Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940

By Charlotte Nekola, Paula Rabinowitz and Toni Morrison

This comprehensive collection of fiction, poetry, and reportage by revolutionary women of the 1930s lays to rest the charge that feminism disappeared after 1920. Among the thirty-six writers are Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, Tess Slesinger, Agnes Smedley, and Meridel Le Sueur. Other voices may be new to readers, including many working-class Black and white women. Topics covered range from sexuality and family relationships, to race, class, and patriarchy, to party politics. Toni Morrison writes that the anthology is “peopled with questioning, caring, socially committed women writers.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642596809

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) was a Nobel Prize–winning American author, editor, and professor. Her contributions to the modern canon are numerous. Some of her acclaimed titles include: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. She won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature.

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I. FICTION

Writing Red: Women’s Short Fiction of the 1930s

PAULA RABINOWITZ

When Michael Gold, editor of the New Masses, admonished young writers to go Left! he was calling for a new aesthetic as well as a new politics in literature. Gold asked his readers to write … your life, re-creating the experiences of the mine, mill and farm in novels, poems, and plays.¹ This editorial was a more urgent call to put into practice Gold’s prescriptives for proletarian art first outlined by him in the early 1920s.² Proletarian realism was to create cinema in words through swift action with a social theme that described the labor process with technical precision. In as few words as possible, proletarian realism conveyed the revolutionary élan, not the drabness of workers’ lives, with honesty and without resorting to melodrama.³ However, debate raged throughout the pages of various left literary journals about the aesthetics and politics of proletarian culture.

Critics and theorists of literary radicalism generally agreed the form most suitable to articulating a proletarian revolutionary culture was reportage. Capturing the immediacy of struggle and the consciousness of commitment for the reader, that curious form of engaged journalism best represented the aims of the movement. When it came to the other genres of writing, however, wide disparities emerged. E. A. Schachner argued that because of the oral traditions associated with each, poetry and drama best expressed the desires of a revolutionary culture.⁴ Granville Hicks had implicitly argued for the primacy of the novel by outlining a typology of the revolutionary novel.⁵ William Phillips and Philip Rahv tended to agree with him on this point. They argued that the novel was still a new and pliable form, unlike poetry and drama, both of which had a long history and tradition that, by the twentieth century, made them too elitist.⁶ In any case, the short story, a genre of importance in American literary history during the nineteenth century (and reemerging today in significance) was rarely considered worthy of critical attention. Apparently if a short prose piece needed to be written, the dictates of literary radicalism pointed to reportage; otherwise the novel was needed to flesh out the contradictory character of Depression America. Still, the pages of the various journals devoted to the culture and politics of the Left were filled with short pieces of fiction, including some excerpts from the collective novels typical of 1930s radical fiction.⁷ It is primarily from among those numerous, now utterly obscure, journals that the following selections were chosen.

Despite the overwhelming male dominance of the apparatus of literary radicalism—the editors of its journals, and the members of John Reed Clubs and the League of American Writers—a great many women published short pieces like the ones included in this volume. Short stories, poems, and reportage seemed unobtrusive within the pages of theory promulgated by male writers. When women were allowed to write theory, it was often about gender-related issues which relegated it to a secondary status. For instance, during its brief publication history, Blast, a magazine of proletarian fiction, edited for a time by William Carlos Williams, never printed a story by a woman. Presumably its editors took to heart Michael Gold’s, Phillip Rahv’s, and the other literary radicals’ prescriptions for a masculine proletarian writing. On the other hand, in Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, edited by W. E. B. DuBois, most of the fiction and much of the poetry printed within its pages were written by women. The masthead flagged only male names, however, and the important theoretical and analytical pieces were reserved for male writers of stature. Again, women’s creative writing seemed to hold a secondary place within the journal. A similar situation obtained at Partisan Review and New Masses, the two primary journals of Left politics and culture published under the auspices (for a time at least) of the CPUSA. Occasionally, a woman appeared on the masthead; toward the end of the 1930s Ruth McKenney and Joy Davidman were contributing editors of New Masses, and Mary McCarthy was theater reviewer and an editor at Partisan Review. (This is long after it had split from the CPUSA and was advocating an anti-Stalinist Left position.) However, Davidman reviewed books; McCarthy reviewed theater; and only McKenney achieved some status as labor reporter and theorist in addition to writing fiction.

