A Short Review of The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism

     The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism is the fourth book in a recent series published by the feminist science fiction publishers, Aqueduct Press. The series reprints forgotten authors and out of print works by significant writers within the genre. So far, the selections made by the publishers have been fairly interesting, and this edition isn't an exception.  Judith Merril's contributions to the genre of science fiction both as an author and as a critic has received some recognition in the past decade, but her critical work has remained out of print until this publication.  Rather than being contained in a single collection, that work is spread over a series of small publications, anthologies, and other ephemera produced by the subculture of science fiction. The book rectifies this situation and is a collection of Judith Merril's reviews, introductions to anthologies, commentaries on the genre, and investigations in the work of individual authors.  The book cannot cover all of the material produced by Merril in the 1950's and 1960's, but Aqueduct offers an ebook version of the text, along with the paper copy of the text, that completes the collection.

     The material is fascinating if you already have an interest in the work of Merril, the history of the genre during the time period, or the early history of science fiction criticism.  The book provides a good sense of her approach to the genre, and provides some fairly interesting critical readings of work within the genre, for instance her reading of Dune. There is also a lot of interesting, if fragmented, commentary on the business side of the genre, discussing its commercial prospects, and the shifting nature of the science fiction publishing business. The two longer commentaries on the genre of science fiction are probably the most in depth engagements with the structures of the genre, but one gets a pretty good sense of her views in the columns, reviews, and anthology introductions. Just as significantly, the collection of articles is an excellent companion to the work of Damon Knight, James Blish, and the more recently republished reviews and essays of Joanna Russ in its contribution to understanding the early attempts of genre criticism, which was focused on a efforts to improve the genre, rather than attempting understand its basic structures.

     However, that material tends to make the book fairly esoteric reading. The critical material, while interesting, largely engages with a series of texts that have been largely forgotten by all but a small group of fans of the genre.  The material from the anthologies is interesting, but makes more sense within the context of the anthologies, which are fairly easy to find used copies, rather inexpensively. None of these issues should be of much concern if you are interested in Merril or the history of the genre, because the book provides a fun look at that history, and I recommend picking it up.  The materials add up to produce an interesting an unique perspective on the genre, produced by someone at the center of its artistic production, combining aesthetic and business concerns.  On the other hand, if you're looking to the collection to get an introduction to the work of Merril, I wouldn't recommend this book. Instead, I would recommend starting with a collection of her short stories or her novel, Shadow on the Hearth. 

oddball notes on a Tuesday

       I find myself with a small amount of time on my hands to put something brief up on the blog.  I've been extraordinarily busy with orientations and bargaining work.  Both tend to translate into a lot of small and often repetitive tasks with no real end in sight.  It's important work that is on occasion interesting, but it tends to seep into all pores of your daily life, producing a seamless flow of union work.  Fortunately, we have some collective support networks in place on our campus to deal with such work, or the entire process would be overwhelming.  

       However, rather than union work, I'd like to turn briefly to science fiction.  The most notable occurrence from my perspective is the death of Frederick Pohl, the former member of the Futurians, who had a long career as an author, editor, and agent within the field of science fiction.  Pohl produced the significant critical works, The Space Merchants and Search the Sky with C.M. Kornbluth.  He also helped get a lot of folks into print through his work as an editor and as an agent.  The latter work produced some controversy as Pohl was not always able to get folks the money that they were expecting within that role, a failing I suspect that arose from his amateur status, rather than any systemic dishonesty.  His divorce from fellow Futurian, Judith Merril was also problematic, involving some fairly emotionally abusive behavior on his part, despite the fact the two eventually reconciled and became friends, again. (Pohl, in fact, provided the text for phonograph recording of two Merril stories that I own on lp).  Despite those issues, Pohl represented one of the last of the early generation of science fiction writers, outliving the rest of the Futurian collective, and more public figures such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke.  He was writing a blog that I have linked to up until the time of his death that provided his own recollections of his fellow Futurians and other figures within the genre.  It's really worth the read if you're interested in the history.  I'm in the process of reading his memoir, which I will write about in the next few days.

      As a last note in this conversation, it has struck me over the past few months that the field of science fiction criticism has been deeply harmed by the fact that Darko Suvin's important interventions, Metamorphoses in Science Fiction, and his work on Victorian Science Fiction, are not in print.  The former regularly goes for over fifty dollars online, and I have seen the latter for over six hundred dollars online.  This lack of accessibility translates into a lot of contemporary work only engaging in Suvin's work from a second hand perspective, which often translates into shallow and often tendentious readings of his critical framework.  This became most apparent in the surface reading that Peter Paik provided of the text, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe, a reading that lacked the focus and thoughtfulness that Paik brought to his other subject material.  I don't think Suvin's work is flawless, but he provides a substantial engagement with the mutating formal quality of the genre, linking it with the rise of the capitalist world system along with the myriad of resistances that respond the creation of that system and deeply shape its trajectory.  It's difficult to think of an equivalent text in another field being similarly inaccessible.  At some point, Yale needs to reprint those volumes, or let someone else reprint them.

