Modern American Women Research Articles

Mental Illness in Selected Plays of Modern American Women Playwrights

Mental Illness in Selected Plays of Modern American Women Playwrights

Ovarian Rejuvenation Through Platelet-Rich Autologous Plasma (PRP)-a Chance to Have a Baby Without Donor Eggs, Improving the Life Quality of Women Suffering from Early Menopause Without Synthetic Hormonal Treatment.

Due to the fact that modern American and European women postpone childbirth until later in life, they are more likely to face the problem of ovarian insufficiency by the time they are ready to have children. So, the ability to restore the ovarian function safely is crucially important. Our study involved 38 women 31-45years of age with low ovarian reserves and at least two unsuccessful attempts to receive their oocytes through IVF. The blood from the patients was collected into two BD vacutainers for PRP preparation. The platelet concentration in the PRP was 1 × 106μl. PRP injections into the ovaries were performed by a gynecologist with a special 25G needle, 20cm in length, as an ultrasound-guided procedure or a laparoscopic-assisted approach. After PRP treatment, women were tested with several criteria for 12months. We saw a significant improvement in hormone levels; six healthy babies were born, ten pregnancies were achieved, and four out of the ten were from natural conception. The PRP injections into the ovaries are safe, productive, and a natural treatment that may help women with premature ovarian insufficiency to give birth to their own child. The difference and novelty with our method of ovarian rejuvenation is in obtaining a higher platelet concentration (about 1 × 106μl), which allows us to achieve long-lasting results, within 12months, after a single procedure. Additionally, for the first time, we proposed and successfully performed a laparoscopically assisted technique for administering PRP into the ovary.

FEATURES AND LANGUAGE REPRESENTATION OF THE LINGUOCULTURAL TYPE «MODERN AMERICAN WOMAN»

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the American as a new realia in the conceptual sphere of modern Ukrainian society. This is actively formed in the linguistic world image of all nations with the help of the media; therefore, the study of the characteristics of its creation and the stereotypes underlying this process is an important task for linguists.The authors analyze the phenomenon of linguocultural type and look at the approaches to it’s definition, the classification of types and lay emphasis at the modelling of types. On the basis of the algorithm of modelling introduced by O. Dmitrieva, the authors analyze the perceptual-imaginative and value characteristics of the “modern American woman”, which are formed in the perception of Ukrainians. As the mass media is one of the most powerful means of forming our conceptual reality, the research is made with the help of the investigation of modern American media materials as well as the opinion poll of the Ukrainians. The results show that the perceptive-imaginative and value characteristics of the linguistic-cultural concept of American are quite similar in both respondents' answers and media materials, but they also have some slight differences. The results have been proven with the help of the corpus analysis based on the Corpus of American Soap Operas. Summarizing the of modern American, we can say that she is a very attractive middle-aged woman who wants to succeed in her career and hobbies, and in her personal life. She is an independent strong woman who knows what she wants and is ready to achieve it. Her career and self-realization is often more important than other spheres of her life.

A Day in the Life of the American Woman: Construction and Mediation of the “American Woman” in Photographic Essays

In 2005, fifty women photographers participated in a project to capture the everyday lives of over seventy American women on the same day in order to provide a composite portrait of the modern American woman in the twenty-first century. Through a close analysis of the photographs and accompanying texts this article questions to what extent the definition proposed by the book A Day in the Life of the American Woman remains faithful to a “traditional” vision of the American woman, or on the contrary to what extent this definition reflects an empowered and diversified vision of women since the 70s feminist movement. Our findings reveal that although A Day in the Life presents a diversified vision of the modern, American woman, it simultaneously remains faithful to a more stereotypical vision where a woman’s primary goal is to remain a mom.

Feminism as Life's Work: Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars

Feminism as Life's Work: Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars

Mary K. Trigg. Feminism as Life's Work: Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars.

Mary K. Trigg. Feminism as Life's Work: Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars.

