The History of Radical Women in the Cold War Era
Allison Schachter is a 2022-2023 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Mending and Transforming.”
I am currently working on the history of radical women in the Cold War era. My research focuses on Black and Jewish women intellectuals who were the subjects of censure as leftists, feminists, and Jewish and Black Americans. These women include Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, and Muriel Rukeyser. Their archives and their public work make visible to us a unique view of twentieth century politics, a field largely narrated through the lens of male intellectuals and political figures.
The 1950s and 1960s saw the new American vogue for the European intellectual figured largely in the guise of men: Jean Paul Sartre or Albert Camus, or Theodor Adorno. These male intellectuals set the tone for an American understanding of the horrors and brutality of World War II, the rise of fascism and authoritarianism that followed, and the promises and failures of decolonization.
Best remembered for her groundbreaking 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry, began her professional career much earlier in 1951 as a journalist for Paul Robeson’s Freedom—where she cut her teeth writing about political organizing at home and decolonization abroad.
Lorraine Hansberry serves as a powerful example of a woman whose work engaged with the central theoretical, aesthetic, and political concerns of the 1950s and 1960s. She was a radical political thinker who spoke out against political oppression at home and abroad, taking great risks at the height of McCarthyism. During her extraordinary career, cut short too early by pancreatic cancer, she produced a large body of essays, plays, and criticism.
Best remembered for her groundbreaking 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry, began her professional career much earlier in 1951 as a journalist for Paul Robeson’s Freedom—where she cut her teeth writing about political organizing at home and decolonization abroad. Imani Perry describes her as Robeson’s and DuBois’ political daughter. She was a freedom fighter, a visionary who imagined new forms of sexual liberation and political freedom quite different from the prevailing ideas of the period.
Hansberry’s work reflected on the very terms of post-war America. Her 1964 play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window follows the fate of Sidney Brustein, his wife Iris Parodus, and her two sisters, to explore the importance of political commitment at a moment when a generation of young people were in Hansberry’s words, turning to the Beats and embracing “the revolt of the merely revolted.”
Sign received mixed reviews at the time of its production. Some were skeptical that a Black woman could write a play about white characters: Richard Gillman, in Newsweek for example, characterizes her work as “borrowed bitchery” and describes how all the plot lines in the play serve merely as “containers for her venomous anger.” The play has also challenged contemporary critics, because of its focus on Sidney, a disaffected Jewish intellectual.
Hansberry, I argue, turns to Sidney to grapple with the legacy of Nazism and its relationship to Jim Crow America. At one point Hansberry had envisioned setting the play in Nazi Germany. In a 1962 speech at a New York rally to abolish the House Un-American Activities committee, she described a scene in which a German novelist explains to an American intellectual why German intellectuals did not speak out against Nazism: “They [the Nazis] permitted us to feel, in return for our silence, that we were non-participants; merely irrelevant if inwardly agonized observers who had nothing whatsoever to do with that which was being committed in our names.”
The example of Nazi Germany drove Hansberry to speak out politically, even as she understood the real risks she faced for her political speech; the state department had already seized her passport. In the speech she asked, where are the artists? She answers her rhetorical question explaining that the artists have retreated from the public sphere into their studios. Hansberry blames the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthyism for the silence and retreat of artists and intellectuals.
Nazism served as a terrifying example to Hansberry of the end point of racial politics. Nazism was not divorced from American racial politics, but rather inspired by American race policy. She turned to the artist as the hopeful figure of political redemption. Hansberry did not throw up her arms in despair, instead she advocated that men and women must fight tirelessly for their freedom, concluding her 1959 essay, “The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism,” on this hopeful note: “Surely then, as we turn our full attention to the hearts and minds of men, we shall see that if man can fly—he can also be free.”
Allison Schachter is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, English, and East European Studies at Vanderbilt. A scholar and translator who works on modern Jewish literature and culture, she is the author of Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century(Oxford UP, 2012) and Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939(Northwestern UP, 2022). Together with Jordan Finkin she translated, From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok (Northwestern UP, 2022).