“Daughters of Earth” and the Contingency of Futurity, a sort of conclusion

Merril’s later work gestured towards this possibility, although it never embodied it, fully.  Perhaps, the most notable example of this exploration occurs in the more expansive novella, “Daughters of Earth.”  Merril wrote the novella about two years after Shadow on the Hearth.  The novella shows a similar concern with the everyday life of domesticity, and women’s experiences within that sphere, but the narrative spans several generations, and moves from the confines of the household to the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond.  The domestic narrative leaves the confines of the household and becomes mobile, transforming through the progressive dialectic logic of space travel.  The narrative shifts out of the confined critique of Shadow on the Hearth, and its refusal to imagine an alternative to the conventional post war nuclear family, to the possibility of the breakup of that formation.  The narrative shifts from the conventional structures of the melodrama to a far more experimental form.  As Lisa Yaszek notes,

“”Daughters of the Earth” takes the form of a family history compiled and related primarily by Emma for Carla, as the latter prepares to lead humanity’s first subspace voyage.  Although Merril grants Emma a certain narrative authority, she balances her protagonist’s account of events with journal excerpts, newspaper clippings, and oral stories from Martha, Joan, Ariadne, and Leah.  Like other feminist authors ranging from Virginia Woolf in the 1920s and 1930s to Joanna Russ in the 1970s and 1980s, Merril refuses to subsume the experiences of women into a single voice but rather insists on the multiplicity of women’s subjective experiences.” (Yaszek 37)

As Yaszek notes, the narrative holds onto the former commitment to exploring the space of the private, rather than the public, but it does this without fully engaging with the conventions of the domestic melodrama.  Instead, the narrative is constructed through a fictionalized account of ‘journal excerpts, newspaper clippings, and oral stories,’ producing a narrative that is far more discontinuous, fragmented, and scattered than the more conventional domestic melodrama, although Yaszek’s comparison to the work of Woolf misses out on the work’s remaining commitment to aspects of domestic conventionality.  However, Yaszek is correct to emphasize the formal shift in Merril’s work, which is used to mark the shifts in the structures of domesticity and reproduction in the society.  More notably, the narrative deliberately marks this shift in narrative style early on with Ariadne’s early self-reflexive assessment of the narrative.

“Frankly, I hesitated for some time before I decided it was proper to include such bits in what is primarily intended to be an informational account. But information is not to be confused with statistics, and when I found myself uncertain, later, whether it was all right to include these explanatory asides, done my own way, with whatever idiosyncratic eccentricities or godlike presumptions of comprehension might be involved.” (Merril 58)

We are quickly told that we are not going to read a conventional story.  Instead, the narrator asserts her right to tell the story, “my own way, with whatever idiosyncratic eccentricities or godlike presumptions of comprehension might be involved.”  The narrative is marked as one that refuses conventionality, which is compared to statistics.  At the same time, it holds onto a claim of operating primarily as ‘an information account,’ keeping to a traditional science fictional claim to critical cognition.  The ‘hesitation’ of the narrative deliberately brings attention to itself as a non-normative structure, one that transgresses the norms of the genre.  As previously noted, the passage places the categories of ‘statistics’ and science fictional narrative conventions on one side, while placing both of them in opposition to ‘an informational account.’ 

At a more basic level, it also follows the structure offered by Shklovsky in his analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.  Shklovsky focuses on the role Watson plays in the narrative, both as narrator and naïve witness, providing a series of incorrect analyses of the clues along the way.  Shklovsky notes, “In this way, Watson serves to retard the action while at the same time directing the flow of events into separate channels.”  (Shklovsky 104)  Watson becomes a device to create tension and structure in the narrative, constructing an opposition between the common sense of Watson and the bohemian temperament of Holmes.  Merril’s narrative similarly attempts to produce rhythmic tension between domestic conventionalities, and the desire to settle, and the desire to explore, discover, and colonize.   The collage of fictionalized source documents attempts to reproduce this logic, through the generational tensions of the mothers and daughters in the story.  We might think of the narrative in the terms laid about by Georg Lukacs in The Historical Novel, except in a condensed form.  The shifting conventions of domestic life and the negotiations of the various protagonists become the way to measure the societal shifts described in the narrative.  The story makes the explicit through the comments of the primary narrator.

“But however we learn to juggle our bodies through space or time; we live our lives on a subjective time scale.  Thus, though I was born in 2026, and the Newhope landed on Uller in 2091, I was then, roughly, 27 years old—including two subjective years, overall, for the trip.

