 1946 In mid-July 1948, members of the Progressive Party met at their founding convention in Philadelphia to write a blueprint for postwar America. The delegates had already chosen their presidential contender; the party was formed to run Henry Wallace as a “peace candidate.” In Philadelphia they turned their attention to introducing voters to the party’s strain of leftist peace politics. The resulting platform, “Peace, Freedom, and Abundance,” vowed to return America to “the purpose of Franklin Roosevelt,” namely, overseeing a redistribution of the nation’s wealth through “progressive capitalism,” guaranteeing civil liberties and civil rights to all Americans, and “seek[ing] areas of international agreement rather than disagreement” in foreign policy. It also included a promise of full citizenship for women, while incorporating such concepts as equal pay for equal work. Less than four months later, the 1948 election became forever associated with the classic photo of Harry Truman smiling broadly while holding aloft a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune emblazoned with the (as it turned out erroneous) headline “Dewey Beats Truman.” Understandably, election results disheartened the party faithful, as Wallace garnered less than 3 percent of the presidential popular vote and not a single electoral vote. Yet despite the New York Times’s description of Wallace’s defeat as so convincing that his supporters’ “chances of achieving any importance in the foreseeable future are extremely small,” Progressive women of the party continued to press their peace agenda.1 Intersections of Gender and Politics Even before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Americans debated how women might vote if given the opportunity. Would a “woman’s 14 bloc” develop, or would they merely vote as their fathers and husbands directed ? By the presidential election of 1936, most agreed that the issue was settled; women had failed to organize in numbers large enough to provide them an effective voice in the political system. World War II, however, would create opportunities for women’s political activism not available in the interwar period.2 As men joined the service, women replaced them not only in the industrial workplace but also in political organizing, where “much of the hard grueling work of Party organization fell upon women.”3 Following the war, their participation in the labor force and the political system came under intense scrutiny. Jo Freeman writes that in these years, “Political women were displaced by political wives, and the concerns of working women . . . by the concerns of housewives.”4 The role of women in postwar politics was more contested than Freeman implies. The relationship between gender and politics in the nascent Cold War years would raise significant challenges for Progressive Party women who saw in Henry Wallace a champion to lead their efforts to protect families across the globe from the threat of nuclear annihilation and the neglect of social welfare posed by Cold War saber rattling. Wallace’s claim that “too much of the American housewife’s dollar is buying guns,” and the argument that peace with the Soviets was possible without appeasement and without abandoning the hope of expanding the New Deal, appealed to war-weary leftists.5 Early Cold War history, however, suggests the magnitude of the challenge Progressive women faced entering gendered political spaces. Americans concerned with dramatic shifts in gender roles brought on by women entering the workforce and party politics, according to historian K. A. Cuordileone, engaged in a concerted effort to remasculinize U.S. culture after the war.6 Long-standing bias against women in politics and a history of skepticism surrounding leftist movements were now compounded by a perceived crisis in masculinity, feeding fears that the feminization of America during the war had put the nation at risk both culturally and militarily. Progressive women making their way into the gendered arena of party politics by campaigning for world peace and women’s equality were doubly menacing. They not only refused to relinquish wartime gains that gave them increased visibility within parties, but were also “soft” on communism. In need of strategies to lessen their apparent threat to American masculinity and to national security , in 1948 Progressive women led by Women for Wallace chair Elinor Gimbel introduced a number of tactics to calm fears about the supposed dangers of c h a p t e r 1 / G E N D E r , P o L...

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