Mother Russia and the Socialist Fatherland: Women and the Communist Party of Canada, 1932-1941, with specific reference to the activism of Dorothy Livesay and Jim Watts
by
Nancy Butler
A thesis submitted to the Department of History
in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Queen’s University
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
November 2010
Copyright © Nancy Butler, 2010
Abstract
This dissertation traces a shift in the Communist Party of Canada, from the 1929 to
1935 period of militant class struggle (generally known as the ‘Third Period’) to the
1935-1939 Popular Front Against Fascism, a period in which Communists argued for
unity and cooperation with social democrats. The CPC’s appropriation and
redeployment of bourgeois gender norms facilitated this shift by bolstering the
CPC’s claims to political authority and legitimacy. ‘Woman’ and the gendered
interests associated with women—such as peace and prices—became important in
the CPC’s war against capitalism. What women represented symbolically, more than
who and what women were themselves, became a key element of CPC politics in the
Depression decade. Through a close examination of the cultural work of two
prominent middle-class female members, Dorothy Livesay, poet, journalist and
sometime organizer, and Eugenia (‘Jean’ or ‘Jim’) Watts, reporter, founder of the
Theatre of Action, and patron of the Popular Front magazine New Frontier, this
thesis utilizes the insights of queer theory, notably those of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
and Judith Butler, not only to reconstruct both the background and consequences of
the CPC’s construction of ‘woman’ in the 1930s, but also to explore the significance
of the CPC’s strategic deployment of heteronormative ideas and ideals for these two
prominent members of the Party
Table of Contents
Abstract............................................................................................................ ii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................iii
Abbreviations ……………………………………………………....…….....................… iv
Chapter One. Beyond the Historical Dichotomies:
Depression-era Communism and the Woman Question.............................1
Chapter Two. The Turbulent Transnational World
of Interwar Canadian Communism ............................................................. 74
Chapter Three. The CPC and ‘The Woman Question’:
Gender in Class Politics................................................................................ 155
Chapter Four. The Cultural Front of Communism in Canada................213
Chapter Five. “This struggle is our miracle new found”:
Dorothy Livesay and the Cultural Front …………………………….................. 288
Chapter Six. “Every Waking Moment Promoting the Party”:
Jim Watts and the Cultural Front ……………………………………….................335
Chapter Seven. Gendered Melancholy: Memory and the Personal
Politics of Jim Watts and Dorothy Livesay ……………......………………....... 386
Conclusion. Looking Backward, Looking Ahead …………......…………....... 437
Bibliography …………………………………………………………............................. 448
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