And although the sixty-one years I have lived here would be counted as closer to sixty-seven on Earth, or on Pluto, I think that the body—and I know that the mind—pays more attention to the rhythm of planetary seasons, the alterations of heat and cold and radiation intensities, than to the ticking of some cosmic metronome counting off whatever Absolute Time might be.” (Merril 59)

Change is mapped on to the body in its experiences ‘on a subjective time scale.’  One has to understand that basic fact to engage with the shifts of historical time, which cannot be understood as ‘the ticking of some cosmic metronome counting off whatever Absolute Time might be.’ Absolute time then stands in for empty homogenous time, which is supplanted by the time of revolution in its most literal sense.  The subjective time of the body is produced through the revolution of planets around the sun, ‘the rhythm of planetary seasons, and the alteration of heat and cold and radiation intensities.’  Rather than gesturing towards some form of geographical anthropology, the subjective experience of the body is defined by the dialectic of environment and the social structures designed to survive it.  The naturalized structures of days and years become contingent within the context of space travel.  At the same time, the narrative continually emphasizes the third part of the dialectic in rhythms of planetary seasons and planetary travel, which is most directly captured in the way that social reproduction is made analogous to the experiences defined by the revolution of planets.

“We still progress through adolescence and education (which once ended at 14, then 18, 21, 25…) to youth, marriage, procreation, maturity, middle age, senescence and death.  And in a similar way, I think, there are certain rhythms of human history which recur in (widening, perhaps enriched, but increasingly discernible) moderately predictable patterns of motion and emotion both.

A recognition of this sort of rhythm is implicit, I think, in the joke that would not go away, which finally made the official name of the—ship?—in which you will depart The Ark (for Archaic?).  In any case, this story is, on its most basic levels, an exposition of such rhythms.  Among them is the curious business of the generation, and their alterations: at least it was that thought (or rationale) that finally permitted me to indulge myself with my dramatic opening. (Merril 59-60) 

The conventions of social reproduction and the revolution of the planets are linked through the common concept of ‘rhythm.’  The ‘rhythms’ of human history are linked to the cyclical rhythms of the developmental phases of human life, ‘to youth, marriage, procreation, maturity, middle age, senescence and death,’ and therefore implicitly linked to the seasons.  The cyclicality of the rhythm is put in tension with the progressive narrative of expansion.  These contradictory concepts are held together by the dialectical form of ‘the curious business of the generation, and their alterations.’  The story claims to explicate the slow and evolutionary expansion of this structure, which evidently allows for its own explication.  It not only makes the claim that the narrative will provide a description of profound transformations in everyday life due to space travel, but the meaning contained in the continuing patterns that are revealed by those transformations.  Within this context, the passage both recognizes and disavows the religious dimension of revelation through its reference to the Ark, while refusing to acknowledge the biblical reference, dismissing it as a shorthand term for the archaic.  If we take the disavowed metaphor of the Ark seriously, spaceflight becomes a secularized version of that narrative, gesturing towards a new social compact.  The flood is replaced by the vacuum of space and each new planet points to the creation of a new social symbolic.  In effect, God’s promise not to flood the Earth is replaced by a rewriting of the norms of the family.  This process is limited to a kind of non-patriarchal serial monogamy, but it has moved resolutely outside of the stalled dialectic of Shadow on the Hearth.

  To understand this process, it is crucial to examine the change in family norms produced in the story briefly.  The novella opens within the same temporal framework of Shadow on the Hearth, slightly in the future of the book’s publication.  It opens from the perspective of a mother who is involved in the first space colonization plan.  The novel opens moments before the launching of that flight.  The essay works within the same basic narrative of complaint contained in Merril’s earlier work, dependent on the normative complaints of the nuclear family. The mother of the family, Martha, is essentially forced into the colonization to the Moon by her husband, George, within the context of his sense of mild patriarchal authority.  Martha’s interior monologue develops this sense of complaint, through her sense of disconnection from the conventions of the journey, both from the official nationalist narrative and the conventional expectations put on her as a mother.  The interiority of Martha became the small voice of protest against these narratives, a disruption to the hegemonic force of cold war space race.

However, this stalled dialectic of complaint radically shifts with each succeeding space journey.  Although the narrative oscillates between domestic conventionality and exploration, each succeeding generation of women lives a profoundly different type of life that the one before, destabilizing the naturalization of any particular form of domestic arrangement.  Those shifts are captured in the description of the colonization of the planet Uller, generations after the initial story of Martha. 

“By the time, too, there were some unattached men.  A good many of those early marriages broke up in the first year.  In spite of the growing emphasis on typically frontier-puritan monogamous family patterns, divorce was, of necessity, kept easy: simply a matter of mutual decision, and registration.  For that matter, the morality in the early years was more than of the huddled commune than of the pioneer farmland.

Emma saw a lot of men that winter.  Lee was a convenient age—old enough not to need hovering attention, young enough still to be asleep a large part of the time.  Emma was a romantic figure, too, by virtue of her widowhood; her long grief established her as a better marriage risk than those who had made an error the first time, and had had to admit it.  The dawning recognition of these facts provided her at first with amusement, and later with a certain degree of satisfaction.  She had been an intellectual adolescent, after all.  Now, for the first time, she found out what it was like to be a popular girl.  She discovered a new kind of pleasure in human relationships: the casual contact.

