In the Company of Radical Women Writers

by Rosemary Hennessy

Overview

Recovering the bold voices and audacious lives of women who confronted capitalist society’s failures and injustices in the 1930s—a decade unnervingly similar to our own
 

In the Company of Radical Women Writers rediscovers the political commitments and passionate advocacy of seven writers—Black, Jewish, and white—who as young women turned to communism around the Great Depression and, over decades of national crisis, spoke to issues of labor, land, and love in ways that provide urgent, thought-provoking guidance for today. Rosemary Hennessy spotlights the courageous lives of women who confronted similar challenges to those we still face: exhausting and unfair labor practices, unrelenting racial injustice, and environmental devastation.

As Hennessy brilliantly shows, the documentary journalism and creative and biographical writings of Marvel Cooke, Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Alice Childress, Josephine Herbst, Meridel Le Sueur, and Muriel Rukeyser recognized that life is sustained across a web of dependencies that we each have a duty to maintain. Their work brought into sharp focus the value and dignity of Black women’s domestic work, confronted the destructive myths of land exploitation and white supremacy, and explored ways of knowing attuned to a life-giving erotic energy that spans bodies and relations. In doing so, they also expanded the scope of American communism.

By tracing the attention these seven women pay to “life-making” as the relations supporting survival and wellbeing—from Harlem to the American South and Midwest—In the Company of Radical Women Writers reveals their groundbreaking reconceptions of the political and provides bracing inspiration in the ongoing fight for justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781517914905
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	08/08/2023
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	751,927
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Rosemary Hennessy is L. H. Favrot Professor of Humanities and professor of English at Rice University. She is author of three other books, including Fires on the Border (Minnesota, 2013).

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction: How Did Fast Food Become Black?

Part I. White Utopias

1. A Fortress of Whiteness: First-Generation Fast Food in the Early Twentieth Century

2. Inharmonious Food Groups: Burger Chateaux, Chicken Shacks, and Urban Renewal’s Attack on the Existential Threat of Blackness

3. Suburbs and Sundown Towns: The Rise of Second-Generation Fast Food

4. Freedom from Panic: American Myth and the Untenability of Black Space

5. Delinquents, Disorder, and Death: Racial Violence and Fast Food’s Growing Disrepute at Midcentury

Part II. Racial Turnover

6. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? (Mis)Managing Racial Change and the Advent of Black Operators

7. To Banish, Boycott, or Bash? Moderates and Militants Clash in Cleveland

8. Government Burgers: Federal Financing of Fast Food in the Ghetto

9. You’ve Got to Be In: Black Franchisors and Black Economic Power

Part III. Black Catastrophe

10. Blaxploitation: Fast Food Stokes a New Urban Logic

11. PUSH and Pull: Black Advertising and Racial Covenants Fuel Fast Food Growth

12. Ghetto Wars: Fast Food Tussles for Profits amid Sufferation

13. Criminal Chicken: Perceptions of Deviant Black Consumption

14. 365 Black: A Racial Transformation Complete

Conclusion: The Racial Costs

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

06/12/2023

This dense study from Hennessy (Profit and Pleasure), an English professor at Rice University, examines the work of seven women communists whose writings tackled issues of social justice and labor during the Great Depression. She contends that the politics of Alice Childress, Marvel Cooke, Josephine Herbst, Claudia Jones, Louise Thompson Patterson, Muriel Rukeyser, and Meridel Le Sueur challenged the “disparity between the promise of democracy and the inequalities people lived under” by taking “a feminist approach to class, race, and gender.” Contending that her subjects were ahead of their time, Hennessy notes that journalists Cooke and Jones’s 1935 coverage of a unionization drive by domestic Black women workers in Harlem exposed how they labored under threat of sexual assault and how whiteness was “reproduced through a Black woman’s performance of her subordinate place.” Women’s bodily autonomy is another through line in the writers’ work, as in Le Sueur’s 1934 novel The Girl, which follows unmarried women living in an abandoned warehouse, some of whom “abort pregnancies others resist forced sterilization.” The discussions of social reproduction, dialectical sensibility, and other Marxist concepts can get a bit knotty, but Hennessy’s case that these writers have been unjustly overlooked convinces. Leftist scholars will want to add this to their libraries. Photos. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"This truly revelatory work pushes the already rich encounters between contemporary left feminist scholars and 1930s radical women writers in new directions—new ways of thinking and new fields of desire. Beautifully written, it is a model of engaged, compassionate, and grounded activist research."—Paula Rabinowitz, author of American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street and coeditor of Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940

 

"Rosemary Hennessy’s latest book (re)introduces women writers of the Communist Left who thought the unthinkable of their time and increasingly ours: Black left feminism, radical ecology, the ‘erotics of race work.’ Their work, and Hennessy’s, are primers and love letters for liberation. In the Company of Radical Women Writers exemplifies materialist feminism, scholarship on the American Left, and literary studies for the twenty-first century."—Cheryl Higashida, author of Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995

"In the Company of Radical Women Writers is significant; it covers 1930s literary history, the civil rights and women’s rights movements, and the under-heralded work of seven powerful writers."—Foreword

 

From the Publisher