This dissertation focuses on various texts of the early Cold War (1945-1960) to show how several politically left writers engaged gender relations, civil rights, and the labor movement in the context of McCarthyism. This project argues that some cultural producers substituted more overt forms of mass politics and self-expression with "literary activism" and uses three representatives of different positions on the left, playwright Theodore Ward, novelist Ann Petry and the serial publication Correspondence to demonstrate how they modified their work to depict injustices in the repressive early Cold War.

After an introductory chapter exploring scholarship on left culture in the 1950s and defining key terms, in Chapter 2 I turn to Ward's complicated dramatizations of African American women as sites of labor and sexual exploitation as well as fortitude and resistance. I argue that Ward's prescient concern with intersectionality developed in tandem with increased external repression, and his vision simultaneously moves from Popular Front visions of collective action to individualized protest. Chapter 3 explores Ann Petry's deployment of domestic servants as representative of racialized and gendered labor in the early Cold War, arguing that Petry locates agency and especial insight in marginal characters who, as workers, are isolated and both subject to and capable of surveillance. In Chapter 4, I focus on Correspondence as a form of journalistic activism in the 1950s. I show how Correspondence facilitated a greater engagement in its pages with issues of gender, family and racialized labor. Correspondence's hostility towards the Communist Party of the United States and the Soviet Union is also explored in depth to show how such antipathies failed to protect the group from debilitating McCarthyist harassment.

This project expands on relevant ongoing discussions of the varieties of political activism invoked at times of reduced capacity. Thus this project brings attention to writers that have often been obscured by the very forces they protested, and engages the work of racially and politically marginalized people whose activism bridges the more well-known cultural and social movements of the 1930s and the 1960s.