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  • Cold War Progressives: Women’s Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom by Jacqueline Castledine
  • Angela M. McGowan
Cold War Progressives: Women’s Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom. By Jacqueline Castledine . Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 2012 ; pp. 1 + 210 . $45.00 cloth.

In Cold War Progressives: Women’s Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom, Jacqueline Castledine accounts for the impact of McCarthyism on the lives of women engaged in progressive activism. Castledine’s thoroughly documented interpretation of their struggle expands the present understanding of leftist women’s Cold War era activism. Specifically, readers learn why the Communist Party helped forge an early appreciation of feminism. Castledine’s use of rich descriptions and poignant anecdotes examines the Progressives’ efforts to empower women and seek peace. Cold War Progressives focuses on an important era and its rarely discussed female activists. Castledine weaves together evidence found in primary documents to describe a complex movement that broadly defined world peace. Castledine argues for the book’s significance by noting that academic conversations about “leftist peace movements are rarely given the same consideration as single-issue campaigns” (2). Castledine maintains, for example, “that Progressive women helped shape the most significant social movements of the twentieth century by placing peace at the center of their activism” (4).

Recognizing that readers may lack an adequate appreciation of Progressive Party activists, Castledine provides an initial summary of the party’s history. She relates the term “Progressive” to a short-lived political party that supported Henry Wallace for president in 1948. Emphasizing the importance of women, each chapter illuminates the lives of Progressive Party activists who founded various Popular Front organizations. These women influenced the Progressive Party from its inception (1948) until its demise (1955). [End Page 558]

Throughout each of the book’s six chapters, readers learn about the roles played by gender and politics during the Cold War. Castledine’s descriptive writing coupled with her comprehensive research transports readers back to 1948 and to initial forays into feminist efforts to achieve equality. We learn, for example, that many women searched for a political party that addressed their needs as both caregivers and workforce employees. The result was a Popular Front Movement supported by an eclectic group of organizations. Castledine paints a picture of what life was like for a Progressive Party activist by relaying accounts of Susan B. Anthony II, Mary van Kleeck, and Anna Lena Phillips. For instance, Castledine uses van Kleeck’s narrative to convey early Cold War history. From van Kleeck’s story, we learn that Progressive Party women faced many challenges as they entered the gendered political sphere. While moving from the domestic sphere to the political sphere, the women of the Progressive Party argued for women’s equality and family issues. All Progressive Party feminists encouraged supporters to view the party as part of a transnational peace movement.

In addition to activists’ backgrounds and life experiences, Castledine uses newspaper articles, magazine articles, Progressive Party campaign literature, activists’ diaries, resumes, reporters’ interviews, and documented feminist achievements of the era to interpret history. Castledine demonstrates how strongly “progressive women believed that the status of women and of children could be significantly advanced when peace and democracy prevailed” (47). This, in turn, underscores Castledine’s scholarly intention to elucidate the activist vision of Progressive women, how they understood postwar power, and how the women might influence international polices in the future. The historian also discusses women’s concern about the looming nuclear war and the eventual demise of the Progressive Party.

Castledine then moves the reader into the peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. She does this by first describing how the founding of the Progressive Party united race and gender by racially integrating organizations. For instance, party cofounder Eslanda Robeson went on to cofound notable civil rights organizations, despite landing on Joseph McCarthy’s radar. Within the final chapters, we learn about the various organizations that Progressive African American women started, such as the NAACP and the Sojourners.

Although the text is written from a historian’s perspective, the author effectively examines activists’ rhetoric to support her argument. Castledine [End Page 559] informs readers about the Progressive message...

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