The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce by Jeremy Kuzmarov & John Marciano

Author:Jeremy Kuzmarov & John Marciano [Kuzmarov, Jeremy & Marciano, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Communism & Socialism, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Russian & Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9781583676967
Google: pq07DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07C598L87
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2018-05-22T03:00:00+00:00

WEAKENING THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

The Cold War had a negative effect on the women’s rights movement as it promoted a rigid conformity with conservative gender norms and resulted in the persecution and silencing of radical women. Women were over-represented among defendants in federal loyalty cases.66 Many stalwarts of the labor movement and Communist Party, which emphasized the interconnection between class, racial, and gender oppression, were further red-baited, blacklisted and jailed. Among them was Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian-born intellectual and the communist movement’s chief spokesman for black women who was deported, and “the rebel girl,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was purged from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which she had helped found, and spent two years in prison after having been prosecuted under the Smith Act.67

Some feminists who had been active in the Communist Party and labor movement later covered up or renounced their radical past in order to fit in better with the mainstream. The feminist movement in this way further lost its radical edge and connection with working-class women. A prime example is feminist icon Betty Friedan, the founder of the National Organization of Women and author of The Feminine Mystique, a bible for the 1960s feminist movement. As historian Daniel Horowitz has documented, Friedan suppressed her background as a labor organizer and radical journalist in the 1940s because she did not want to be stigmatized as a “Red.” Her book The Feminine Mystique spoke to the interests of white middle-class women seeking career fulfillment, rather than addressing the plight of working-class women who had to work outside the home in demeaning and poorly paid jobs.68 The feminist movement today, as represented by Hillary Clinton, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Lady Gaga, follows from this tradition, promoting women’s rights absent any attempt to forge a broader political movement to challenge the power structure of society and empower all marginalized groups.

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