| This dissertation explores the ways in which a critical feminist analysis of the role of American Communist women intervenes in the construction of national and international Communist histories and theories from the 1920s through the 1940s. Although women's transnational political communities were forged through the medium of both formal organizations as well as informal textual traditions, recognition of radical women's resistance to nationalist discourse is quite absent from the socialist-feminist literature and Communist historiography of the last three decades. The realization of such an absence and a conviction that a transnational lineage of radical women's thought contributes significantly to a vision that can include alternative standpoints in our understanding of knowledge, constituted the initial impetus for this dissertation. This work explores and establishes the similarities between women's political communities and women's practical involvements that are based upon a common challenge of the numerous traditional boundaries within histories of Communism, including that of nation and nation-state, which hindered women's organizing efforts. To the extent that such a feminist critical analysis places the subject of social change at the center of debates and recognizes multiple relations of domination, this dissertation explores Communist women's intervention in Marxist orthodoxy and its rejection of a gendered analysis of women's specific role in revolution, the foundation of many Communist women's work. |
