The Romance of American Communism

I looked in those years I saw discrimination against women and every piece I wrote was influenced by what I saw: that was the easy part. Soon enough, however—and this was the difficult part—the women’s movement itself began to spout a separatist line that contained strong suggestions regarding what was proper and what improper for a card-carrying feminist to say or do. In no time at all those suggestions became

My mother was in the audience that night and said, when she came home, “America was fortunate to have had the Communists here. They, more than most, prodded the country into becoming the democracy it always said it was.” I was surprised by the gentleness in her voice, she’d always been a hot under the collar socialist; but then again it was the sixties, and by then she was really tired.