Still, women’s work could be found in the pages of these two journals, and a substantial number of the selections collected here are from those important journals. Surprisingly, in the journals published in cooperation with the John Reed Clubs from chapters outside New York—like the New Force from Detroit’s John Reed Club—women were often editors and thus responsible for writing criticism and analysis, as well as publishing imaginative works. It is among these pages that we found a number of lost women’s voices. These writers had been used by the John Reed Clubs as editors ostensibly to nurture the budding proletarian literary movement, but perhaps further to marginalize them as outsiders to proletarian culture.⁸

As late as 1968, Josephine Herbst declined an invitation to provide a contribution to David Madden’s collection of critical essays, Proletarian Writers of the Thirties. Believing that the definitions of proletarian literature constricted the range of aesthetic and political issues important to 1930s writers, Herbst reminded Madden that the writing she called vehicles for protest and engines for change had addressed the revolution in language, as in sex, as much as the politically volatile struggles by the working class for industrial unionism and against fascism.⁹ For Herbst, as for many other women authors calling themselves literary radicals, the legacies of feminism, Freud, and modernist experimentation circulating within the culture of Greenwich Village during the 1920s supplemented their desire to write with the urgency that the issues of the 1930s demanded. These multiple influences sent women’s revolutionary writing on a different path from the one blazed out by Michael Gold and the other theorists.

Actually, nobody could fulfill Gold’s requirements for proletarian realism. Even his own novel was criticized by E. A. Schachner, another Party literary critic, as too romantic. But for the women authors, painting the portrait of the valiant male workers struggling against vampirish bosses meant repressing their own experiences in their writings. Women’s literary voices had arisen into a full choir during the preceding two decades. The rise of modernism was as indebted to Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, among many others, as it was to Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Yet women, too, were having their eyes refocused from internal struggles to those developing on the streets. In fact, the first truly proletarian novel, published in 1929, was Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth.

Women authors, along with their male colleagues, wanted to venture into the mills, mines and farms in search of the material out of which to fashion a new literature that would elaborate not only the psychological experiences of the individual but the social structures of class relations. But because authenticity of voice was valued so highly within the 1930s aesthetic of socially conscious literature, women’s stories often did not penetrate the walls of the factory or descend to the depths of the mines. Women’s writings—both fictional and nonfictional—often focused on the home life of the working class, taking apart the sexual division of labor in the family as it focused on the wives, mothers, and daughters of male workers. For example, Leane Zugsmith’s Room in the World sensitively portrays the special pains that wives of unemployed workers took to shield their children from their husband’s sometimes violent frustration. Meridel Le Sueur’s Sequel to Love follows a young working-class woman’s thoughts about her enforced sterilization resulting from an unwanted pregnancy. Lucille Boehm displays the ways poverty constricts the desires of a black teenaged girl so that she cannot escape a sense of guilt for her brief pleasure. Marita Bonner’s powerful portrait of urban poverty in The Whipping focuses on the potential for tragedy locked within racial and class oppression and enacted, as in Le Sueur’s story, by the state relief organizations.

Women were rarely employed in industrial or skilled trades work during the 1930s. With unemployment over 25 percent, many companies developed a policy of refusing to hire women (or of firing those already employed) on the grounds that they were taking jobs away from men. Women’s labor power was restricted to the unorganized fields of domestic and service work or, if they were white and middle class, sales and office work, none of which held the ideological sway of the male-dominated jobs in steel, rubber, and automobiles. Thus, many of the stories by women focus on other sites of labor. Ramona Lowe’s The Woman in the Window investigates the class, race, and gender divisions within a restaurant by delving into the degradations that Mrs. Jackson, a cook, must endure to keep her job; Tess Slesinger reveals the varying class and sexual strata within a small New York office in The Mouse-Trap.

