“So far away from home”: Minority women writers and the new woman

Abstract

Despite indications that minority women were involved in early 20th-century feminist causes, the New Woman image from that period remains primarily white. This essay attempts to strengthen the emerging notion that women of color were also involved with the New Woman model by examining some key texts from the 1920s, a pivotal era for minority women writers: novels by Harlem Renaissance figures Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, the first novel by a Native American woman, Cogewea (1927) by Mourning Dave, and the first book in English by a Japanese- American, A Daughter of the Samurai (1925) by Etsu Sugimoto. Because these texts echo plot conventions of popular fiction for white women, they are contrasted with New Woman narratives from the dominant culture which posited the heroine's successful transition from female to male sphere as she found a place in the urban center of American life. In contrast, writings by minority women reject the idea of fulfilling merger in the male arena because its promises of liberation for women are demystified by the persistence of racism. Following a circular rather than a linear trajectory, minority writers move their New Woman protagonists back to the ethnic communities they initially left because life on the margin of mainstream America is reconceived as a new, more vital center for women's liberation. Perhaps because of their greater marginalization, then, women of color were able to develop a more penetrating critique of male supremacy at a time when the public arena appeared to be opening its doors to women.