Rannie McDuffie

In this book, McDuffie uses a historical methodology, tracing black women’s journeys through the Communist Left movement and how that led them to construct radical black feminist politics, which is the groundwork for black feminism of the 1970s. In order to carry this out, McDuffie uses a variety of different sources of materials: Archival records, personal records from the women featured in the book and their Communist writings, records from various Communist organizations, FBI surveillance files, newspapers and interviews conducted both by the author and interviews conducted by others. The interviews were carried out with the women themselves as well as their spouses, children and associates , to create oral histories of the movement, the women involved and the time period.

I found this to be an interesting way of constructing the narrative, almost like reading a novel on the subject. This is quite different from what I’ve seen previously in academic writing. Perhaps this is the result of using several different sources of materials (like the archival records and interviews), which allows the author to come to such conclusions. For example, when discussing Thompson and Edward’s trip to the Soviet Union, McDuffie explains not just their behaviors, but also their thoughts: “The Soviet Union helped these women come to think critically about gender, race and class in a global context. They also wrestled with Soviet contradictions.” (p. 63). I am somewhat torn in what I think of this. McDuffie does not tell us how he knows what these women were thinking (did it come from interviews with themselves or others in the movement? Or is McDuffie drawing these conclusions from texts and speeches that these women wrote?). This is just one example, but it is indicative of how McDuffie tells the story of these Black Communist Feminists. The academic texts I have read are usually quite careful in citing their sources and information is presented on its own, with the analysis of the writer. At the same time, McDuffie’s text flows very well and is a comfortable read. The narrative is quite easy to follow and I found most of it quite convincing. I do know that I would not get away with academic writing like this, which perhaps just reflects how social science oriented my discipline is. That being said, I believe that this book could be of interest to people outside of the academy, not just for its subject matter, but also because the topic is made quite accessible with the writing. Perhaps this is one of the trade-offs of writing in the academy, you can either be very specific in citing sources and careful in analyzing and drawing conclusions, and then you run the risk of writing dry and difficult prose. On the other hand, being less clear about where you got your information and how you are interpreting it for the sake of constructing a clear narrative, can serve to make the book more accessible to people outside of the academy, which is probably good thing.

I also appreciated the tracing of intersectionality so far back in history, for example seen in the opening quote: “Over the whole land, Negro women meet this triple exploitation- as workers, as women, as Negroes.” (Louise Thompson, “Toward a brighter dawn”). Later in the introduction, McDuffie explains that the idea of triple oppression was the key historically significant part of the Black left feminists. Overlooking race and gender within worker’s movements is further victimization of Black women because it does not address their experiences or things that may be important to them. Also, one system of oppression cannot be dismantled without other oppressive systems also falling apart.

Intersectional methodologies can also be very important in work on violence against women, because survivors tend to be such a heterogeneous group. This is why flexibility is very necessary in the community response to domestic violence, for example, because women will have very diverse needs. For example, some women may need help with housing, while others face serious psychological issues that they may need counseling to help with. I think that an important part of intersectionality is not just that people live at the intersections of different demographic categories, but also that salience of certain identities is different for them (and may also change over time). In this way, race only becomes important when women view it as an important category of difference that has impacted their lives.

Like McDuffie discusses, the women of the Black Communist party generally did not examine things with a sexual orientation lens, nor see domestic violence as part of their cause. Today, feminists generally argue that domestic violence is an incredibly important part of women’s oppression by men. This can be seen in a literal way on women’s bodies, and with silencing of the issue in families and communities, but also as a more general form of oppressing women and showing that men have power over them.

Finally, I found it interesting that many of the women in the book refused to identify as feminists, even though McDuffie labels them as such. The women did not identify as feminists because they associated the term with the National Women’s Party, which they saw as bourgeois and separatist. That organization also became more conservative, racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Communist with time. I agree with McDuffie that the beliefs of the women in the book are in line with much of modern feminist thought and if they hadn’t perceived the National Women’s Party so negatively, they have used the term for themselves. It is also possible that the term feminism was too associated with White women, and with race being such a central construct of this struggle, that black women wanted to distance themselves from white women’s movements.  However, labeling people as something that they actively resisted made me a little hesitant, because we have so often emphasized listening to people’s voices and allowing them to self-identify in whatever ways they want.