Holly Allen, “Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives” (Cornell UP, 2015)

In Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2015), Holly Allen offers a fascinating analysis of how notions of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship were challenged and defined during the Great Depression and into the war years. By focusing on popular and official narratives, she provides new insights into the questions of masculinity, femininity, gender outsiders, and sexual outcasts, connecting all these categories with federal policies and exploring them in the New Deal context. In this New Books in Gender Study’s podcast we focus exactly on these arguments, discussing further how these analytic categories correlated to each other during the 1930s. Allen argues that cultural representations of gender, sexuality, and race had practical consequences for federal policies, and vice versa. The book is well theoretically informed, based on the variety of sources, but still accessible to read with a lot of examples and compelling stories.

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