Cold War Progressives   Jacqueline Castledine   ©                                                     Contents  i                                          Photographs fo llow page 66 Acknowledgments I   Cold Wa r Progressives                                                                    I            I                                                                     I                                                                                                                                .                                                               I            I                                                  I          ix                                Abbreations                                                                          ABB AT 0 NS                                                      INTRODUCTION Peace, Freedom, and Abundance                                                                                                                           [...]... account of women's organizing Still, much of this history contin­ ues to be shaped by three tropes about women's postwar "containment." The first assumes that the postwar years fell within a long, fallow period that disrupted generations of women's activism, the secand that an ticommunism of the early Cold War years curtailed nearly all leftist political dissent, and the last that women's interracial organizing. .. as 1946 , and scholars the organization's dissolution in 1950 "efof the McCarthy era that forced tion between feminism, social reform fectively dissolved the conscious connec 10 America This claim is contradicted by the and peace protest" in postwar and thousands of their allies Their ongoing work of the women noted above and social justice, including women's equality, in the organizing for peace repression... to c onceal the extent of women's postwar organizing Recently, such scholars as Kate Weigand, D aniel Horowitz, Dayo Gore, and Erik McDuffie have challenged the idea that progressive women abandoned their activism in the postwar years 7 Examining women in the Communist Party (CP) and its orbit, they reveal that for some, the CP provided yet another road to feminism Cold War Progressives builds on this... become known as "Cold War" liberals and progressives became increasingly clear in the late 1940s and early 1950s, many used terms such as leftist liberal and interchangeably In time the distinctions became more entrenched By 1990 Paul Buhle described postwar progressives as "those left-of-center and vigorously opposed to the agenda of Cold War liberalism," a definition well suited for the women of... from the threat of nuclear annihilation and the neglect of social welfare posed by Cold War saber rattling Wallace's claim that "too much of the American housewife's dollar is buying guns," and the argument that peace with the Soviets was possible without appeasement and without abandoning the hope of expanding the New Deal, appealed to war- weary leftists Early Cold War history, however, 5 suggests the... social injustice) and international state-sanctioned violence (or war) was best explained by Eslanda Robeson, author, activist, and wife of entertainer Paul Robeson, who wrote that Cold War U.S policy resulted in "a white supremacy civil war at home" and "an American superiority world war" abroad " In Prog ressive thinking, Jim Crow and European colonization, institutional racism and international... consciousness regarding leftist women's movements is understandable, considering that the broad agenda of postwar women's peace organizing, especially its relation to feminist movements, does not fit neatly into paradigms that currently dominate U.S women's history Indeed, the master narrative of U.S history when it recognizes it at all too often reduces the scope of leftist women's Cold War- era activism by contain­... of PP cofounder and benefactor Jesse Lloyd O'Connor, had helped found the Women's Inter­ national League tor Peace and F reedom (WILPF) in 1 9 1 9 WILPF shared with the pp and later groups like Women Strike for Peace (WSP) a belief not only in peace, but also in maternalist rhetoric Among Progressive women, maternal rhetoric was deployed to support a range of progressive causes, and peace was defined... movements of the New Left and, whether later activists recognized it or not, provided a model for them Their decades-long effort to keep the thread binding social and political causes from unraveling, and with it the association between peace, femini sm, an d racial equality, is critical to understanding modem U.S history Chapter 1 Gender, Politics, and the Emerging Cold War Until recently "nice"... convention in Philadelphia to write a blueprint for postwar America The del­ egates had already chosen their presidential contender; the party was formed to run Henry Wallace as a "peace candidate." In Philadelphia they turned their attention to introducing voters to the party's strain of leftist peace politics The resulting platform, "Peace, Freedom, and Abundance," vowed to return America to "the .       Progressives and Cold War Liberalism      .        INTRODUCTION Peace, Freedom, and Abundance       . Cold War Progressives   Jacqueline Castledine