“SUBJECT’s Wife”: The Racialized Gender Logics of Anticommunism and State Surveillance

Abstract

This essay examines how gender shaped Black communist and communist-affiliated women’s experiences with political repression in early Cold War Chicago. While recent scholarship on Black women leftists in the mid-twentieth century has emphasized early Cold War anticommunism as a moment of rupture, I find that the experiences of Black women organizers in Chicago complicates such conclusions. Using police archives, personal papers, oral histories, and more, I contend that sexist-racist cultural discourses rendered Black women activists’ leadership and agency less visible to the state and that anticommunist state officials, as a result, tended to treat Chicago’s Black communist and communist-affiliated women as peripheral rather than central threats. Thus, Black communist and communist-affiliated women were more capable than their male counterparts of surviving early Cold War anticommunism and sustaining the class-conscious radical Black politics they had developed in Chicago. This essay not only identifies how raced gender discourses affected Chicago activists’ experiences with political repression, it also adds to recent scholarship by exploring the measure of opportunity Black communist and communist-affiliated women accessed in this early Cold War context, despite the straitened circumstances.