She found out that friends could be loved without being the beloved; that men could be friends without intensity; that affection came in varying degrees, and that she could have many different kinds of affection from many different people….” (Merril 97-98)

Despite the hardships of the early years of settlement, the colony is distinguished from its Midwestern antecedents.  Rather than producing ‘typically frontier-puritan monogamous family patterns, divorce was, of necessity, kept easy: simply a matter of mutual decision, and registration.’  The colony, while still implicitly operating within a hetero-normative logic, shifted towards a far more informal social contract of marriage.  This shift in the practices of marriage is presented in moral terms, as a part of the ‘enriching’ of the rhythms of history.  The shift from the general history of the colony to the particular history of Emma reinforces this shift in the normative expectations of marriage.  Emma is presented as taking on multiple lovers, and remains the moral center of the narrative.  Her actions allow her to feel empowered as an individual, but they also let her recognize the multiplicity of emotional and romantic relationships that are possible.  The passage is not entirely outside what might be considered a set of conventional narrative structure, as Emma becomes ‘a popular girl.’  At the same time, it refuses the sentimental logic of complaint that Berlant sees at the heart of melodramatic convention.  Through the multiplicity of possible relationships, the narrative moves towards an abandonment of the idealization of any particular relationship along with the need compensate for the inevitable failure that is tied to that idealization.  The passage gestures towards a pluralistic approach to family structure, while never fully explicating that multiplicity.  That gap points to a recognition of the contingency of any family structure, but it also cannot concretely imagine what that might look like.

At the same time, the inventiveness of the narrative, its attempt to create a fictionalized memory of the experience of women, as well as the imagined history of social reproduction continues to reproduce the private/public binary that defined the far more claustrophobic narrative of Shadow on the Hearth.  The exclusionary nature is most directly evident in the description of the conflict between the native Ullerns and the colonists.  The narrative refuses an easy narrative of either presenting the indigenous population as monstrous or radically innocent.  Instead, the understanding of the conflict and resolution is presented through the loss of Emma’s husband, and her attempts to understand that death.  She eventually realizes that the death was an accident due to a lack of knowledge on both sides of the conflict.  At the same time, this somewhat sentimental journey excludes a thorough political examination of the social and political arrangements that defined the situation.  We are offered very little detail on how the colonists divided into two opposing camps, or how the sympathetic camp of colonists was able to negotiate a peace.  Finally, we don’t know what that peace meant to those camps.  Instead, we are offered a brief comment, putting those questions to the side.

“Thad Levine wrote the story of the bitter three years’ quarrel in the colony, and wrote it far better than I could.  You have heard from me, and probably from a dozen others, too, the woe-filled history of the establishment of Josetown.  Jo himself wrote a painstaking account of the tortuous methodology by which the Ullern code was worked out, and I know you have read that, too.

(I am sternly repressing the inclination to excuse my many omissions pointing to the date above, and referring to the page number.  Time is short now, and the story too long.  But neither of these is an honest reason for my failure to do what I planned—no more than are my excuses in the paragraph immediately above.) (Merril 107-108)

Through this clever passage, any attempt to link the economy of social reproduction of the household and the larger questions of political economy are effectively elided.  It ducks this question by claiming a lack of competency, placing the political narrative into the hands of Thad Levine.  While the novella form perhaps made the inclusion of long didactic passages on economics, sociology, and political conflict impossible, the occlusion of this material draws on a set of patriarchal conventional assumptions.  Despite the text’s attempt to re-imagine social reproduction outside the regulatory norms of domesticity, those norms continue to have a profound hold on the imagination of the text.  Just as significantly, the refusal to place the political questions of the impact of colonization within the text neutralizes the potential anti-colonial critique of the text, leaving the ethical question of the engagement with the other intact, but erasing the questions of power and racialization central to that question.  In effect, the occlusions of the text are perhaps as significant to the construction of the genre as its engagements.  The end of the narrative seems to gesture towards this possibility, as the process of human expansion into the unknown continues with another couple leaving to found another colony.

