This paper focuses on the emergence of women's history in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the works on Berry Friedan, Carl Degler, Gerda Lerner, Aileen Kraditor, and Eleanor Flexner. In many cases, their work had its origin in the labor and radical struggles of the 1940s-Kraditor, Lerner, and Flexner were members of the Communist Party in the immediate postwar period; Friedan had extensive involvement with the Old Left. To a considerable extent, they placed African Americans and women at the center of the story of America's past. In varying degrees, their work also involved a critique of American capitalism. This paper reconnects the 1940s and the 1960s even as it suggests that these historians embarked on different paths after the mid-1960s.

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