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This chapter reconstructs the lost collaboration between the photographer Berenice Abbott and Muriel Rukeyser. In a period defined by the elevation of the sciences over the arts—when everybody could be “scientific Americans”—Rukeyser and Abbott shared a similar goal: to develop new methods for demonstrating the uses and relationships between the arts and sciences. The chapter participates in the recovery of an innovative and exciting modernist partnership and asks us to see the lost potential of its inventiveness as well as to contextualize its disappearance. In order to see their work, the chapter undertakes an exploration into the cultural mechanisms that obfuscated it at midcentury. As the chapter stresses, the recovery of such a project demonstrates the continued importance of collaboration between women, not just between artists but between scholars who teach each other how to see and look for things—texts, histories, images—that are not readily visible and available. The chapter looks at how Abbott and Rukeyser began an ambitious project that combined Abbott's experimental photographs with Rukeyser's theorization of “seeing.”

This chapter suggests that it was the Savage Coast's gender-nonconforming and sexually liberated protagonist, along with the politically radical and experimental form of the novel, that ran counter to contemporaneous political and aesthetic gender dictates. The chapter traces the political development of Helen, the protagonist of Savage Coast—her transformation from tourist and witness into activist and radical, from girlhood “liberalism” to mature political engagement, from an “awkward” adolescence of rebellion and anger to a sense of sexual and historical subjectivity found in the collective experience of political action. It then looks at how the rejection of the novel highlighted the constraints and expectations of women's writing in the 1930s and 1940s, under which women were often lauded for their smallness and modesty. The rejection of Savage Coast or its “anomalous” form was the first of what would become a steady stream of criticism of Muriel Rukeyser's work. The chapter explicates the recovery of Savage Coast, and then explains how it alerted us (again) to the fact that the recuperation of women writers has not ended, and that there is a continued need for archival work that restores feminist and radical texts and puts them into print. It also explores how Rukeyser worked to develop a poetics of history that was particularly attuned to exploring the latency of the past inside the present. Savage Coast is essential to understanding this textual-archival practice, one that Rukeyser develops throughout her life.

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In The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser writes that the resistance to poetry comes not just from its being viewed as 'intellectual and obscure and confused' but also because it is considered 'sexually suspect.' In bringing together these questions about gender and genre from the outset, it is clear that one of Rukeyser's central projects in the text is to unveil and confront the gender norms of Cold-War containment culture, norms that positioned the queer body and the communist body as dangerous, the male body as antagonistic to the female body, and that underscored the policing of literary and disciplinary categories. The gender politics of the text, however, only become fully legible when read along with 'The Usable Truth'-the lectures delivered through the 1940s that would become the 1949 book-and in context of her unpublished essay about women poets, Many Keys-commissioned but rejected by The Nation in the 1957-that expands on underdeveloped ideas in The Life of Poetry. While Rukeyser was deeply engaged in thinking about the place of the woman writer, this essay considers the repressive conditions that contributed to the absence of an overt gender analysis in the final version of The Life of Poetry, while exploring Rukeyser's wilful persistence in pursing radical textual and sexual theories of multiplicity.