Abstract
This chapter argues that the Cold War was a hot war when seen from the perspective of women and feminist writers across the world. It presents the convergences and divergences between ‘women’ and ‘feminist’ as well as between ‘international’ and ‘transnational’ before analysing the key themes in the literature of the period. It showcases a variety of genres, a range of continents and countries and a diversity of approaches to experiences, ranging from military conflict and material destruction to human survival. This chapter presents the literature of the period as bearing the legacies of the two World Wars and as prelude to current conditions in which the threat of ecological disaster, state surveillance and armed truce persist in new forms.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In the US, both ‘international’ and ‘transnational’ are read as referring to everything other than the US. Given the movement of peoples and the heterogeneity of cultural and political affiliations within the country, it is increasingly difficult to maintain that separation.
- 2.
Raymond Aron and Daniel Bell posit that socialism and capitalism were ‘two varieties of the same industrial society’ (quoted in Sandrine Kott, ‘Cold War Internationalism’, in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds, Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 357).
- 3.
As Penny von Eschen observes, nations become ‘legible in the emerging international order as peoples with rights’ (von Eschen, ‘Locating the Transnational in the Cold War’, in Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 453).
- 4.
Von Eschen alerts us to a distinction between ‘transnational’ as a ‘methodology and analytic category’ and ‘transnational’ as a set of ‘political, material, and ideological formulations’, pointing out that the latter is about establishing explicit post/neo-colonial national differences and aspiring universalisms (ibid., p. 452). The manner in which US state and corporate powers continue to coopt ‘transnational’ to advertise actions that are actually ‘international’ emphasises the carving up of territories into nations that forms the basis of Area Studies, a legacy of the Cold War. For a discussion of the contrasting kinds of ‘communist internationalism’ and ‘liberal internationalism’, see Kott, ‘Cold War Internationalism’, pp. 340–62.
- 5.
Significantly, von Eschen addresses ‘the fragility as well as the power of transnational formations’ (von Eschen, ‘Locating the Transnational’, p. 453).
- 6.
See the discussion of the status of women as Cold War battleground in Helen Laville, ‘Gender and Women’s Rights in the Cold War’, in Immerman and Goedde, eds, Oxford Handbook, pp. 523–39. As my chapter demonstrates, women (authors) are not merely compliant or dissident, nor do they all reject certain essentialisms; they also experience differently the position of minoritised subjects or second-class citizens.
- 7.
The fact that Third World women and indigenous women unevenly adopt the term ‘feminist’ is shown by African American Alice Walker’s use of ‘womanist’ in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). To subsume diverse literatures and their contexts under the term ‘feminist’ is to perform the same epistemological erasure that is imposed by using the term ‘Cold War’ to signify all the events in that era. Talking about the Unione Donne Italiane and the Centro Italiano Femminile, Wendy Pojmann addresses how these Italian women’s associations, in being Catholic, may not have been perceived as ‘feminist’ because they advocated for women’s place in the home, but were still feminist in their advocacy of equal rights (see Pojmann, Italian Women and International Cold War Politics 1944–1968 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 9). These variations coexist with ‘universal sisterhood’, a term used by African American women working with South African allies against state oppression during the Cold War.
- 8.
Redding, ‘Cold War’, in Steven Belletto, ed., American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 25; Loughran, ‘“Counterfeit Machismo”: Joan Didion, American Masculinity, and the Monroe Doctrine’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 54: 4 (2013), p. 427; Clark, Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. ix. See also Andrew Hammond’s use of the term ‘muscular Christianity’ and Robert D. Dean’s discussion of ‘warrior-intellectuals’: Hammond, ‘On the Frontlines of Writing: Introducing the Literary Cold War’, in Hammond, ed., Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern, and Postcolonial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 1; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), p. 38.
- 9.
Shafran, ‘Long Live Jewish-Arab Friendship!’, in Miriam Cooke and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, eds, Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 116.
- 10.
Murray, ‘Thursday, February 1, 1951’, in Anne Firor Scott, ed., Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), p. 65.
