Description
Book SynopsisSeen 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 Redm
Trade Review“This book never flattens out its subject to construct a single, monolithic New York or gendered ‘type’ of wit. All these writers are represented as complex individuals, whose comedy came in many varieties and served diverse functions, reflecting the creators' identities and the concerns of their different communities. Fuchs Abrams's admiration for these women, with their groundbreaking approaches to urban style and humor, is evident throughout. She does a superb job of making readers share it.”
—Margaret D. Stetz,Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities, University of Delaware
“Fuchs Abrams makes a critical and overdue intervention in comedy studies with this book. Through personal accounts, criticism, biography, and textual analysis, she gives texture to our understanding of these six women, their impetus for writing, and the response in their own time. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century offers us a persuasive argument for how the legacy of these sardonic writers continues to influence satire, and especially satire written by women, today.”
—Danielle Fuentes Morgan,author of Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Female Satirist in the City
1. Nancy Boyd and the Greenwich Village Bohemians: The Secret, Subversive Humor of Edna St. Vincent Millay
2. Dorothy Parker and the “Vicious Circle”: Satire of Modern Love and New York Society
3. Tess Slesinger, the Menorah Journal Group, and the Feminist Socialist Satire of 1930s America
4. Jessie Redmon Fauset, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Radical and Gender Politics of Humor
5. Dawn Powell and the Lafayette Circle: Satirist of Greenwich Village Bohemia and Modern, Midtown Publishing Culture
6. Mary McCarthy and the Partisan Review Crowd: Satire and the Modern Bitch Intellectual
Epilogue: Fighting Funny; Postfeminism, Postracialism, and the Fumorist of the Future
Notes
Bibliography
