Title: Better red
First published: 1995
Description: Better Red is an interdisciplinary study addressing the complicated intersection of American feminism and the political left as refracted in Tillie Olsen's and Meridel Le Sueur's lives and literary texts. The first book-length study to explore these feminist writers' ties to the American Communist Party, it contributes to a re-envisioning of 1930s U.S. Communism as well as to efforts to promote working-class writing as a legitimate category of literary analysis.

At once loyal members of the male-dominated Communist Party and emerging feminists, Olsen and Le Sueur move both toward and away from Party tenets and attitudes - subverting through their writing formalist as well as orthodox Marxist literary categories.

Olsen and Le Sueur challenge the bourgeois assumptions - often masked as classless and universal - of much canonical literature; and by creating working-class women's writing, they problematize the patriarchal nature of the Left and the masculinist assumptions of much proletarian literature, anticipating the concerns of "second wave" feminists a generation later.
Subjects: American Authors, American Women authors, American Working class writings, American literature, Authors, American, Biography, Communism and literature, Feminism and literature, History, History and criticism, Intellectual life, Political and social views, United States, Women and literature, Women authors, Women authors, American, Women communists, Working class, Working class authors, Working class in literature, Working class writings, American, American literature, women authors, Women, united states, biography
Places: United States
People: Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen
Time periods: 20th century