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9 Feminism, Women's History, and American Social Thought at Midcentury Daniel Horo~vitz T h e development o fwomen's history benveen 1956 and 1969 reflected and helped reshape postwar ,hesican social thought. T h e linlzs that historians have recently made between union activity and the Old Left in the 1940s and second \rave feminism in the 1960s are apparent in key writings about women's history.' T h e debt four major figures-Carl Degler, Eleanor Flexner, Aileen Ksaditor, and Gerda Lerner-o~ved to the Marxist feminism they learned early in their lives helps us understand many o f the questions they asked and the ans~vers they offered o n a ~vhole range o f issues, including the relationship bet~veen capitalism and women's lives. This chapter charts the first phase o f the reemergence o f women's histor5 before the arrival o f a younger generation o f historians that toolz its bearings from the revival o f feminism in the late 1960s. Central to the ~vorlz o f these four more senior historians Jvas the connection between what they experienced in the Old Left and the feminism o f the 1960s. Early in their careers, these four writers saJv capitalism as a force that oppressed Jvomen in \rays that only socialism could remedy By the 1960s they paid much less attention to the power o f economic forces and focused instead o n gender, patriarch!; and race. T h e encounters o f Degler, Flexner, Ksaditor, and Lerner with anti-fascism and Marxism in the 1930s and 1940s shaped their careers and ~vritings. What they read early in their lives gave capitalism a central role in their vision o f the forces that both oppressed and liberated women. Beginning as early as the mid-l930s,however, as they reconsidered their commitment to a Marxist critique o f capitalism, they rethought their assumptions about the relationship o f economic forces and social justice. Ideological consistency over decades is not necessarily a virtue, especially given revelations o f the 110srors o f Stalinism in the Soviet Union,the dramatic recovery o f the American economy in the postwar years, and changes in the lives o f Xfrican ' h e r icans and women. T h e careers o f these four historians illuminate the complicated personal and ideological factors that caused them, especially after the late 1960s, to talze different paths-sometimes dramatically different 192 Daniel Horo~vitz ones. Above all, this chapter explores one o f the reasons gender gained importance in ,hesican social thought, to a considerable extent displacing capitalism from the predominant position it had held in the 1940s. The De~elopment of Feminist Consciousness, 1935-1955 These four writers had much in common, but a number o f factors differentiated Eleanor Flexner (1908-1995) from the others: she \\.as the oldest o f them, the one ~ v h o grew u p in the most privileged circumstances, and the one ~vhose participation in the Old Left generally and the Communist Party specificallyJras the most sustained. Early in the Depression, soon after she graduated college, she Jvas horrified by the sufferingo f others she ~vitnessed in Manhattan but was personally protected by her parents' wealth. Joining the Communist Party in 1933, from the early 1930s until the mid1950s Flexner participated in a wide range o f radical causes, focusing o n social justice for Afsican Americans, the ~vorlzing class, trade unionists, and Jvomen. T h e party drafted her to serve, from 1946 to 1948, as executive secretary for the Congress o fAmerican Women (CATlV),the Popular Front feminist organization driven out o f existence in 1930 soon after the Justice Department placed it o n its list o f subversive organizations. From 1950 to 1934, using pseudonyms that were more obviouslyJewish than her oJvn (her father \\.as bornJe~vish; her mother \\.as from a Protestant background),she ~ t ~ o t e and taught o n ~vomen's issues and ~vomen's history in publications and at the Communist Party'sJeffersonSchool o f Social Science in New Yorlz. In 1933-34 she offereda course there, relying o n The Wottratl Questiotl: Selections jnttr the Mhitings of Katl,\latx Ft~detick Engels, 1 : I. Lettin,Joseph Stalin (1931). Her activism exposed her to the sexual discrimination against ~vorking Jvomen, including what she personally experienced from both employers and male activists o n the left;it Jvas one o f the many...

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