Merril’s work begins to challenge the conventions of the domestic melodrama, by showing the limitations of the isolated nuclear family in Shadow on the Hearth, and by connecting transformations of the domesticity and marriage in “Daughters of Earth.”  However, neither narrative entirely escapes the regulatory structures of the generic structures that the narrative attempt to subvert.  Rather than acting within the role of prophet, the role Merril prescribes to the science fiction author, Merril offers critical and symptomatic engagement of her present, a present that is powerfully defined by the mutually implicated ideological formations of the cold war, McCarthyism, and the Feminine Mystique.  That engagement allows for an initial critical engagement with those intertwined formations, exposing the structures of domination and coercion contained with them, and gesturing towards the possibility of an alternative form of domesticity in the future.  However, it will take the later work of Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, and Samuel Delany to move questions of social reproduction from the space of the privacy of the household into the political space of the public sphere through a renewed engagement with the utopian form. 

scattered thoughts

        Since I am between large formal writing projects, I thought I should make a greater effort to write for the blog.  I'm currently taking a few days to access the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, which resides in the special collections of the University of California-Riverside library, in order to read through the lengthy debates between Samuel Delany, Ursula Leguin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr. and others that occurred in the third and fourth issues of the Khatru fanzine.  I've only just started this process today, and have only read a later issue that catalogs a series of fan responses to the debate, responses that have ranged from the thoughtful to the esoteric.  It's a nice reminder that one can find genuinely interesting intellectual debate outside the academy, in a language that a lot of the inhabitants of that institution would probably not deal with very well.  Don't worry, I'll put up some of my initial thoughts as I start to read the actual conversations between the authors, which sound like they're fairly contentious, if the rather large secondary literature on the debates is true. 

       Asides from that, I'm trying to use my week of spring break to get myself prepared for the rather large amount of work that I am going to have to take on for the spring quarter.  I have to finally complete my chapter on the implicit debate between Ursula Leguin and Samuel Delany that can be found in their respective novels, The Dispossessed and Trouble on Triton.  Additionally, I need to edit my chapter on Judith Merril, along with my chapters on Joanna Russ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  This is going to be a lot of work, but I know that those earlier chapters are not in as bad shape as the initial draft of the Gilman chapter that I took care of this quarter.  Finally, I need to put together a definitive prospectus/introduction to the project, based of the many earlier versions of that conversation.  I feel that I'm in a much better position to do this sort of writing, but I've never been good at that kind of abstract summary.  I suppose I need to figure out how to do this, if I want to apply for any jobs, or apply for grants of any sort.  Not my favorite activity in the world, but as Bertolt Brecht notes, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral."

     In addition to that, we are going to have a lot of work ahead of us, politically, because of the contract negotiations that will be beginning in the summer, at latest.  I feel that we actually have a lot of positives on our side, from the passage of Prop. 30 to the long history of protests that have created a deep crisis amongst the upper administration of the UC system, but it's going to take a lot of work to move away from the older forms of bargaining that have defined the last couple contract negotiations.  We have introduced a series of demands that I feel are quite strong, but without concerted action on the part of the rank and file, it's going to be an uphill battle, at best.  Within this context, I think our reform slate has done a very good job of creating democratic structures amongst the representatives and has gotten rank and file activists deeply involved in the process of organizing, but we haven't as of yet created the democratic representative structures that we need to bring 12,000 members into the conversation, rather than a small portion of that.  In many ways, the folks at Berkeley seem to be about as close to that ideal as anyone, with their Contract Action Team structure, but we need to come up with a structure that makes sense to activists and members on the Irvine campus, a campus that sees a substantial amount of police repression, even of simple actions such as canvassing and handing out fliers.  One thing I am hoping we will do is create a lot more media about what we do, another thing we can learn from other activist groups around the state.

      In any case, I might find myself continuing the low output on the blog that you have seen over the past couple months, but just be assured that this doesn't indicate a lack of commitment to the blog, or my implicit plans to close it down.  It just indicates that I have a lot of work to do.   Incidentally, I will be giving a paper at the Eaton Conference in Riverside this year on The Stepford Wives.  More details on that in the very near future.

Thoughts in regards to the Popular Front, its destruction, and the relationship of that destruction to the rise of '2nd Wave' Feminism

It's been a while since I have put up anything on the blog.  I've been trying to get finished with my dissertation, and put together two substantially revised chapters over the past quarter, the last two weeks focused on the revisions of my very unorganized Gilman chapter.  Within that context, some folks have been wondering about my argument in that case.  I thought I would put up this discussion here, which supplies the context of my argument.

Merril’s work needs to be placed within the context of the destruction of the Popular Front of the 1930’s and 1940’s with the rise of the cold war and McCarthyism. The destruction of that social formation ended an array of political and aesthetic possibilities that existed within that historical bloc. Those radicals that survived the purges and the deportations of the period had to create a new style and form to be heard. The artists involved in that project were left without a cultural milieu to work within, or any substantial institutional support. Ideological purges were a defining aspect of the era, occurring in locations as disparate as the university and the steel foundry. Chandler Davis noted that between the years of 1947-1950, “most institutions, from the government through the unions and universities to the American Civil Liberties Union… declared Communists unwelcome,” setting a precedent for the years to follow. (Davis 272) He also notes that the loyalty oaths utilized by those institutions not only restricted the involvement of members in the Communist Party, but also organizations with associations with the Communist Party. Radical artists had to navigate this minefield in order to find legitimate spaces to offer critiques of the society and avoid censure. Failure to negotiate these dangers could lead to the blacklists, that is, the inability to publish or work in the industries of popular media. In a few cases, it led to criminal charges or expulsion from the country.

