Black Mothers as Anti-Imperialist Revolutionaries: African American Women Leftists’ Peace Activism in the Early Cold War

This presentation will attempt a feminist and queer reconsideration of African American leftist women’s use of maternalist and familialist strategies in efforts at internationalist mobilization against U.S. imperialism and militarism in the early 1950s through centering the antiwar political and intellectual activism of Claudia Jones, Eslanda Goode Robeson and Shirley Graham Du Bois. I will show that while relying on and reinforcing heteronormative assumptions regarding women’s roles and responsibilities and precluding more critical interrogations of dominant notions of gender and sexuality in general, this emphasis on racialized and colonized mothers’ moral authority and determination to make the world safer for their children sought to undo the regulation and exploitation of their and their male relatives’ productive and reproductive labor—and the destruction of their families—that these left feminists pointed to as crucial to imperialist war efforts. In so doing, they extended their struggles against the extraction of Black women’s reproductive labor and its products in the “afterlife of slavery” to the international arena of anti-imperialism. Foregrounding the concrete concerns and needs of mothers, especially those in global capitalism’s externalities, thus enabled these women activists to sharpen a materialist critique of war that exposed the co-constitutive relationship between militarism and gendered racial capitalism and linked the maintenance of global peace to the improvement of living standards and the economic and social liberation for subjugated peoples. Additionally, in articulating a concept of revolutionary motherhood, they positioned themselves on the front lines of the global struggle against white supremacy and imperialism. Beyond highlighting mothers’ revolutionary agency, this maternalist internationalism also called for transnational women’s solidarities but at the same time took into account the unequal power relations among them.