In 1919 Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy white woman, received one of the first Communist Labor Party membership cards for the charter group of the northern California Communist Labor Party. Less ...than a decade later in Berkeley, California, a Jewish woman named Dorothy Ray Healey became a card-carrying member of the Young Communist League. Nearly forty years later, in 1966, Kendra Claire Harris Alexander, a mixed-race woman, enlisted with the Los Angeles branch of the Communist Party, determined to promote class equality.
InGendering Radicalism, Beth Slutsky examines how American leftist radicalism was experienced through the lives of these three women who led the California branches of the Communist Party from its founding in 1919 to its near dissolution in 1992. Separately, each woman represents a generation of the membership and activism of the party. Collectively, Slutsky argues, their individual histories tell the story of one of the most infamous organizations this country has ever known and in a broader sense represent the story of all women who have devoted their lives to radicalism in America. Slutsky considers how gender politics, California's political climate, coalitions with other activist groups and local communities, and generational dynamics created a grassroots Communist movement distinct from the Communist parties in the Soviet Union and Europe. An ambitious comparative study,Gendering Radicalismdemonstrates the continuity and changes of the party both within and among three generations of its female leaders' lives.
First-wave feminists in the Progressive Era found ways to make the political physical by empowering their bodies. As the women's suffrage movement gained momentum, advocates for women's self-defense ...training in England and in the United States insisted that all women were physically capable of defending themselves and should learn self-defense not only to protect themselves physically but to empower themselves psychologically and politically for the battles they would face in both the public and private spheres. Militant suffragettes used their bodies to convey discontent and resist oppression through marches, pickets, and hunger strikes. Yet, and perhaps more importantly, even average women, with no direct association with suffrage organizations, expressed a newfound sense of empowerment through physical training in boxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu.1 This paper considers the ways in which women during the first wave of feminism empowered their bodies to fight assault, sexism, and disfranchisement through their training in the “manly art” of self-defense. Although not all women who embraced physical training and martial arts had explicit or implicit political motives, women's self-defense figuratively and literally challenged the power structure that prevented them from exercising their full rights as citizens and human beings.
On October 23, 1925, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) unanimously passed a resolution declaring its commitment to help Charlotte Anita Whitney, a card-carrying Communist, avoid prison. ...“We, as members of the WCTU,” it proclaimed, “hold it deplorable in the extreme that a law the alleged purpose of which is to protect society against the violence of the evil minded, should have been so interpreted as to entrap within its coils one whose gentle life has been devotion to service of the betterment of humanity.”¹ A longtime progressive organization, the WCTU offered important broad-based support for Whitney’s pardon campaign. Nearly
In 1928, less than a year after Anita Whitney received her pardon, a determined fourteen-year-old named Dorothy Ray Healey joined the Young Communist League in Berkeley, California. Although there ...was considerable overlap in their involvement in the years that Healey belonged to the Party that Whitney had helped to birth, their activism over these two decades appears to have occurred in separate worlds. Healey ushered in the generation of California Communists that constituted the Party’s most successful era, one that has since earned the most attention in Americans’ and scholars’ collective memories of the Communist Party. In part because the
As the lives of these three women show, radicalism in America continually reinvented itself. Radicals’ grievances, agendas, goals, and strategies regularly shifted to respond to their changing worlds ...and constituencies. Whitney, Healey, and Alexander’s collective experiences offer insight into why they and others like them became drawn to the Party, what they found once they did become members, how the Party changed over time because of them, and why California played a central role in creating their radical worlds.
Whitney, Healey, and Alexander all saw the American Communist Party as the most attractive option for attaining their goals. Although the
The New Old Left Slutsky, Beth
Gendering Radicalism,
08/2015
Book Chapter
On July 9, 1973, Dorothy Healey publicly resigned from the Communist Party on her weekly radio show in Los Angeles. Minutes after she finished her announcement, Kendra Claire Harris Alexander called ...into Healey’s show and spent the remaining on-air hour debating parts of her reasons for leaving.¹ Although Healey had personally recruited Alexander into the Communist Party, in 1973 the national leadership decided that Alexander could represent her generation and speak on behalf of the national Party. Ironically, Alexander’s new generation had grown out of Healey’s own efforts to rebuild the Southern California Party after it lost most of its
In October 1919 an educated, wealthy, white woman who loved to wear colorful hats and had grown up with pedigree in a prestigious California family sat quietly in an Oakland meeting hall while votes ...were being tabulated. Moments earlier she had cast her ballot in favor of her branch of the Socialist Party breaking off and becoming a pioneer branch of the Communist Labor Party. Within days the members of the charter group of the Northern California Communist Labor Party affirmed their commitment to the revolutionary organization’s constitution and its article supporting the overthrow of the capitalist American government. On