In order to understand the full implications of this destruction, it’s necessary to briefly sketch out the impact of the Popular Front on U.S. culture and politics. Until recently, the dominant critical interpretation of that formation reflected the narrative produced by the forces that supported its destruction, putting an emphasis on Moscow, the naiveté of artists, etc. However there have been a number alternative interpretations of the period, most notably the argument presented in Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front. Denning makes the argument that the Popular Front was a part of a larger cultural formation, one that he calls the Cultural Front. “The cultural front was… the result of the encounter between a powerful democratic social movement—the Popular Front—and the modern cultural apparatus of mass entertainment and education.” (Denning xvii-xviii) The formation of the cultural front consisted of a mass movement, a tentative formation of organic intellectuals, and institutional structures, ranging from magazine publishers to trade unions. For Denning, this formation cannot be simply reduced to the influence of the Communist Party and “Moscow gold.” Instead, it constituted a counter-hegemonic force within the society, a force crucial to the New Deal alliance, and yet, “making a culture that was neither a Party nor a liberal New Deal culture.”[1](Denning 5) For Denning the culture of the Popular Front constitutes radical social democratic social formation in which the Communist Party played a significant role, although not a central role. At the same time, the cultural front was inextricably linked to the rising mediated spectacle of mass culture.

As Stuart Ewen notes through his analysis of advertising, that system, the system of mass culture and the structure of the advertising that supports it, is intimately linked with the system of mass industrial production.[2] These institutions not only represented industrial capitalism, but were enmeshed in its interests, material processes, and social networks. They operated simultaneously as a system of legitimization for industrial capitalism, and contributed to the process of incorporating workers into that system as consumers, rather than as simple cogs. Mass production simultaneously demanded an increased mass consumption base to thrive. As Stuart Ewen notes, a group of intellectuals began to develop a sort of social democracy of consumption, responding to Henry Ford’s experiments in social control in his factories.[3] Ewen notes, “The image, the commercial, reaches out to sell more than a service or a product; it sells a way of understanding the world. The basic premise is that in a corporate, industrial world, it is the agencies of communication that provide the mechanisms of social order.”[4] The apparatuses of the social democracy of consumption are implemented to simultaneously respond to and shape popular desires, while maintaining the basic structures of capitalist accumulation. Rather than limiting themselves to the limited, crudely instrumental forms of control used by Ford, the intellectuals developing these structures began to draw on the recent development of psychoanalysis, linking structures of consumption with formations of desire. Ewen’s work links the shift in mass production with the rise of an image based advertising structure, tying into unconscious libidinal structures of the society. The cultural front can only be understood as a network of individuals and institutions the simultaneously immanent to that nascent system, yet exogenous to its logic.

Denning argues that the cultural front constituted a powerful counter-hegemonic force within the period of the 1930’s and the 1940’s, as well as containing a powerful legacy for the rest of the century through its intellectual, literary, and musical contributions. Denning notes, the most literal measure of that power can be seen in a 1942 Fortune poll in which, “25 percent of Americans favored socialism and another 35% percent had an open mind about it.” (Denning 4) However, the depth of that success went considerably beyond those numbers. The Popular Front was linked to innumerable campaigns from union organizing, fights against racial discrimination, to direct action efforts to keep families in their houses and apartments. Denning notes that these modes of politics drew on the tradition of the “voluntary reform association”, large popular organizations focused on single issues, from the League of Women Shoppers to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. (Denning 63) These public sphere activities merged with the massive labor unrest and strike activity in cities ranging from San Francisco, Minneapolis, Harlan, and Detroit to form a network of organizations and activists throughout the country. Those structures posed an alternative vision of inclusion, one that was based on a participatory social democracy, rather than a vision of inclusion based on the social democracy of consumption being developed by the intellectuals linked to Fordist forms of production.

However, this formation, what Denning, working in the vocabulary of Antonio Gramsci, refers to as a historical bloc, was quickly destroyed in the post war years. The alliances of the Popular Front had already been put under strain because of the acceptance of the no strike clauses insisted on by the Roosevelt administration during the war, as well as the acceptance of the Japanese internment camps by most of the Popular Front. These actions simultaneously delinked the cultural formation of the Popular Front from worker militancy and led the institutions of the Popular Front into a more uncritical alliance with the Roosevelt administration. However, this alliance began to quickly unravel with the end of the war. There was an immediate upsurge in labor militancy with the end of the war, represented by a wave of strikes throughout the country. The reaction to this upsurge in labor militancy was the Taft-Hartley act, which both limited the abilities of labor to strike and disallowed unions with membership involved in the Communist Party to benefit from the National Labor Relations Act. Despite initial opposition by the CIO leadership to this act, the conservative elements of the federation took advantage of the law to expel Communists and Communist affiliated unions from the CIO, effectively removing the influence of the radical left from the union movement.

