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 

https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/handle/1974/6213/Butler_Nancy_E_201011_PhD.pdf%A0;jsessionid=726BE91A7D3202EBDDAA538217568394?sequence=3

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