Editor's Note

Editor’s Note Jennifer S. Tuttle, Editor, Legacy Legacy is happy to announce that Dr. Summar C. Sparks has joined us as our new editorial assistant. Dr. Sparks recently defended her dissertation, “Bound by Paper: Nineteenth-Century Southern Editors and Their Northern Connections,” at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She brings experience working as an assistant editor at College English, and we are very happy to have her. We would also like to thank Amber LaPiana for her contributions as editorial assistant over the past two years. Dr. LaPiana has helped managing editor Mary Unger with myriad tasks, including proofreading, copyediting, fact-checking, and editing content for mla and house style. She is thorough and exacting in her work. She has also assisted me with improving and managing our workflow and collaborative editorial process. To all of this work she has brought both expertise in the field and lively collegiality. We observe the end of her term with regret, in that we will really miss working with her, but also with gratitude that the journal benefited from her gifts before her career took her elsewhere. In addition to noting these changes in the editorial team, we announce some changes in the composition of our advisory board. We are happy to appoint Catherine Keyser of the University of South Carolina to the board. Dr. Keyser has served the journal faithfully as a consultant/reader, where she distinguished herself through her meticulous, thoughtful, and constructive essay evaluations. Her broad expertise in modern American women’s writing, gender studies, and periodical studies will be greatly valued as we turn to her for guidance in her new role. We would also like to take this opportunity, with the conclusion of her term on the board, to thank Meredith Goldsmith for her stellar service. Dr. Goldsmith was unfailingly generous, not only in helping the Legacy editors make difficult decisions about the journal contents but also in accepting whatever assignments I might throw at her, some in quick succession. A journal editor herself, Dr. Goldsmith is extremely busy, yet she cheerfully complied with every single request I made of her. On behalf of the journal, I want to express our gratitude for all Dr. Goldsmith has done for Legacy and the field. We are fortunate indeed that she will continue serving us as a consultant/reader. [End Page ix] Finally, I’d like to thank our student interns—Shannon Cardinal, Josh Powers, Jennifer Bradley, Kassia Waggoner, and Melanie Calicchio—and to acknowledge the contributions of Amber LaPiana and former book review editor Sari Edelstein to the production of this issue. By the time it appears, Dr. LaPiana will have completed her term, but she was actively involved in editing its contents; Dr. Edelstein generously worked with current book review editor Jean Marie Lutes to advise her on the editing of that section. This kind of commitment is typical of those who give their service to Legacy. I offer them both admiration and thanks. [End Page x] Copyright © 2015 The University of Nebraska Press

Feminism as life's work: four modern American women through two world wars

With suffrage secured in 1920, feminists faced the challenge of how to keep their momentum going. As the centre of the movement shrank, a small, self-appointed vanguard of women carried the cause forward in life and work. Feminism as Life's Work profiles four of these women: the author Inez Haynes Irwin, the historian Mary Ritter Beard, the activist Doris Stevens, and Lorine Pruette, a psychologist. Their life-stories, told here in full for the first time, embody the changes of the first four decades of the twentieth century--and complicate what we know of the period. Through these women's intertwined stories, Mary Trigg traces the changing nature of the women's movement across turbulent decades rent by world war, revolution, global depression, and the rise of fascism. Criticizing the standard division of feminist activism as a series of historical waves, Trigg exposes how Irwin, Beard, Stevens, and Pruette helped push the U.S. feminist movement to victory and continued to propel it forward from the 1920s to the 1960s, decades not included in the wave model. At a time widely viewed as the doldrums of feminism, the women in this book were in fact taking the cause to new sites: the National Women's Party; sexuality and relations with men; marriage; and work and financial independence. In their utopian efforts to reshape work, sexual relations, and marriage, modern feminists ran headlong into the harsh realities of male power, the sexual double standard, the demands of motherhood, and gendered social structures. In Feminism as Life's Work , Irwin, Beard, Stevens, and Pruette emerge as the heirs of the suffrage movement, guardians of a long feminist tradition, and catalysts of the belief in equality and difference. Theirs is a story of courage, application, and perseverance--a story that revisits the bleak and lonely years of the U.S. women's movement and emerges with a fresh perspective of the history of this pivotal era.