The shift in the trade union movement had an immediate effect on the cultural front of the movement. The trade unions were a major funding source for publications such as the Federated Press, as well as a whole set of union publications. (Horowitz 102-152) Denning notes that half of all Popular Front publications were funded by the union movement, and this funding evaporated as those unions either became more conservative to respond to Taft-Hartley, or became smaller, more embattled units outside the protection of the National Labor Relations Act. (Footnote) In addition, subscription funded publications such as PM closed due to cheaper, advertising funded publications. At the same time, the independent studios involved in the production of socially conscious films closed due to the post war economic crisis in the film industry as well as the effects of the red scare. (Footnote) The destruction of these institutions also contributed to the destruction of the cultural front. With a few notable exceptions such as the independently financed Salt of the Earth, spaces for explicit radical critiques in popular publications evaporated, and the attempts to express radical ideas could only occur in veiled terms.

Furthermore there had been a radical transformation of the social structures and the class structure of the nation. Many of the political goals of the Popular Front were accomplished by the liberal New Deal State. It’s already been noted that the middle class had double from 30% in pre-depression times to 60% after the war.[5] The United States government worked to create the conditions for economic security internally. In addition to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board, the intervention in education was probably the most obvious of the interventions, taking the form of the G.I. Bill for education. Although it also included the National Defense Education Act, which both subsidized industries and the education of individual scientists. These policies were also linked to a shift in the loan structure of housing, which allowed for families to purchase a house with only a very small deposit. However, these benefits structurally excluded African Americans. These transformations, as David Roediger notes in his recent work, Working Towards Whiteness, occurred within the white supremacist context of the New Deal. The shifts in the access to housing, education, and other benefits was segregated at best, structurally reinforcing the practices of redlining and restrictive covenants, and at worst, were completely inaccessible to African-Americans. The programs and institutions constituted what historian Ira Katznelson called affirmative action programs for whites.

The post-New Deal political consensus can be read as a combination of fulfilling the incorporation of the white working classes and former new immigrants as consumers, rather than simply as cogs, and the systemic destruction of the radical elements of the Popular Front who wanted a more radical destruction of the society. The need to incorporate working classes into the society as something beyond simple cogs of the machine had been seen as early as the turn of the century, by a number of intellectuals responding to the phenomenon of mass production introduced by Ford. These individuals “Built on the expanded production and the economic potential of consumer markets, advertising created the imagery, the aesthetic, of a social-democratic capitalism, one that understood and would claim to solve the most basic contradictions of modern life.”[6] These theories had been developed around the turn of the century, but the working classes remained too impoverished to be fully incorporated in a consumer society. As we had seen previously in the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, project of incorporation depended on a combination of modes of expertise and through that, a re-imagination of the reproductive labor of the household, although the modes of redistribution to create that vision were left unimagined. The radical activism of the Popular Front through its demands for redistributive programs and contributions to industrial unionism ironically created the conditions to fulfill the promises made by Fordist democratic capitalism.

The new regime of consumption was to be anchored in the new suburban household. This household was meant to fulfill a multiplicity of purposes, social, cultural, and psychic. Elaine Tyler May notes that the new household was widely seen as an analogous form of containment, a domestic equivalent to the Cold War foreign policy of the U.S. government of the late 1940’s through the 1950’s as a way of neutralizing the class struggle through the containment of the home. Uncannily replicating the logic implicit in Gilman’s Herland, the household was supposed to act as the supplement to the alienated and regimented nature of the workplace, providing a space of leisure, and the creation of social meaning. That supplement was dependent on the labor of women who were expected to carry the weight of this process. To accomplish that, the household had to take on a radically different function within the society. As Stephanie Coontz notes, the post-war period was defined by a cultural shift in the family structure as well as the economic shift discussed earlier. As I noted in the earlier chapter, the vast majority of new housing was constructed in the suburbs, and the new families distanced themselves from their parents, moving out of their parents’ house earlier, and moving farther away from them. The new nuclear family additionally was designed to fulfill the social psychic and emotional needs of its members in an unprecedented manner, marking former homo-social gathering places such as the bar as pathological. The new household was both the sign and seal of the guaranteed social wage, and the compensation for the lost possibility of social democracy.

