New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century

Sabrina Fuchs Abrams

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780271095714
• eBook ISBN: 9780271097039
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

Seen as too smart, too sassy, too sexy, and too strident, female humorists have been resisted and overlooked. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century corrects this tendency, focusing on the foremothers of women's humor in modern America, who used satire, irony, and wit as indirect forms of social protest.

This book focuses on the women who stood on the periphery of predominantly male New York intellectual circles in the twentieth century. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams argues that the advent of modernism, the women's suffrage movement, the emergence of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman, and the growth of urban centers in the 1920s and '30s gave rise to a new voice of women's humor, one that was at once defiant and conflicted in defining female identity and the underlying assumptions about gender roles in American society. Her study gives special attention to the contributions of the satirists Edna St. Vincent Millay (pseudonym Nancy Boyd), Tess Slesinger, Dorothy Parker, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy.

Grounded in theories of humor, feminist and critical race theory, and urban studies, this book will find an audience among scholars and students interested in women writers, feminist humor, modern American literature, and African American studies.

Table of contents

• COVER Front
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Chapter 1: Nancy Boyd and the Greenwich Village BohemiansThe Secret, Subversive Humor of Edna St. Vincent Millay
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter 2: Dorothy Parker and the “Vicious Circle ”Satire of Modern Love and New York Society
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Chapter 3: Tess Slesinger, the Menorah Journal Group, and the Feminist Socialist Satire of 1930s America
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Chapter 4: Jessie Redmon Fauset, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Racial and Gender Politics of Humor
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Chapter 5: Dawn Powell and the Lafayette Circle Satirist of Greenwich Village Bohemia and Modern, Midtown Publishing Culture
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Chapter 6: Mary McCarthy and the Partisan Review Crowd Satire and the Modern Bitch Intellectual
• Notes to Chapter 6
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index