The shift in focus from interior to external reality sent writers across America and throughout the world recording the eruptions of class warfare. For women authors, in particular, this mobility expanded their literary horizons to include portraits of revolutions in China, Cuba, Germany, the Soviet Union, as well as every region of the United States. The selections in this section begin in China with a portrait of Shan-fei, Communist, by Agnes Smedley and circle the globe to a hotel room in Havana in Josephine Herbst’s The Enemy. The rest of the stories track across the United States from New York to St. Paul to Chicago, detailing the devastation of the Depression on the lives of women and their families.

Stories that appeared in the New Masses, Partisan Review, The Magazine, The Anvil, Crisis, or any of the other numerous journals devoted to promoting the new aesthetic of revolutionary literature were often written as short didactic pieces. Many were based on true incidents, because the primacy of fact, the urge to document history, best exemplified by the exciting new form of reportage, informed fiction also. It is sometimes difficult to tell where the truth leaves off and the fiction begins. For instance, Sequel to Love represents Meridel Le Sueur’s attempt to capture the speech patterns of working-class women whose stories she recorded while living in the Worker’s Alliance in St. Paul. Similarly, Smedley lived and wrote in China between 1928 and 1941, traveling with the Red Army and producing some of the most influential reportage about the revolutionary struggle there. Shan-fei, Communist was one of Smedley’s attempts to turn her knowledge of many Chinese women’s lives into fiction. In the style of the great Chinese writer of the 1930s, Lu Hsun, she narrates, using an understated, reportorial tone, the history of social forces shaping the consciousness of a revolutionary. The Enemy by Josephine Herbst, a traditional, Western, well-crafted story, represents one of a number of fictional accounts of Herbst’s own experience as a reporter for the New Masses on assignment in Cuba. It investigates the predicament of a middle-class journalist whose political sentiments are clearly aligned with the revolutionary movement in Cuba, but whose retrograde emotional ties to her estranged husband betray her political fervor. Emotional turmoil threatens to interfere with Mrs. Sidney’s ability to react to the events taking place in Havana; yet her political commitment helps her overcome her personal pain.

If Mrs. Sidney in The Enemy is ambivalent about her dual position as committed leftist and rejected wife, and thus appears to be the extreme opposite of Shan-fei, the narrator of Eleanor Clark’s Hurry, Hurry appears happily unaware of the impending social upheaval. Hurry, Hurry presents a parable of the decay of bourgeois culture in America. Through the eyes of its narrator, we see that the fall of middle-class culture destroys the wealth, but not the illusions, of the rich. Just as Elizabeth Thomas used the metaphor of the house in Our House to display the inequities of race relations in America, Clark presents the structure of capitalism as a house whose rafters, foundations, walls, and ceilings crumble slowly before the eyes of its owner. The festive atmosphere that develops as neighbors gather to watch the destruction hints at the myopia of the middle class, who, like Nero, will fiddle while Rome burns or, to use Josephine Herbst’s metaphor, will perish in the swamp because they cannot see themselves for what they are—parasites whose fortunes depend upon the crippled lives of the workers.¹⁰

The form of the parable was fairly uncommon among 1930s writers, who were often overtly moralistic about bourgeois insensitivity. But a satiric approach to bourgeois hypocrisy made an acceptable counterpoint to the heroic portraits of working-class lives called for by Gold. The excerpt from Ruth McKenney’s Industrial Valley juxtaposes the slow degradation of unemployment with the absurd folly of civic boosterism. Using the collage style pioneered by John Dos Passos in his classic proletarian trilogy, U.S.A., McKenney sets in motion a dialectic between the two classes within the environs of Akron by writing the story of a place rather than a character. Akron’s bourgeoisie manifest their quirky foibles through datelined news items, while the workers are allowed a deeper humanity through realist narrative technique. This disparity reveals the class, social, and sexual divisions that underpin the community and burst out of the official pronouncements of the bourgeois press and elsewhere. This work again points to the blurred distinctions between factual and fictional writing within literary radicalism. The book is catalogued as nonfiction because its presentation—the portraits and clippings—appears to be a document of the Rubber Workers’ Union sit-down strike of 1936 rather than a "true story of what happened to Akron, Ohio, from 1932–1936," as McKenney called the work.¹¹

