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Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Meets the "Second Sex": Feminist Aspirations & Communist Politics
"Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Meets the 'Second Sex'"
This is a project I have been working on for some years. In the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library, New York University, in the papers of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn I found a series of documents relating to educational materials she prepared for Communist Party clubs, when she was chair of the National Women’s Commission, starting in 1948. African American Communist leader Claudia Jones was Secretary of the Commission. Together they prepared a series of “educationals” for Party clubs on “Women’s Equality.” In the same archives I also found an outline of the recently published, English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Titled “Some Notes on Simone De Beauvoir’s book, WOMAN: THE SECOND SEX, Flynn’s notes begin:
“In general, despite all the criticisms that can be made, Simone de Beauvoir has given us a really great book, one which offers an enormous challenge. It is a monumental contribution to the struggle for women’s rights. Dozens of books attacking these rights appear every year. Here, at last, is a book fighting for the rights of women. Despite the fact that it was not written by a Marxist, Marxists welcome it, while reserving the right to criticize and disagree.”
Flynn’s assessment is astonishing given her previous antipathy to anything ‘feminist.’ This material complicates our ideas about the ways in which women within the Party, some of whom were lesbians, deeply undercover, struggled with expanding the struggle for women’s emancipation.