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Unfriendly Witnesses: Gender, Theater, and Film in the McCarthy Era
by Milly S. Barranger
"It is hard to have a witch-hunt without witches," Ellen Schrecker writes in her book The Age of McCarthyism. This insight begins Milly S. Barranger's new account of the complex web of politics and ideological warfare of the McCarthy period. Unlike other accounts of the period, however, Barranger is primarily interested in the experiences of female witnesses brought before HUAC, dubbed "McCarthy's women" by the press. As Barranger notes, these seven women - actresses Judy HollidayMady Christians, Anne Revere, and Kim Hunter, director Margaret Webster, and writers Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker - were simultaneously infantilized and demonized by committee members. Of these McCarthy "witches," Barranger provocatively asks,"Why did the women arrive in the political cauldron as unfriendly witnesses while the male majority, with few exceptions, walked into the corridors of power as cooperative or friendly witnesses?" (xiv).
In the cover artwork for Barranger's book an inset box features Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan Davis in an accusatory pose - her finger outstretched and pointed slightly upward, her lips pursed, and her gaze fixed on the off-camera space. Davis's gesture and gaze direct the viewer to an oversized, unfocused image of Martin Dies, thenchairman of the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities. The David-and-Goliath image bespeaks the book's central project: uncovering and analyzing the role of female victims of the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era.Through archival research and textual analysis informed by a slight dose of feminist theory, Barranger tells the story of how seven prominent women of stage and screen attempted - through irony, performance, and outright accusation - to topple the giant that cast its shadow over the entertainment industry.
In her account of Judy Holliday's blacklisting, Barranger usefully details the vastly hegemonic nature of paranoia, suspicion, and character assassination. Holliday's exclusion was not limited to the public spectacle of the HUAC hearings or even in FBI documents like Counterattack :The Newsletter of...