Comrades and Partners

Book excerpt: With intense passion and commitment, labor reformers and Communist Party activists Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester dedicated themselves both to the cause of economic justice and to each other. Janet Lee traces Hutchins and Rochester's extraordinary ideological journey from Christianity to Communism in this engaging joint biography, regendering the history of the intellectual left at the same time that she shares the interwoven life stories of these remarkable women. This is a biography that explores the complex and multiple contexts that produced Hutchins and Rochester as political subjects and focuses on the tensions and contradictions of their public and private lives. Methodologically ground breaking, Comrades and Partners attempts to disrupt the realist frame of research and writing in relation to both subject and author: subject in terms of the myth of an unfolding, coherent self and author in terms of highlighting the boundaries between fact and fiction. Lee has produced an invaluable addition to the study of women's history, a volume which will prove indespensible to scholars of history, gender studies, and the postmodern approach.