A Veritable Crazy Quilt of Contradictory Practices and Beliefs: Female Marginality and Feminist Scholarship in the Immediate Postwar Era

“A Veritable Crazy Quilt of Contradictory Practices and Beliefs”: Female Marginality and Feminist Scholarship in the Immediate Postwar Era

Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, a small number of feminist-minded scholars crafted new perspectives on gender-based oppression and searched for solutions to the problem of women’s marginalization. Well before the advent of the late modern feminist movement, sociologist Mirra Komarovsky and historian Eleanor Flexner, among others, used their scholarly investigations to challenge the gender conservatism of postwar America. Through their investigations of women past and present, these scholars succeeded in making names for themselves at a time when much of academia regarded the study of women as irrelevant. This paper will explore what led these women to pursue careers as professional scholars and attends to the ways that their marginality as women in the predominantly male world of academia and as Jews living in Protestant America informed their research agendas and their perspectives on prevailing gender norms. Inspired in part by their experiences of marginality as women and as Jews, these two intellectuals produced scholarship that shaped the trajectory of feminist research and theorizing in the years that followed. By examining the interplay between these women’s lives and the scholarly work they produced, this paper reveals how Komarovsky and Flexner helped establish the intellectual foundations of postwar feminist activism in the decades before The Feminine Mystique.