In the Company of Radical Women Writers
In the Company of Radical Women Writers, by Rosemary Hennessy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023)
During a recent trip to a used bookstore, I purchased (for $3.00) a 1944 edition of The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell. Originally published in 1934, my vintage discovery includes the declaration, under the heading “Books in Wartime,” that it was printed on light paper so as to conserve resources for the war effort. Many visitors to this website are likely familiar with Farrell and his Studs Lonigan trilogy of novels from which the writer and broadcaster Louis “Studs” Terkel adopted his nickname. That Farrell’s literary creation found continued life in someone so beloved and prolific as Terkel should bring a smile to anyone’s face.
It was serendipitous that I wandered across The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, yet I wondered if I might ever experience a similar encounter with any of the writers Rosemary Hennessy examines In the Company of Radical Women Writers? To be sure, Meridel Le Sueur and Muriel Rukeyser are fairly well known, and Josephine Herbst is to a lesser extent. Then there are the four Harlem-based writers—Marvel Cooke, Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, and Alice Childress—whose writings are probably mostly known by specialists, but deserve a wider audience. In the Company of Radical Women Writers engages their works, ideas, and legacies in order to bring “neglected subjects into focus.” Indeed, as women on the Left during the Great Depression, their marginal positions led them to write about issues and topics that even ruffled feathers among their fellow travelers and comrades in the Popular Front, particularly the Communist Party USA.
A common thread among these writers, Hennessy tells us, is how “labor, land, and love” inform their perspectives. They addressed topics that were profoundly personal and political, and so Hennessy writes with the same vigor and candor. As she explains, “In tracking down the women writers of the radical 1930s, I only gradually realized that I was looking not only for a lost generation in the history of feminism but also an absence in my own family.” Hennessy acknowledges the impact of 2020 on this study; certainly, between a deadly pandemic, the horrific killing of George Floyd, and the specter of authoritarianism, “life making”—what she refers to as the nurturing, care, and obligations that make life possible—became all the more urgent and precarious for women the world over.
This book features seven chapters divided into three sections in addition to an introduction. The first two chapters discuss the biographies and works of Cooke, Patterson, Jones, and Childress. These women, Hennessy argues, were “public intellectuals, theorists, and warriors.” In 1935, Cooke and Ella Baker (although not the subject of this book, Baker truly lived an extraordinary life) collaborated on a story published in the NAACP journal, The Crisis, about a corner where Harlem women stood in the hopes of getting hired to cook and clean for white households. Their story, the “Bronx Slave Market,” invokes slave-era hierarchies and investigates the workplace (white middle-class homes) as spaces where Depression-era master-servant relationships created and reinforced white supremacy.
One of the most fascinating sections is Hennessy’s analysis of Josephine Herbst and her biography of the eighteenth-century botanist and farmer John Bartram, New Green World, which was published in 1954. This chapter, “Unsettling the Grass Roots,” offers readers multiple layers by peering into Bartram’s life while also offering a close read of Herbst’s presentation of it. In spite of McCarthyism’s narrowing chill in the 1950s, or perhaps because of it, Herbst found in her subject a “counter-narrative” that defied “market logics and a prevailing conception of white masculine control.” As Hennessy observes in the chapter on Meridel Le Sueur, it was, in fact, quite radical to write about ecological topics during this period since roots and seeds are grounded in soil not unlike the political-economic, racial, and gender structures that shape everyday life.
The word “Company” in the title of this book invites multiple interpretations. Hennessy brings together seven writers whose radicalism and literary pursuits distinguish them from their peers and the then-prevailing expectations of women. As readers, moreover, we are in company with these writers and with Hennessy. The themes of “labor, land, and love” are hardly bound by artificial boundaries of time; they are permanent features of human life, and In the Company of Radical Women Writers offers a good introduction to writers who asked difficult questions. This is a challenging read at times, however, and readers would do well to use it as a companion to the texts that Hennessy examines. That is how their legacies will endure.
Reviewed by John Lepley, a labor educator in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.