like Union Maids ( 1974) that women had marched on the picket lines, chal-
lenging not only the boss's authority but also that of their husbands and
fathers. Surely, there must have been women writers on the Left who had told
stories as powerful as my grandmother's.

When I began working on this study, almost none of the texts I discuss were
in print. The Delacorte Press had once again silenced Tillie Olsen; Yonnon-
dio, so recently published, was out of print, thus going the way of so many
works by women, especially those multiply marginalized by class or race. The
Feminist Press had plans to reissue a series of novels from the 1930s, but as
yet only Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth, one of their first reprints, was
available. Since that time Feminist Press, Monthly Review Press, Naiad
Press, Virago Books, and some university presses and commercial houses
have begun to publish new editions of these lost works. Thus a new context
for my study has developed as I have written it.

Now I can have a dialogue with the editors and reviewers of these various
editions. Then I had only the memories of some friends and acquaintances
who had been active in the 1930s Left (yes, they remembered reading I Went
to Pit College) and materials deposited in the Labadie Collection of the
University of Michigan library, in the Tamiment Collection of New York
University's Bobst Library, and in the archives of the New York Public
Library to provide clues about women's participation in 1930s literary radi-
calism. Consequently my goals have changed as I have written this work,
developing with the new theories of gender and sexuality generated by femi-
nist studies. My process of reinventing the 1930s began as an archaeological
recovery of the lost novels by women who wrote out of a radical, rather than a
romantic or gothic, tradition but developed into a re-vision of the prevailing
scholarship of the 1930s.

As I read the novels, some of which survive only in the copyright depository
of the Library of Congress, the material spoke a challenge to the conventional
wisdom that the 1930s were an era dominated by class consciousness and that
feminism as an ideology ended (temporarily) in the 1920s. ¹ Even that second
"reinvention" has now largely given way to an examination of the ways in
which women authors create narratives of class-conscious female subjectivity
and, in so doing, produce theories about the interrelationship of class and
gender. The "powers of desire" that moved women to revise narrative as they
searched for gaps through which to enter history mirror my desire to em-
power these narratives to rewrite history. ² In this way, I believe this study

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