Tell me a riddle: class and gender rivalry in meridel le Sueur and Tillie Olsen

Resumo

Writers Meridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen span two generations of radical women, those affiliated with the Old Left and those who came of age with the New Left and the most recent women's movement. One of the salient features of the 1930s was the failure of any leftist organization to develop women's militance into a self—conscious feminism. Yet in more or less covert ways, Le Sueur and Olsen's literature from the late '20s and '30s anticipates the concerns of feminists a generation later. We see in their texts a prescient if latent consciousness. During the '30s Le Sueur and Olsen's literature was considered "proletarian," the term generally reserved for working—class literature produced during the Depression decade.