- 11.
See Howard Zinn, ‘Artists in Time of War’, Comparative Literature and Culture, 9: 1 (2007), pp. 2–9.
- 12.
Murray, ‘Thursday, February 1’, p. 65.
- 13.
The point is evidenced by US science fiction. While a number of male authors became popular science writers and industrial consultants, hired by magazines like Collier and The Saturday Evening Post, science fiction also included such oppositional authors as Alice Eleanor Jones (1950s), Kate Wilhelm (1960s), Lisa Tuttle (1970s) and Octavia Butler (1980s) (see Lisa Yaszek, ‘Stories “That Only a Mother” Could Write: Midcentury Peace Activism, Maternalist Politics, and Judith Merril’s Early Fiction’, NWSA Journal, 16: 2 (2004), p. 76).
- 14.
See Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt and trans. by Harry Zohn (1955; New York: Schocken Books, 1998), pp. 253–64. In Benjamin’s view, reflexive history-writing brings forth stories of the subjugated and draws attention to literature as chronicle that does not write history or politics but records both.
- 15.
See Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits, 1985) and El plan infinito (The Infinite Plan, 1991) and Eltit’s Por la patria (For the Fatherland, 1986) and El cuarto mundo (The Fourth World, 1988). The Boom phenomenon is usually associated with an all-male roster of literary stars, including Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) and Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia).
- 16.
Eisenhower, ‘Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People’, Ford Library Museum, https://www.fordlibrarymusuem.gov/library/document/0011/1683358.pdf (accessed 16 June 2019) (italics added).
- 17.
Ware, ‘Vienna, Virginia December 8 [1951]’, in Scott, ed., Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware, p. 70.
- 18.
See the analyses of East Asian immigrant literature in Shirley Lim and Amy Ling’s edited Reading the Literatures of Asian America (1992) and Jodi Kim’s Ends of Empire: Asian American Culture and the Cold War (2004).
- 19.
See Robert J. Corber’s Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema (2011). On the sociopolitical front, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee in the 1960s continued the McCarthyite legacies of targeting schoolgirls’ perceived lesbian sexualities as deviant and as a threat to ‘marriage, normal life, and manhood’ (an unsigned letter quoted in Stacy Braukman, ‘“Nothing Else Matters but Sex”: Cold War Narratives of Deviance and the Search for Lesbian Teachers in Florida, 1959–63’, Feminist Studies, 27: 3 (2001), p. 553). In Argentinian writer Luisa Valenzuela’s short story ‘La palabra asesino’ (The Word Killer, 1982), a heterosexual relationship is presented as an analogy for dominant political discourse, the female protagonist as the people and the homicidal lover as the military regime responsible for the country’s ‘Dirty War’ (1976–83).
- 20.
The reference to the status of women as being indicative of a nation’s progressiveness presaged Laura Bush describing Afghani women’s liberation as a welcome result of the US presence in Afghanistan: see Bush, ‘Introduction’, to George W. Bush Institution, We Are Afghan Women: Voices of Hope (New York: Scribner Books, 2016), pp. xi–xxii.
- 21.
See Laville, ‘Gender and Women’s Rights’, p. 523.
- 22.
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 102. Kristina Zarlengo describes such women trainees as ‘deterrence soldiers’ and ‘bombshell women’ (quoted in Dianne Newell, ‘Home Truths: Women Writing Science in the Nuclear Dawn’, EJAC, 22: 3 (2003), p. 194). Romania, under Ceauşescu, imported Soviet notions of female fitness, strength and heroism, and constructed the figure of the ‘heroine mother’: someone who nurtured and protected and, at the same time, was able to survive the ravages of man-made turmoil.
- 23.
See Yaszek, ‘Stories “That Only a Mother” Could Write’, p. 76.
- 24.
Family life was presented, in this era, ‘as a defense against political subversion’ (Laville, ‘Gender and Women’s Rights’, p. 25). While not strictly literary in category, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) also describes suburbia as an illusory haven for the persona of the happy housewife to which North American women of her time were supposed to aspire.