Within this context, Betty Friedan offers a useful narrative of the shift from the formation of the Popular Front to the rise of a feminist politic in the wake of the ruins of that earlier formation. Daniel Horowitz maps out this transformation in his biography, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique. Horowitz places Friedan’s intellectual development at the center of the culture of the Popular Front, from her role as the editor of her university paper, SCAN (Smith College Associated News), to her involvement with the Popular Front news service, and for the new service of the radical trade union, the UE. Friedan was intensely involved in what Michael Denning called the ‘laboring of American culture,’ the creation of genuinely participatory social democracy within the structures of mass culture, both within the workplace, and through modes of consumption. At the same time, her involvement gestured towards the nascent forms of feminism contained in the Popular Front, both through the participation of women in the movement, but more notably, through later efforts of the movement to distinguish itself from the explicitly patriarchal politics of fascism, leading to connections on the part of the movement with the initially suspicious institutions of the official women’s movement. However, she also mapped the disintegration of that alliance. She was pushed out of the first job because of a combination of political conflicts, and the news service’s desire to return jobs to veterans through firing women to open spaces. The UE position collapsed due to the attacks on the union because of their refusal to recognize the stipulations of the Taft-Hartley Act. For Friedan, the loss of these jobs constituted a fundamental betrayal of the Popular Front, gesturing to its limitations and defeat.

The 1950’s were a period of reevaluation for Friedan, as she married and moved to the suburbs. She worked as a freelance writer for a variety of women’s magazines and was involved in neighborhood politics. Horowitz notes that Friedan’s shift in concerns, from the urban to the suburban; from the problems with poverty to the problems with prosperity were a common theme within the work of social criticism of the time. This collective effort can be seen as an attempt to produce a new political aesthetic that could be heard through the atmosphere of red baiting and the cold war, and produced a new critical framework to understand the new prosperity. However, Friedan’s work was markedly different than other leftist intervention through her emphasis on the suburban household, and expectations put upon women within that household. She focused on its many functions in the maintenance of the new dominant structures of the society, mapping out the construction and legitimization of the new role of women through the expertise of home economists and psychologists in the pages of women’s magazines. She argued that women’s restriction to the household effectively legitimated and expanded levels of consumption needed for the Fordist state, and created a way of mediating and creating an escape valve for the pressures created by the new society. Friedan states this quite polemically,

“The unremitting attack on women which has become an American preoccupation in recent years might also stem from the same escapist motives that sent men and women back to the security of the home…. No one has ever been blacklisted or fired for an attack on “the American woman.” Apart from the psychological pressures from mothers or wives, there have been plenty of nonsexual pressures in the America of the last decade—the compromising, never-ceasing competition, the anonymous of the purposeless work in the big organization—that also kept a man from feeling like a man. Safer to take it out on his wife and his mother than recognize a failure in himself or in the sacred American way of life. The men were not always kidding when they said their wives were lucky to be able to stay home all day. It was also soothing to rationalize the rat race by telling themselves that they were in it “for the wife and kids.” And so men re-created their own childhood in suburbia, and made mothers of their wives. Men fell for the mystique without a murmur or dissent. It promised them mothers for the rest of their lives, both as a reason for their being and as an excuse for their failures.” (Friedan 297)

The figure of the housewife then becomes the lynchpin for the entire social system of the post war era. She simultaneously acted as a force of legitimating remaining in the system for men, and at the same time, became an escape valve for the anger and aggression produced within such a system. Friedan implicates the entire superstructure of expertise, from psychologists to home economists in this process. The professionalization of child raising demanded by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, rather than facilitating new forms of collectivity in the household, was used to further isolate housewives, legitimating the new system of consumptive social democracy. The patriarchal control of the household became the social contract between men, legitimizing the often meaningless and repetitive labor of the Fordist factory or the assembly line logic of the business office. Drawing from the work of Sylvia Federici, the ‘mystique’ of domestic femininity created an implicit cross-class alliance between primarily white men, not only dependent on the social wage, but also on the access to women as a commons for men. It expanded the sexual contract to the white working class as well as the middle classes. The contract offered both material as well as psychic benefits to those who accepted its strictures.

The power of Friedan’s text largely arises through her rhetorical identification with the feminine mystique. That is to say, the power of her narrative is derived through her claim to be a housewife negotiating her way through this new form of domesticity. However, it is precisely this rhetorical claim to the conventional role of the housewife that causes a set of limitations to the text. To begin, Friedan’s censorship of her radical past leads to an erasure of the history of working class. Unlike many later radical feminists, Friedan’s claims about the mystique are limited to the post-war period, but her history of women’s activism is limited to the activities of the middle classes. Women’s union and radical activism is placed under erasure, which limits the forms of activism analyzed in the text.[7] Additionally, Friedan’s critique is dependent on her engagement with the psychological conventions of her time. That engagement is often quite critical of the discipline’s complicity with the feminine mystique, but it also embraces the hetero-normative impulse of psychology, arguing that homosexuality is a possible pathological response to the mystique.[8] If Friedan strategically engages with these conventions to be heard, these conventions profoundly shape and limit the epistemological possibilities of the text.

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[1] Ibid., 5.

[2] Stuart Ewen, Channels of Desire,

[3] Stuart Ewen, Channels of Desire, 37

[4] Stuart Ewan, Channels of Desire, 42

[5] Look for this fact again

[6] Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, 37

[7] Friedan, x.  See also Horowitz and Coontz

[8] Friedan,