2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

“Sexualities and Silences: Women on the Radical Left” explores how left-wing women in the United States navigated heterosexual gender norms while pursuing class-centered strategies of social change from the 1910s through the 1980s. Gendered expectations, shaped in part by socialist organizations, led these women to compartmentalize their personal lives as irrelevant to their public work; American anticommunism made “deviant” sexuality dangerous. Thus, many women denied same-sex relationships or hid affairs with male comrades, creating archival silences. Yet these women forged female friendships that sustained challenges to heterosexual gender norms and nurtured heretofore unrecognized feminisms. Our panelists investigate these themes through individual life stories. Dayo Gore explores how CP-affiliated black women activists created intimacies that sustained intersectional commitments to race, class, and gender equality. Lara Vapnek discusses how Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s unorthodox sexuality prevented her from narrating the full story of her life. Bettina Aptheker reveals how Flynn and Claudia Jones conspired to incorporate a feminist perspective into the Communist Party by championing the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Donna Haverty-Stacke questions how Grace Carlson’s affair with Vincent Dunne influenced her career in the Socialist Workers Party. Focusing on government surveillance of Angela Davis, Beth Slutsky analyzes how California Communists pursued “proletarian-led revolution to emancipate women.” Liz Faue, a leading scholar of gender and working-class history, will chair and comment. This session demonstrates how black and white activists pursued feminist objectives within socialist organizations, despite the limits of women’s sexual expression within the “Old Left.”