Rereading American Women's Crime Fiction of the Cold War

FAIN: FT-278842-21

Erin A. Smith
University of Texas, Dallas (Richardson, TX 75080-3021)

Archival research relating to a book on women’s genre fiction in the cold war era.

Feminine Noir?: Rereading American Women’s Crime Fiction of the Cold War is a scholarly monograph-in-progress. I have three purposes: (1) to think about women’s crime fiction as cultural documents of the Cold War that engage with what historian Elaine Tyler May calls “domestic containment”; (2) to present a comparative reception study of these books in their Cold War pulp paperback formats and in their contemporary feminist reprints; and (3) to rewrite the history of American crime fiction to more accurately reflect the centrality of women writers. Using a history of the book approach, I argue that these books illuminated how women navigated a society in which literal and symbolic violence against women and children was quite ordinary, and state authorities were often indifferent or hostile to the victims. In an era before second-wave feminism made cultural conversations about rape, sexual violence, and child abuse public, these texts engaged precisely those issues.