Black women authors were rarely concerned with industrial unionism since, for the most part, neither black men nor black women constituted more than a small minority of these workers. Instead, black women’s stories deal with themes of racial prejudice, sexual inequality, and class differentials within the black community, and between blacks and whites. With the rise of pan-Africanism within the Marcus Garvey movement and the excitement generated by the Harlem renaissance during the 1920s, black nationalism had given a new sense of community to black artists. Traditional forms and themes from Afro-American literary history took on new meaning in the political context of the 1930s—for example, the theme of the tragic mulatto, prevalent in much Afro-American literature, now appears in a new dimension. In Deepening Dusk, she is brought back into the black community through her love of her mother and desire for her lover, both of whom are dark-complected, and the consequent rejection of her white father. Because black women were so precariously positioned within the Depression economy, their imperative desire was to maintain their families. This concern becomes central to many of the stories by black women authors that appeared in the journals Crisis and Opportunity, the two leading black journals of politics and culture. In The Woman in the Window, an ironic rewriting of Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel, Imitation of Life, a woman endures humiliation to keep her job, while teaching her children to fight for their self-respect. Another ironic treatment of the history of racial and class divisions appears in Our House. The issues of racial stratification, economic privation, sexual desire, and women’s relationships become intertwined in Lucille Boehm’s story Two-Bit Piece and in Marita Bonner’s The Whipping.

The writings by women involved with 1930s literary radicalism often elaborated the complex relationship they felt between gender and class by connecting the expressions of female sexuality to women’s political consciousness. The importance of sexuality to women’s literature had clearly emerged during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Within the context of modernist investigations of interiority, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen, among others, explored the relationship of gender to perception and expression. Authors more concerned with social issues, such as Charlotte Teller, a socialist writer, equated women’s sexual freedom with the end of bourgeois domination. While Walter Rideout—one of the few literary historians to recognize the importance of women’s contribution to the genre of the radical novel—argues that by the 1930s women writers were not as concerned with expressing sexual identity, the selections that follow indicate that for a woman to write red, she needed to focus her attention on sex and gender as well as on class and race.

Female sexuality, whether expressed as sexual relations, marital relations, maternity, love, or desire, marks many of the stories collected here. Because the family (or heterosexuality) came to stand for class relations in much fiction by women, the alienation women experienced from their sexual desire due to the sexual division of labor in the family often mirrored class relations within American society. Within the classic work of literary radicalism, the proletarian novel, some instance of extreme hardship at the work site—a mining disaster, an industrial accident, a plant closure—precedes the events leading to the strike. In the variations included here, the tensions that produce consciousness are often located within the spaces of the family or of heterosexuality. Thus, Shan-fei becomes a revolutionary leader in part as a reaction to her bondage under patriarchy. The narrator of Sequel to Love feels she is being denied the only source of power and pleasure by the relief agency that threatens to sterilize her. Vivvie’s deepening dusk, her growing consciousness of herself as a black woman, is precipitated by her sexual attraction to Tim. As she fantasizes about her estranged husband sleeping with his new lover, Mrs. Sidney’s pain gives way to her desire to avenge the death of a strike leader. But, as the enemy, women’s retrograde emotional ties to men can stymie their revolutionary zeal. Thus, sexuality and political consciousness are linked in confusing, often contradictory, ways within many of the stories.

Perhaps the most fascinating example of the connection between bourgeois class ideology and its sexual consequences for women occurs in Tess Slesinger’s The Mouse-Trap. Here, Miss Betty Carlisle, an executive secretary in a small advertising firm, trades class solidarity for sexual privilege, only to discover that the two—class and sex—cannot be easily separated for women workers. Slesinger investigates office politics through each character’s reaction to the strike. Sexual desire, economic need, and political ideology interact in a complicated way that simultaneously unites the workers yet divides them from each other and from the boss. Betty Carlisle fails to judge accurately her class position within the mouse-trap, the hierarchy of the office. Once she has succumbed to her boss’s sexual advances, she is abruptly returned to her place among the mice by his offer of payment. Because of the intimacy that characterizes the boss/secretary relationship and the setting of the small business office in which men and women are stratified into rigidly gender-defined jobs, this story presents a different plot pattern than the classic proletarian