The lost art of dress: the women who once made America stylish

As a glance down any street in America quickly reveals, American women have forgotten how to dress. We chase fads, choose inappropriate materials and unattractive cuts, and waste energy tottering in heels when we could be moving gracefully. Quite simply, we lack the fashion know-how we need to dress professionally and flatteringly. As historian and expert dressmaker Linda Przybyszewski reveals in The Lost Art of Dress, it wasn't always like this. In the first half of the twentieth century, a remarkable group of women--the so-called Dress Doctors--taught American women how to stretch each yard of fabric and dress well on a budget. Knowledge not money, they insisted, is the key to timeless fashion. Based in Home Economics departments across the country, the Dress Doctors offered advice on radio shows, at women's clubs, and in magazines. Millions of young girls read their books in school and at 4-H clothing clubs. As Przybyszewski shows, the Dress Doctors' concerns weren't purely superficial: they prized practicality, and empowered women to design and make clothing for both the workplace and the home. They championed skirts that would allow women to move about freely and campaigned against impractical and painful shoes. Armed with the Dress Doctors' simple design principles--harmony, proportion, balance, rhythm, emphasis--modern American women from all classes could learn to dress for all occasions in a way that made them confident, engaged members of society. A captivating and beautifully-illustrated look at the world of the Dress Doctors, The Lost Art of Dress introduces a new audience to their timeless rules of fashion and beauty--rules which, with a little help, we can certainly learn again.

Osa Johnson’s road to civilization

Abstract The self-described ‘motion picture explorer’ American Martin Johnson frequently cast his wife Osa (1894–1953) as the star of his African and Asian Pacific expeditionary films. Her appeal to audiences was evidenced not just by the media hype surrounding the features, but also by the many spin-off enterprises the Johnsons variously produced and inspired, from published memoirs to a clothing-line. Throughout the Johnsons’ productions, Osa performed a persona that fired American imaginations of what it was to be a modern American woman, significantly styling her body to fit the part. Set against the perceived ‘primitivism’ of Indigenous societies, Osa’s look took exaggerated proportions and she self-appointed as the leader amongst local women along a road to civilization, which ostensibly required the wearing of Western dress, styling and self-reflexivity.

Hers, His, and Theirs: Community Property Law in Spain and Early Texas

This is the first book on the Spanish origins of women’s property rights in modern America. Women in Spain, Mexico, and colonial Texas have enjoyed property rights not always extended to their Anglo-American sisters. A woman in Spanish or Mexican Texas of the nineteenth century could legally own land. These Tejanas bought and sold land, inherited it, and bequeathed it to their children. What’s more, they could sue and testify in court, they could adopt children, and they retained ownership of their dowry and premarital assets. A few historians have briefly acknowledged the uniquely Spanish roots of women’s property rights. This book is the first published work to fully treat the issue of how Spanish men proudly established these powerful rights while Anglo-American men reluctantly conceded them to their wives under the male-dominant tradition of English common law. In her book, Jean A. Stuntz provides convincing evidence that modern American women’s property rights can be traced through a long chain of documentation all the way back to ancient Spain.Through extensive research, Stuntz provides a vivid comparison of the historical traditions of England and Spain. She demonstrates that while the Anglo-Saxons were subordinating their women in the early legal codes of England, Spanish noblemen were strengthening the status of their women as the bedrock of the Spanish family and community. Women’s property rights emerged along with the earliest Spanish legal traditions. The author notes, for example, that as early as 1256, Alfonso X set out his fabled Las Siete Partidas to encompass the ancient Visigothic codes and the Spanish legal canon as the basis for the Spanish law. As the codes were manifested through the centuries in Castilian language, law, and philosophy, they deeply integrated the property rights of women. Stuntz says that in Spain, women came to symbolize “the most priceless possessions of the family, the community, and the realm” in the turbulent centuries of the Reconquista (p. 44). And because aristocratic Spanish knights sought privilege and glory through warfare, ranching, and horsemanship, they willingly deferred ganancial rights to their wives.In her systematic contrast of English and Spanish legal tradition, Stuntz cites the 1765 promulgation of English common law in William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England as a milestone in women’s rights. Blackstone defined the English woman’s status by declaring that “the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage” (p. 101). The English wife could not own, buy, or sell land or fully inherit her husband’s land. More importantly, Stuntz argues that the English transferred these codes to their American colonies even as their Spanish counterparts brought the women’s rights of their Recon-quista culture to their colonies in New Spain. As New Spain and the Spanish province of Texas gained their independence, they systematically incorporated the ancient codes into their new constitutions and congressional legislation. In Texas under the Republic of Mexico, Tejanas inherited their full legal status and property rights in Béxar, Goliad, and Nacogdoches.One of the major arguments of the book is that the Anglo-Texan policymakers of the Republic of Texas were motivated by their own financial distress to incorporate the Hispanic codes of community property, letting Texas women retain ownership of their family lands specifically in order “to protect family property from creditors” and banks that they had fled in the United States (p. 156). By combining women’s land ownership with the inalienable land ownership of the homestead, the new Texas constitution would protect their lands “by law from forced sale” by banks and creditors in the United States (p. 155), especially after Texas was annexed as a state in the American economy.The book extensively documents women’s rights in European, colonial, and early Texan codes and case law. Its strength is in the comparison of English common law with Spanish codes. And in keeping with the promise of her preface, Stuntz provides a viable rationale for the development of women’s ganancial rights in the Republic of Texas. Community property was a gambit to the Anglo male legislators. Stuntz concludes instructively, “Equality, fairness, and freedom are the ideals that Americans hold dear, even if they are exemplified by laws that originated in Spain” (p. 173).Beyond its simple, factual style, the book’s importance comes from its novel insights into a phase of Texas and American history. It posits simply that community property rights were another of the many cultural institutions transmitted from the early Spanish colonies and the Mexican Republic to the expanding United States of the nineteenth century. The book is an important read for Texas historians, political scientists, and the general readers who want to know how and why American women came to enjoy Spanish, Mexican, and Tejana rights.

