Three radical women writers: Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst. A Marxist-feminist discussion

This dissertation presents the work of Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst not only in the context of their historical time--the radical movement of the 1930s--but also as they emerge in recent publication as writers worthy of consideration in contemporary times. The method, therefore, is not entirely historical. The thesis employs Marxist and contemporary feminist analyses to examine these texts. At the same time, as these are by all accounts the three most important women writers to emerge from the radical period of the thirties, the dissertation explores proletarian writing and these women's relationship to it.;The thesis is that all three were not necessarily oppositional to Communist Party policy in the period. If that policy favored an orientation to the working class, so did these three woman writers. What is uniquely feminine about the writing that binds all three of the women is the locale or the site of the writing. Frequently these writers seem to be substituting a gynecological continuum--family narrative--for the traditional documentary narrative of strike and upheaval. Nonetheless this writing was welcomed within the radical left because it was pro-radical and, in the main, pro-working-class. It continues to resonate in modern times because the peculiar combination of radicalism, working-class and radicalized middle-class politics and women's concerns seems relevant to current issues.