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Book Review: Gendering Radicalism: Women and Communism in Twentieth-Century California

In Gendering Radicalism, Beth Slutsky produces an important portrait of radical political organizing in twentieth-century America through the stories of three women who served in successive leadership positions for the Communist party in California from 1919 through 1992: Charlotte Anita Whitney, Dorothy Ray Healey, and Kendra Claire Harris Alexander. Working and organizing within different but overlapping epochs of radical reform movements in America -- the Bolshevik Revolution (Witney), the U.S. labor movement (Healey), and the Cold War and Civil Rights Movement (Alexander) -- their stories reflect the morphology of the Communist Party as it wrestled with defining debates over race, gender, and class in America. To that end, this book also reflects the unique contributions of each of these women to the Party, and the inevitable tensions around the position of women in the Party. Finally, this book explores the role of California in centering and shaping the character of politics in America. For its tolerance toward more radical political philosophies, California then and now stirred the winds to pull American politics leftward. In this regard, this story of three women in California is not one that unfolds in isolation to other lives involved in and touched by the Communist Party across America. Whitney, Healey, and Alexander's political visions, while mediated in the American West, were ultimately informed by and expressed a shared American experience of economic disenfranchisement, racism, and sexism.

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