Role-Playing the “Feminine” in Letters Home

Role-Playing the “Feminine” in Letters Home Wendy Whelan-Stewart U N I V E R S I T Y O F L O U I S I A N A A T L A F A Y E T T E Sylvia Plath’s corpus spans the gamut of genre classifications, all of which are dis¬ tinctly linked to the biographical. For instance, she is the author of not only “con¬ fessional” poetry, an autobiographical novel (a roman aclef), and short stories, but also of privately penned sketches, journals, and letters.* Three texts in particu¬ lar—none assembled for publication by Plath herself—are classified by publishers as autobiography: The Journals of Sylvia Plath, apartial collection of Plath’s jour¬ nal entries edited by Frances McCullough and prefaced vnth an introduction by TedHughes;TheUnabridgedJournalsofSylviaPlath,thecompletesetofaUof Plath’s extant journal entries; and Letters Home, aseries of personal letters written byPlathtoherfamilyyetcompiledandeditedbyhermother.Althoughreaders would be correct in understanding Sylvia Plath as the author of both the private journalsandthelettersshewrotetohermother,theywouldcommitanegregious error in assuming both works present aunified account of the writer’s life and that theLettersembodya“true,”evenhonest,SylviaPlath.AureliaSchoberPlath,who perhaps should be regarded as the true author of the text, relies on readers’under¬ standingofautobiographyasagenresothatherrepresentationofherrelationship withherdaughterwillrivaltheautobiographicalelementspresentinTheBellJar? Infact,SylviaPlath’sBellJar(publishedasfiction)andherJournalscanbereadin oppositiontoMrs.Plath’sLettersHome.Whatresultsisastrugglebetweenpubli¬ cations, all technically identified as autobiographical, to present Plath’s “real story.”Moreover,(mis)informedbyprevailingunderstandingsofautobiography, readersandMrs.PlathfailtoseethatinherlettersSylviaPlathdoesnotbearher soul or present an unadulterated glimpse into her life but instead performs for her audience (Mrs. Plath) the roles her mother wishes to see and manipulates her imagesothat,moreoftenthannot,sherepresentsanidealdaughter,student,or wife.ForPlath,stagingandperformancecannotbeseparatedfromautobiog phy in Letters Home. Fromthemomentofitsinception.LettersHomewasdesignedtoteUMrs. Plath’s story of her daughter and their relationship, rather than her daughter’s story.AfterSylviaPlath’spublicationofTheBellJarbyaBritishpressandhersub¬ sequent death in 1963, American publishers and writers began to hear of the book’s success and soon sought to publish it—despite Mrs. Plath’s strong misgiv¬ ings. In the end, however, she was forced to acquiesce to HarperCoUins and promptly came to resent their decision. In an interview from 1979 with The New York Times, Mrs. Plath not only revealed asense of injury in being identified by readersofTheBellJarasthenarrator’sdespisedmother,Mrs.Greenwood,butshe r a Intertexts ,Vo\. 12, No. 1-2 2008 ©Texas Tech University Press I N T E R T E X T S 1 3 0 also disclosed her intention to rewrite the history of her relationship with Sylvia for readers: “When ‘The Bell Jar’ came out in 1971, it became avery hard time for me,” Mrs. Plath said. “It was accepted as an autobiography, which it wasn’t. Sylvia manipu¬ lated it very skillfully. She invented, fused, imagined. She made an artistic whole that read as truth itself. That’s why Ihad to have Sylvia speak in her truest voice, which Iknow comes through in these letters.” (qtd. in Robertson) LettersHomeappearedin1975withthewords“bySylviaPlath”placedimmedi¬ ately beneath the title. No doubt, Mrs. Plath wanted to legitimize the text and to inform the reading public that it was atruer autobiography than The Bell Jar. However, one cannot help but notice that Mrs. Plath rivals her daughter for author of Letters Home. She did not, for example, print all of the letters Plath wrote home to her, but selected and rejected letters to build acoherent (and possi¬ bly idealistic) mother-daughter narrative.^ In addition, Mrs. Plath grouped the lettersintochaptersrepresentingperiodsinherdaughter’slife,andsheprovided notonlyalengthyintroductionbutalsocommentariesframingeachchapter.Her voicecarefullyattemptstoguidethereader’sinterpretationofthemother-anddaughterrelationshipthatdevelops . Despite Mrs. Plath’s attempts to control her daughter’s texts, it becomes quicklyapparentthatSylviaPlath’sletterstohermotherarenotwrittenin“her truest voice.” Rather, Sylvia seems to adopt personae when addressing her mother. Throughout the course of her letter writing, she acts out roles acceptable for the young modernAmerican woman: the boisterous, flirty young college stu¬ dent and, later, the dedicated and companionable wife. Certainly, Sylvia Plath may have studied these personae in various ladies magazines, which she fre¬ quently read and submitted poems to and which also providedAmerican woman readers with acceptable images and narratives of the idealAmerican woman. By reading Plath’s letters to her mother alongside these narratives of the ideal woman providedbymagazineslikeLadies’HomeJournal,weareabletoseejusthowPlath adopts these personae and enacts them for her mother, who assumes the role of theintelligent(thoughdeceived)Americanwomanreader.Evidently,SylviaPlath felt comfortable...

