ture could and should do to show the coming of a new society that she did not even consider then the possibility of a less epic and for her, more feasible structure. Nor could she be content simply to accord centrality to the familial interactions and the stubborn growth of human potential in that unpromising soil, leaving the tensions between human aspiration and social oppression unresolved. So Yonnondio remained unfinished, but the struggle to write fiction at once political and nonpolemical was an essential apprenticeship for the writer who in her maturity produced Tell Me a Riddle.
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The concerns I have called, for lack of better terms, more ''subjective" and "domestic," grew to a great extent out of Olsen's experience as a woman and a mother. Thus, my second and third contradictions overlap, for as we shall see there was little in Left literary criticism that would have validated the centrality of these concerns, except insofar as they touched on class rather than gender. The rest of this paper, then, will be concerned with the third contradiction: between the fact that the world of the Left, like the larger society it both challenged and partook of, was essentially androcentric and masculinist, yet that it also demonstrated, more than any other sector of American society, a consistent concern for women's issues.
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The painful and sometimes wry anecdotes of women writers like Josephine Herbst, Meridel Le Sueur, and others amply testify to the sexual politics of life in the literary Left. For example, Herbst writes to Katherine Anne Porter about the "gentle stay-in-your-place, which may or may not be the home," she received from her husband, John Herrmann, when she wished to join him at a "talk fest" with Mike Gold, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, and others: "I told Mister Herrmann that as long as the gents had bourgeois reactions to women they would probably never rise very high in their revolutionary conversations, but said remarks rolled off like water." 29 Olsen herself remembers that at the American Writers Congress, James Farrell informed her that she and another attractive young woman present were "the two flowers there," compared with the other "old bags."
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Because she was not really a part of the literary circles of the Left, their sexual politics had less impact on Olsen than
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