Gendering the Cold War: Race, class and women's peace politics, 1945--1975

This study reconsiders previous assumptions about the political activism of leftist women in Cold War America using the post-World War II Progressive Party (PP) as its entry point. The work of Progressive women to join the international peace movement to the causes of civil rights and liberties, economic justice, and social welfare has been largely overlooked by political and social movement historians whose analysis of the successes and (mostly) failures of postwar progressivism has centered on the fate of formal organizations during the period of political repression known as McCarthyism. I argue that leftist women remained passionately committed to political activism during this period and that peace was the thread that connected their postwar agenda. Progressive women's decades-long efforts to keep that thread from unraveling---and with it the association between peace, feminism, and social justice---is the story told here. While prominent historians argue that U.S. Cold War domestic and foreign policy successfully obstructed leftist movements, which only began to recover in the 1960s, this dissertation illustrates that working in groups like the PP and in loosely organized networks after its demise, Progressive women were able to sustain a radical critique of both domestic and foreign policy in the nascent Cold War years, helping to shape postwar political culture.