Getting the Picture Right: Women in Early Hollywood

Traditionally, historians have had as little professional interest in Hollywood as film scholars have had in history. Important insights about American culture have fallen into the breach. Modern American women's history has suffered in particular, since the story of modern femininity without Hollywood is like an opera without music: a visual spectacle that's missing a heart. Women poured their hearts into the making of Hollywood. They also made news, as when Alice Guy Blache moved into a state-of-the-art production facility in 1912 and Moving Picture World crowed: entire studio and factory were planned by Madame Alice Blache, the presiding genius of the Solax Company (p. 49). Lois Weber, reputedly the highest paid director in 1917, made pictures reflecting the Progressive Era's political ferment, releasing The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, which called for the legalization of birth control, that year. Women wrote more than half the silent era's screen plays, headed the scenario departments at film studios, and routinely earned the industry's highest salaries for their work. Mabel Normand, a star-producer at Keystone, pioneered the studio's slapstick style and performed its novel comedienne: a conventionally pretty girl who upended the conventions of respectable femininity. Star-producers like Helen Holmes wrote and enacted the period's Serial Queens, the gun-toting, death-defying heroines who attracted a wide audience and sent many middle-class women reformers into paroxysms over the industry's moral impact on female fans. In 1919, Mary Pickford, the era's first great star, spearheaded United Artists, a studio created to protect artists' ability to operate outside of the industry's emerging cartel. Dozens more female stars followed her lead, leveraging their celebrity into independent production companies. Yet a decade after Pickford founded United Artists the professional opportunities available to her sex shrank. As the sound era dawned, Weber advised ambitious young women not to follow her lead. You'll never get away with it, she warned in 1927 (p. 2).

David Crockett Graham (1884–1961) as Zoological Collector and Anthropologist in China (review)

