A Dear Loving Wife or a Radical of the Worst Type: American Jewish Women, Marriage, and Antiradicalism in World War I

In the early twentieth century, many radicals eschewed marriage for ideological reasons as an instrument of capitalist oppression, while their internationalist politics often led them to long-term inter-ethnic partnerships. When the American state surveilled, incarcerated, and deported pacifists, labor organizers, and other radicals during the First World War, the state frequently targeted both American Jewish immigrants and unmarried radicals as archetypal threats to the prevailing moral and economic order. As a result, radical Jewish women’s decisions about marriage newly determined their exposure to scrutiny and state violence, as well as the strategies available to them for survival. Unmarried Jewish women immigrant radicals weathered surveillance, arrest, and the threat of deportation as “Bolsheviks” and “the worst type of radical,” as their heterosexual relationships outside of marriage magnified the threat of their international anti-imperialist solidarities. By contrast, the state rarely targeted Jewish women married to fellow radical men; indeed, these women often strategically wielded their legal and cultural status as white wives to invoke tropes of gendered innocence and downplay the threat of their husbands’ radicalism. This paper contrasts two groups of radical Jewish women during World War I – unmarried radicals organizing in San Francisco’s multi-ethnic radical circles, and those married to incarcerated male organizers for the militant union the International Workers of the World (IWW). Centering both their Jewishness and the radicalism highlights the conditional visibility of Jewishness to the anti-radical wartime state and underscores the ways that American anti-radical violence has simultaneously disciplined sexual deviance. Moreover, tracing this conditional criminalization brings scholarship such as queer of color theory to bear on historical discussions of immigrant whiteness by demonstrating that sexuality, radicalism, and migration status have collectively indexed Jewish racial status in the United States.