- 25.
Khalifa, Memoirs of an Unrealistic Woman, in Cooke and Rustomji-Kerns, eds, Blood into Ink, p. 104.
- 26.
See also Anglo-Scottish writer Emma Tennant’s The Crack (1973) about the conflict between ecology and business.
- 27.
Plath, ‘Thalidomide’, in Plath, Winter Trees, new edn (1971; London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 31.
- 28.
Pritam, ‘To Waris Shah’, in Cooke and Rustomji-Kerns, eds, Blood into Ink, p. 14.
- 29.
Claudia Jones’s position in relation to Black masculinity and white feminism was characterised by alienation from both sides, based on gender on the one hand and race on the other.
- 30.
Hansberry’s relationship with the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian community, and her contributions to their journal Ladder, also evinces links between counter-hegemonic stances against political and sexual mores.
- 31.
Ravikovitch, ‘One Cannot Kill a Baby Twice’, in Cooke and Rustomji-Kerns, eds, Blood into Ink, p. 47.
- 32.
Ranasinghe, ‘Auschwitz from Colombo’, in Cooke and Rustomji-Kerns, eds, Blood into Ink, p. 66.
- 33.
Rahmani, ‘A Short Hike’, in Cooke and Rustomji-Kerns, eds, Blood into Ink, p. 148.
- 34.
As Mary Helen Washington points out about the particular scrutiny of people of colour by the FBI, ‘being black equaled being Red’ (Washington, ‘Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front’, in Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst, eds, Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 183). The American Indian Chicago Conference in the 1960s was, on the other hand, strongly anti-communist.
- 35.
Activist efforts complemented creative production and occurred across continents: see, for example, the World Congress of Mothers in Lausanne (1955), the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Britain (1981–2000) and the Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament founded in the US (1982–91). Among related gatherings were the Mouvement Mondial des Mères, the World Organization of Mothers of All Nations and the International Conference in Defence of Children.
- 36.
Marike Janzen discusses the category of the ‘messenger writer’ as having an ‘affinity with the political struggles of the oppressed […] that extended beyond national or hemispheric boundaries at a particular moment in the Cold War’ (Janzen, ‘Messenger Writers: Anna Seghers and Alejo Carpentier in the Cold War’, Comparative Literature, 62: 3 (2010), p. 286).
- 37.
The writers in this group included Claire Gebeyli, Daisy al-Amir, Etel Adnan and Laila Usairan (see Cooke, Women Write War: The Centring of the Beirut Decentrists (1987)).
- 38.
Outside literature, women’s intra-national and international solidarities also flourished synchronously. Amongst the groups that were formed in this era were the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, the Congress of American Women, the African National Congress Women’s League, the Third World Women’s Alliance, the Women’s International Democratic Federation and the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom.
- 39.
al-Saih, ‘Intimations of Anxiety’, in Cooke and Rustomji-Kerns, eds, Blood into Ink, p. 17.
- 40.
al-Amir, ‘The Future’, in Cooke and Rustomji-Kerns, eds, Blood into Ink, pp. 157–8.
- 41.
Ashrawi, ‘Night Patrol (An Israeli Soldier on the West Bank)’, in Cooke and Rustomji-Kerns, eds, Blood into Ink, p. 33.
- 42.
See Áine McMurtry, ‘The Strange Everyday: Divided Berlin in Prose Texts by Herta Müller and Emine Sevgi Özmadar’, German Life and Letters, 71: 4 (2018), pp. 473–94.
- 43.
Numerous memoirs of the Cold War were issued during and after the formal end of that era, including Sandra Crockett Moore’s Private Woods (1988), Mary Morris’s The Waiting Room (1989), Patti Massman and Susan Rosser’s A Matter of Betrayal (1999) and Beverly Gologorsky’s The Things We Do To Make It Home (1999). See also writings by Taslima Nasrin (Bangladesh), Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus) and Patricia McFadden (Swaziland).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sarker, S. (2020). Inter/Transnational Feminist Literature of the Cold War. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38972-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38973-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)