Reviewed by: David Crockett Graham (1884–1961) as Zoological Collector and Anthropologist in China Nicholas Tapp (bio) Hartmut Walravens, editor. David Crockett Graham (1884–1961) as Zoological Collector and Anthropologist in China. Opera Sinologica Documenta 1. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006. 251 pp. with index. Paperback €58, ISBN 3–447–05042–X. David Crockett Graham, FRGS, spent most of his life in Sichuan Province, where he was curator of the West China Union University’s Museum of Archaeology, Art, and Ethnology. At first he was stationed in Suifu (now Yibin), then transferred to Chengdu in 1932. He produced monographs and major articles on religions in Sichuan, the Qiang, and the “Lolo” (Nosu, or Yi) people, and his 1954 collection of Miao (Hmong) tales and legends from Sichuan is superlative. Parts of his collection can still be seen at Chengdu University, where the museum he ran continues, but the greater part of it is at the Smithsonian Institution, which he was attached to as a collector for the U.S. National Museum since 1919. Although the Smithsonian website ( www.si.edu/archives ) has a short biography of him and a list of the various boxes in which his diaries and papers are kept, this collection is a valuable piece of archival footnoting to what must have been quite an extraordinary career. Graham presented two live pandas to the New York Zoo and about 400,000 specimens to the Smithsonian (p. 8). Some of the letters collected here to introduce his diaries make amusing reading: “October 22, 1925. Dear Mr. Graham, It gives me pleasure to acknowledge the receipt of four frogs, eight snakes, two salamanders and three lizards, seventy-two fishes, one hundred and thirty-five specimens, seventeen species of molluscs, thirty-seven bird skins, two mammals, three crabs, fifty shrimps, one earthworm, and a collection of miscellaneous insects . . .” (p. 33). The letters, from Alexander Wetmore, who later became the sixth Secretary of the Smithsonian (1944–1952), are stored at Whitman College, where Graham graduated before becoming a Baptist minister in 1911. As the introduction (pp. 7–9) says, probably the most valuable part of this volume is the bibliography of Graham’s 177 works (pp. 11–27), including his monographs and many contributions on archaeology, anthropology, and natural history to journals such as the Chinese Recorder and the Journal of the West China Border Research Society (JWCBRS); besides these, he published one article on the Lolo in American Anthropologist (1930) and several in Man (1938–1939) There is also a one-page list (p. 28) of short notices and (mainly) newspaper articles, and one senior thesis, perhaps at the Smithsonian, about Graham and aspects of his work. Sketch maps of his collection treks accompanying the relevant diaries are provided at the back (pp. 246–251), after the index. Graham was a folklorist, a Christian, a collector of animal and plant specimens, and an observer of human traits. The locals called him “Da Ren” (Great Man), according to his own notes. The [End Page 251] value of this collection is hard to assess, except as a piece of antiquarian interest. The diaries are not particularly well written—they do not compare well, for example, to those of his contemporary Samuel Pollard in Yunnan, extracts from which were published both by the latter’s son and by R. E. Kendall in 1954. And unlike the Pollard diaries, there is not a word about God in them, perhaps because they were intended mainly as records for the Smithsonian of his collecting expeditions. Yet flitting through them may give one a taste of what life was like at that time for unusual men like Graham who devoted themselves to a life in China engaged in proselytism and research. Graham, who received his doctorate in practical theology from Chicago in 1927 before further studies in cultural anthropology at Chicago and Harvard, must have been busy, taking anthropometric measurements of the Chinese and “aborigines” around him, attending to their ailments as a doctor, hunting all kinds of animals and birds, training taxidermists, collecting cultural artifacts and specimens of flora and fauna, developing his photographs, delivering sermons and even a speech on modern American women, teaching at the...

Between the Orient and the Ghetto: A Modern Immigrant Woman in Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements

