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3. Progressive Mothers
- University of Illinois Press
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Chapter 3 Progressive Mothers Women everywhere thought . . . “at last we can build permanent peace, get better homes for our families, better education for our children, better medical care, all the benefits which our society is so capable of producing for the good of man.” —Helen MacMartin, 1948 At the core of U.S. leftist women’s postwar activism stood a host of social justice causes, including civil rights and women’s equality, but central to it was peace. Response to their attempts to push the boundaries of good mothering to include such endeavors as political organizing, especially peace activism, that took them out of the home and challenged emerging Cold War liberal ideology suggests the difficulties they would face balancing the personal and the political in the immediate postwar era. The experiences of a cohort of Progressive Party organizers working across the nation at both national and local levels demonstrates how their determination to continue working for leftist causes while also performing their social roles as mothers, wives, daughters, and waged workers was increasingly complicated by domestic reaction to international events. In his study of the significance of the 1948 election, Zachary Karabell introduces readers to one such woman, Vermonter Helen MacMartin. MacMartin served as the 1948 Progressive Party state director and by all appearances represented the futility of the Wallace movement. Karabell explains that the demands MacMartin experienced as an organizer attempting to keep her small state party afloat after the crushing electoral defeat of 1948 had sent her into a tailspin. “People stopped giving money, stopped listening to Helen, stopped answering her letters,” he writes. The grandmother who “served cookies with Vermont milk” at her campaign meetings was physically exhausted; despite her wish that she could “snap out of it soon,” the author concludes, MacMartin failed to recover from the malaise that gripped her following the Wallace loss and died in 1951.1 68 The recounting of MacMartin’s latter years supports a well-established narrative of the Cold War era that depicts American leftists “contained” by increasingly anticommunist U.S. foreign policies at the same time that domestic containment of women valorized their role in the home. Indeed, this story appears to dramatically illustrate the postwar silencing of political women as they retreated from public view. Yet MacMartin died not in 1951, but in 1987, following nearly forty years of leadership in Vermont social movements, and writing women like her out of the narrative of social movement history has had broad implications. Not the least of these is concealment of strong links between movements for peace, civil rights, and women’s equality in mid-twentieth-century America. Examination of the activism of MacMartin and a host of PP women like her provides insight into the complexity of the lives of those who struggled in their interracial organizing to balance leftist beliefs with traditional women’s roles.2 Progressive Mothers Historian Ruth Feldstein argues that in the postwar period, “families with ‘good’ mothers” became increasingly important to “a liberal vision of citizenship based on a family wage and male breadwinner.”3 Within this paradigm, masculinity equaled citizenship as experts on postwar mothering emphasized the notion that good mothering created strong and healthy citizens, while bad mothering could produce emotionally wounded sons unable to protect the United States from either internal or external Cold War threats. Fears of “Momism,” the stifling overprotection of sons demonstrated by white mothers, and “matriarchy,” black aggressive maternal behavior that confused gender norms, were at the center of a culture of “mother blaming” that narrowly defined the role of a “good” mother as one who “accepted her dependence on a man and sought no fulfillment outside the home.”4 Every era has had its bad mothers, yet the mother blaming of previous generations “paled in comparison” to that of the war and postwar years.5 Starting in 1942 with the publication of Philip Wylie’s best-selling Generation of Vipers, which introduced the concept of “Momism,” critics and social scientists increasingly employed Freudian analysis to trace societal problems to inadequate mothering. In Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, published in 1947, authors Dr. Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lunberg bluntly explained that “the spawning ground of most neurosis in Western civilization is the home,” c h a p t e r 3 / P r o G r E S S I v E M o T H E r S [100.26.135.252] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:25 GMT) 69 with mothers “the...