This critical, historical, and theoretical study looks at a
little-known group of novels written during the 1930s by women who
were literary radicals. Arguing that class consciousness was
figured through metaphors of gender, Paula Rabinowitz challenges
the conventional wisdom that feminism as a discourse disappeared
during the decade. She focuses on the ways in which sexuality and
maternity reconstruct the "classic" proletarian novel to speak
about both the working-class woman and the radical female
intellectual.
Two well-known novels bracket this study: Agnes Smedley's
"Daughters of Earth" (1929) and Mary McCarthy's "The Company She
Keeps" (1942). In all, Rabinowitz surveys more than forty novels of
the period, many largely forgotten. Discussing these novels in the
contexts of literary radicalism and of women's literary tradition,
she reads them as both cultural history and cultural theory.
Through a consideration of the novels as a genre, Rabinowitz is
able to theorize about the interrelationship of class and gender in
American culture.
Rabinowitz shows that these novels, generally dismissed as marginal
by scholars of the literary and political cultures of the 1930s,
are in fact integral to the study of American fiction produced
during the decade. Relying on recent feminist scholarship, she
reformulates the history of literary radicalism to demonstrate the
significance of these women writers and to provide a deeper
understanding of their work for twentieth-century American cultural
studies in general.
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