Between the Orient and the Ghetto:A Modern Immigrant Woman in Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements Ljiljana Coklin (bio) Anzia Yezierska's first novel, Salome of the Tenements (1923), is one of the earliest attempts to situate the representation of a female Jewish immigrant within the larger context of American modernity. As such, the text is riddled by contradictions as the author strives to combine a female immigrant rags-to-riches story with a narrative of female empowerment. Yezierska's introductory portrayal of urban immigrant femininity caters to the established expectations of an American audience: it offers familiar sketches of the hardships of ghetto living and reinforces immigrant desire for social visibility and economic stability. Yet, Yezierska's ghetto girl is also a driven and aggressive achiever and compulsive consumer, aware of her sexuality and increasingly skeptical of the female American Dream: of matrimony as a vehicle for women's upward social mobility. I argue here that Yezierska's characterization of Sonya Vrunsky in Salome of the Tenements redefines the ghetto girl as bold, ambitious, and goal oriented and as such participates in the larger efforts of American feminists to redefine the New American Woman as independent, active, strong willed, and sexually assertive. Yezierska establishes a link between an empowered immigrant woman and a liberated New American Woman through her employment of rich yet contradictory Oriental imagery, and in particular through her use of the Salome myth. Yezierska's use of the images of Salome and the Orient serves several purposes in Salome of the Tenements. The numerous references to the biblical story of Salome establish the Semitic background of Yezierska's main character and the polarized world of modern America, in this case between a Jewish immigrant woman and an Anglo-Saxon American male. The identification of Yezierska's Sonya Vrunsky with Salome, the pivotal figure of European modernist art and the fin-de-siècle Decadent movement, aligns Yezierska's immigrant narrative with modernist literary and artistic output as well as empowers the immigrant heroine, hungry for cultural sophistication, social advancement, economic power, and sexual freedom. Furthermore, Yezierska's choice of images [End Page 136] of Oriental otherness and of the heroine's free "dance" of social mobility participates actively in the American social and cultural scene of the time. It reflects the visual fascination of early Hollywood with the Orient, responds to the shocking emergence of modern dance in America, and supports efforts of American feminists to resort to the Oriental topology as a new geography of women's newly found liberties: economic, political, artistic, and sexual. Yezierska's invocation of the Orient in her representation of a Jewish immigrant woman is a strategy to empower her heroine as well as to situate her within the larger context of modernity, American pop culture, and emerging feminism. Yet, the seductiveness of the Oriental imagery complicates Yezierska's efforts, as the same imagery is used, as Edward Said has argued, to disempower, distanciate, and dismiss the other on the grounds of its excessive and destabilizing, albeit charming and exoticized, difference. It does not surprise, then, that burdened with complex imagery and contradictory meanings, the immigrant heroine in Yezierska's text becomes a contested site in which biology and artifice, radicalism and conservatism, submissiveness and aggression, images of a noble savage woman and a stylized, decadent seductress, intersect. The Jewish immigrant woman in Salome of the Tenements emerges simultaneously as a pristine, self-sacrificial, exoticized pre-modern ingénue and a scheming, dishonest, and corrupt woman, whose sexuality threatens to destabilize the power structure of gender relations in turn-of-the-century America. The unsettling inconsistency in Yezierska's character is a powerful comment on the contradictory existence of the Jewish immigrant woman in modern America, on the jarring contrasts between immigrant ghettos and urban America, and on larger social imperatives to identify, contain, and situate the redefined roles of a modern American woman. The Case of Anzia Yezierska As an immigrant writer with a proto-feminist orientation, Anzia Yezierska and her work are currently experiencing a revival of interest among feminist scholars and audiences. Her unconventional lifestyle—she abandoned her husband and daughter, insisted on a "room...

Zelda Sayre, Belle

There are few more memorable wives in twentieth-century American culture than Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who married to the successful young author F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, had appeared a few weeks before their marriage. Because of his popularization of the Jazz Age, complete with its New York partying, elite college society, and alcohol, dancing, and flappers, readers tend to place his beautiful bride with the exotic name--Zelda--within those fictional contexts. In reality, Zelda Sayre had never been to New York City until she went there, accompanied by her older married sister, to wed Fitzgerald. Neither had she been abroad, nor had she gone to college. In fact, she had seldom spent a night away from her father's house. Zelda Sayre in fact a Montgomery, Alabama, girl, whose father a judge there in the state capitol. But more than that, Zelda Sayre a highly visible southern belle, soon to be immortalized in literature as the essence of the early-twentieth-century's thoroughly modern American woman. To change the definition of Zelda from flapper to is to move from the commercialized and risque image of woman as fast, easy--a speed--to that of the highly desirable but more traditional and consistently protected beauty. Flirtatious and flamboyant, the southern belle often a local celebrity. She the woman one courted, although she never assumed to be available. In the candid words of Virginia Foster Durr, a contemporary of Zelda's who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, belles almost like visiting movie stars.... the epitome of success. Zelda Sayre, Durr wrote, was just gorgeous. She had a golden glow around her.... The boys would line up the whole length of the ballroom to dance with her for one minute. She just pre-eminent. And we recognized it. (1) The belle is peculiar to the South, and Fitzgerald, who grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota; Buffalo, New York; and Princeton, would have known little about belledom. Requisites of this time-consuming status at the close of the nineteenth century included birth into a certain social class along with the means to afford suitable clothes, train travel, and leisure. Several dozen callers on Sunday afternoons, as many letters daily, boxes of long-stemmed red roses, small square boxes of corsages, and the offers of fraternity pins, club insignias, and engagement rings--not to mention the actual dates, parties, and dances--kept the true belle busy from morning to night and into the next morning. The orderliness of the custom may have been difficult for outsiders to fathom, but within each social circle, rituals were firm: town girls could not be belles (again, social class--with a proper and recognizable family name--was crucial); neither could fast girls. The existence of the belle a tribute to the power, and the self-conceit, of the higher classes within the South: it reaffirmed patriarchy in that status as a belle entirely dependent upon the social standing of the girl's father. (2) Having money not the most significant part of being from the right social class. In the South people knew which families were which, and in Montgomery the Sayres were important people. Being popular as a teenager and a debutante a way of ensuring that the woman in question the right sort of girl, a suitable candidate for marriage, for, ultimately, the belle to take on the roles of wife and, particularly, of mother. Southern bloodlines, like southern manners, were not to be corrupted. Stemming from the aftermath of the Civil War, when the barriers between the white and black races became even more firmly entrenched--and horribly enforced through lynching--the politics of marriage grew increasingly significant. Because fortunes had been lost during both the Civil War and Reconstruction, social position maintained largely on the basis of family name and through one family's partnership in marriage with another stable and well-placed family. …

