"The Personal Politics of Communist Women on the Left Coast."

Beth Slutsky

“The Personal Politics of Communist Women on the Left Coast.”

This paper will explore questions about gender, place, and radical politics.  Drawing from research from my first book, Gendering Radicalism: Women and Communism in 20^th Century California, as well as State Department documents about Angela Davis’ famed 1972 trial, this paper will analyze how women in California’s Communist Party navigated mainstream American social and cultural norms.  In the late 1960s, as women’s rights advocates protested gender wage gaps and access to education and employment opportunities, Communists naturally agreed with the campaigns, but not with the broader feminist critique.  Especially as women’s liberationists called for revolutionizing gender roles inside the home as a way to bring equality, California Communist women had not only wrestled with the burden of housework and Party work for generations, they had long ago resolved this contradiction for themselves.  For decades, California Communist women simultaneously advocated a proletariat-led revolution to emancipate women and embraced conventional American gender roles in their personal lives: they tended to marry young, have families, and appear in typical feminine clothing.  By focusing on the way in which the government and media outlets surveilled Angela Davis in the wake of her exoneration, as well as on the creation of two Communist organizations - the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) and Women for Racial and Economic Equality (WREE) – this discussion will explore how radicals in the late 1960s and 1970s attempted to resolve the challenges of being female communists in America.