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  • Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture by Kathlene McDonald
  • Danica Savonick (bio)
McDonald, Kathlene. Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2012.

Resurrecting the voices of the obscured and censored, and revealing the Leftist proclivities of revered authors, Kathlene McDonald’s Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture documents the contributions of a Left feminist perspective to “the history and culture of the American Left, the history of feminism in the United States, and US women’s literary history” (8). McDonald’s book exceeds the specificity of her argument: “that women writers drew on the rhetoric of antifascism to critique the cultural and ideological aspects of women’s oppression,” offering a comprehensive and expansive overview of “the largely neglected story” of the feminist Left and the literature it produced during the postwar period (6). McDonald’s work recovers the voices erased by McCarthy-era censorship and illustrates the contributions of African American female artists and activists to Leftist debates, as early critics of intersecting axes of oppression. [End Page 742]

Refreshingly written in clear, vibrant prose, making it accessible to nonacademic readers, Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture is an earnest and engaging exploration of the “often-reciprocal relationship” between Left feminist debates and the cultural texts that emerged amidst the hostile conservative climate of mid-twentieth-century America. In comparison to the array of work detailing Leftist feminist writing of the 1930s and 1940s, McDonald’s study probes the relatively overlooked postwar period for its contributions to Left feminist history. As McDonald makes explicit, her work contributes a literary-historical perspective to the extant studies detailing second-wave feminism’s indebtedness to the Old Left. These include Kate Weigand’s Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (2001), Gerda Lerner’s Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (2002), and in the context of black feminism, Kevin Gaines’s “From Center to Margin: Internationalism and the Origins of Black Feminism” (2002) and Dayo F. Gore’s Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (2011). Though avowedly not a work of literary criticism, the intellectual magnitude of her scholarship should not be overlooked. McDonald’s detailed historical inquiries into how female authors used literature to proliferate the possibilities available to women will likely prove useful to those examining the time period, either with or without a theoretical bent.

Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture begins by contextualizing the literary works McDonald discusses, tracing the contours of Left feminist culture through debates over the “Woman Question” and the use of antifascist rhetoric within Communist party publications. The central chapters of McDonald’s book crystallize around three major figures of women’s literary history: Martha Dodd, Alice Childress, and Lorraine Hansberry. Using the stories of their radicalizations to inform her readings, McDonald carefully identifies the elements of racial, gender, and economic critique that give their oeuvres social and political gravity. She reads their works as historical documents and cultural texts, informed by and participating in the debates of the postwar period. For McDonald, these are political texts that dramatize the prejudices and injustices that their authors fought to eradicate. As McDonald makes clear, the feminist perspectives of Dodd, Childress, and Hansberry contributed to the Communist Party’s gradually increasing willingness to address women’s issues in their visions of a more just and equitable society.

This study also redresses a historical redaction: the Leftist activities of female authors during the postwar period. McDonald compiles an archive of powerful arguments and representations that challenged the racist and sexist images of women as “white, middle-class, heterosexual, married mother[s] and homemaker[s]” (21). Specifically, she focuses on female authors intimately involved in Communist party activities whose work recognizes the need for solidarity, coalitions, and intersectional analyses of oppression given what McDonald identifies as the fascist nature of racism, sexism, and class disparity.

In her first chapter, “Domestic Ideology as Containment Ideology,” McDonald charts the historical context of her analysis and elaborates upon one of her critical terms: domestic ideology. Her portrait of the historical period foregrounds the American postwar zeal for patriotism and the contentious debates over...

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