The Secondary Contradiction of Women of the Radical Left

Abstract

The Secondary Contradiction of Women of the Radical Left Laura Beers (bio) Michelle Chase. Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952–1962. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 310 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4696-2500-3 (pb); 978-1-4696-2501-0 (epub). Patricia Melzer. Death in the Shape of a Young Girl: Women's Political Violence in the Red Army Faction. New York: New York University Press, 2015. xii + 339 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4798-6407-2 (cl). Julia Mickenberg. American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 432 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-2262-5612-2 (cl); 978-0-2262-5626-9 (epub). In 2010, one of my brightest undergraduate thesis students moved from Washington, DC, to London to pursue a master's in history at University College London. As an undergraduate, she had been a politically committed member of the campus women's movement who occasionally engaged in militant action, as when she and a group of comrades dumped hundreds of copies of the student newspaper in front of the paper's editorial office under a sign that read "No room for rape apologists" in a protest against an editorial by a member of its staff who dismissed the seriousness of date rape. Her politics were leftist as well as feminist, and when she arrived in Bloomsbury, she decided to attend a meeting of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) women's group that she saw advertised on campus. She later told me that the women present made clear their view that the class struggle stood above the women's struggle, and she left and never came back. In 2013, the SWP was thrown into the headlines for an alleged culture of sexual violence and double standards in which party leaders were said to have covered up sexual assaults by male leaders against their female comrades and branded women who reported sexual violence as sluts.1 My student's experience and the scandal within the SWP leadership highlights one of the enduring tensions within the radical left: is there necessarily a relationship between radical socialist politics and support for women's rights? And, for women within the radical socialist movement, should class loyalty trump gender solidarity or vice versa? My own research into the life of Ellen Wilkinson—a female trade unionist and former suffrage activist who helped found the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) [End Page 129] in 1920, before leaving the CPGB in 1924 for a career on the radical left of British Labour politics—highlighted the frequent tensions between socialist and feminist agendas. While Wilkinson considered herself a lifelong feminist, she occasionally felt compelled to sacrifice her feminist ideals on the mantle of socialist expediency, as when she agreed to "compromise" over the inclusion of birth control reform in the 1929 party platform rather than risk alienating Catholic voters.2 At the same time, she used her political position to champion the rights of working women in parliament and keep gender issues on her party's political radar. In very different ways, Julia Mickenberg's American Girls in Red Russia, Michelle Chase's Revolution within the Revolution, and Patricia Melzer's Death in the Shape of a Young Girl all tackle the question of what happens when a woman who considers herself both a radical and a feminist is confronted with the contradictions between her two commitments. The answer sadly does not tend to be that a constructive dialectic produces a new form of feminist radicalism. Instead, the women showcased in these books were almost all forced to choose. Nearly all of them chose radicalism. From a feminist standpoint, American Girls in Red Russia is in some respects the most difficult to read, as the women whom Mickenberg chronicles all arrive in Russia with extremely progressive ideas about women's sexual and career emancipation as well as idealistic hopes for a socialist future, only to find themselves faced with a sea of contradictions between Soviet rhetoric and reality in terms of both gender and social reform. As Mickenberg notes, many of the American women who traveled to Russia were...