Precious fire: Maud Russell and the Chinese Revolution

When Maud Russell (1893-1989) first sailed for China in 1917, she traveled as of a number of foreign dispatched by the YWCA to do Woman's Work for Woman. A product of the Progressive Era, she sought to bring the benefits of Christianity and Western civilization to a new generation of Chinese women struggling to find their own path to modernity in the wake of the 1911 Republican Revolution. Instead, over the next twenty-six years, Russell was herself transformed - from Christian liberal reformer to committed Marxist revolutionary. According to Karen Gamer, Russell's personal political trajectory paralleled that of the YWCA in China, which evolved during the 1920s and 1930s from a Westernled, middle-class-oriented institution into a Chinese-led organization that addressed the needs of revolutionary working women. Crossing class, race, and cultural boundaries to learn from their Chinese associates, Russell and a few other western YWCA secretaries developed a shared vision of feminist social change that included support for the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership. Returning to the United States during World War II, Russell joined American liberals and leftists in promoting government cooperation with the Soviet Union and other Communist Party-led states and movements. After the war her views, including her advocacy of a one world Progressive Party, collided with the anticommunist imperatives of the emerging Cold War. In response, Russell adopted a defensive and dogmatic pro-communist stance from which she would never retreat. During a long and at times lonely career as a radical activist and publisher of the Far East Reporter (1952-1989), Russell was defamed and investigated by the anticommunist right and embraced by the antiwar New Left Her notoriety as a proponent of friendship with the People's Republic of China soared during the restoration of U.S-China diplomatic relations in the 1970s, only to dissolve in the 1980s as she denounced the revival of capitalist economics in China on ideological grounds. Although Russell's own political vision may have narrowed over the years, Garner's reconstruction of her life broadens our understanding of U.S.-China relations during the twentieth century. Not only did Russell come to see her own country through the eyes of an ideological antagonist, she also brought to that vantage point the experiences of a modern American woman. As Garner shows, even if did not agree with Russell's views, could not deny the fervor of her commitment to gender equality, social justice, and internationalism.

The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women

This pathbreaking anthology is an illuminating look at the lives of ten influential twentieth-century American women

The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women.

The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women.

A gulf so deeply cut: American women poets and the Second World War

In A Gulf So Deeply Cut Susan Schweik looks at poems written by American women between 1941 and 1945 and, on a larger scale, examines the workings of gender in the politics of war. The Schweik writes of is the gulf between the sexes, between homefront and frontline, between the male soldier, traditionally understood to have experienced too much, and the women left behind, assumed to have experienced nothing at all. Calling into question experience of war as an ideological construct, Schweik traces its limits to masculinity and considers its implications for writers and reades of both sexes. She closely reads the poems of Louise Bogan, Marianne Moore, H. D. Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Muriel Rukeyser, Toyo Suvemoto, and Mitsuve Yamada, as well as the work of male poets such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Wilfred Owen, and Randall Jarrell. Schweik draws upon an unusually wide variety of sources - not only published books of poetry but also manuscripts, letters, anthologies, government-sponsored propaganda, private journals and notebooks, material from the Black and Yiddish presses, and work published in the internment camps by Japanese Americans. She reads the poems in relation to the social practices of war-making and of gender-making, showing how they both reproduce and contest dominant perceptions of and gender. A Gulf So Deeply Cut should prove invaluable as an analysis of the ideology of 20th century Anglo/American poetry and as a mulitcultural history of modern American women's poetry.