Better Red

Better Red is an interdisciplinary study addressing the complicated intersection of American feminism and the political left as refracted in Tillie Olsen's and Meridel Le Sueur's lives and literary texts. The first book-length study to explore these feminist writers' ties to the American Communist Party, it contributes to a reenvisioning of 1930s U.S. Communism as well as to efforts to promote working-class writing as a legitimate category of literary analysis. At once loyal members of the male-dominated Communist party and emerging feminists, Olsen and Le Sueur exhibit in their writing tendencies both toward and away from Party tenets and attitudes--at points subverting formalist as well as orthodox Marxist literary categories. By producing working-class discourse, Olsen and Le Sueur challenge the bourgeois assumptions--often masked as classless and universal--of much canonical literature; and by creating working-class women's writing, they problematize the patriarchal nature of the Left and the masculinist assumptions of much proletarian literature, anticipating the concerns of "second wave" feminists a generation later

Aesthetics · Art · Bourgeoisie · Communism · Feminism · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Proletariat · Sociology · Working class · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society · 20th century · American Authors · American literature · American Women authors · American Working class writings · Authors, american · biography · Communism and literature · Feminism and literature · History · History and criticism · Intellectual life · Le Sueur, Meridel · Meridel Le Sueur · Olsen, Tillie · Political and social views · Tillie Olsen · united states · Women · Women and literature · Women authors · Women authors, American · Women communists · Working class authors · Working class in literature · Working class writings, American

• “A breast for all … and milk for all”

  Open Access•KATHERINE ROGERS-CARPENTER•Rethinking Marxism•2009

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• The Representation of Class in the Realist Novel

  Open Access•Julian Markels•Rethinking Marxism•1999

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• Blanche Evan's Film Studies of the Dance

  Open Access•Andrea Harris•Dance Research Journal•2022

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• Coming to “Clearness”

  JENN WILLIAMSON•Women s Studies•2009

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• Rethinking Working-Class Literature

  Sonali Perera•differences•2008

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