Twentieth-century American Women Research Articles

Contributors

Contributors

Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man by Nieves Pascual Soler

Reviewed by: Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man by Nieves Pascual Soler Alice L. McLean (bio) Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man Nieves Pascual Soler Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, ix + 126 pp. ISBN 978-3319709222, $54.99 hardcover. Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies explores men's life writing, focusing on works penned by celebrity chefs. The book begins with a cursory overview of the secondary role food plays in nineteenth-century canonical "narratives of masculinity" by Henry Adams, Henry James, and Benjamin Franklin before diving into contemporary life writing by seven men—namely, Michael Ruhlman, Bill Buford, Grant Achatz, Marco Pierre White, Randy King, Steven Rinella, and Hank Shaw. According to Nieves Pascual Soler, the type of autobiography crafted by these chefs enables them to script a performance that works to mask—yet ultimately belies—a deep anxiety about cooking as an ideologically effeminate task. To aid in his performance, each chef-author draws on various forms of hyper-masculine life writing, casting himself as a hero, a criminal, or a hunter. As Pascual Soler acknowledges, the role of cooking has long been split along gender lines, with men serving as professional chefs and women as home cooks. Although not explicitly articulated in Food and Masculinity, this split likewise manifests within the cookbook genre—Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) trained generations of middle-class white women how to rule the home kitchen, while Auguste Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire (1903) served as the canonical text for twentieth-century professional chefs. Not surprisingly, the trajectory of men's and women's food writing has been significantly impacted by the rigidly gendered nature of cooking, a rigidity that becomes especially manifest in the culinary autobiographies explored in Chapter 3. Pascual Soler argues that chefs are driven to depict themselves as heroes or anti-heroes in order to compensate for the "feminizing power of cooking" (49). The drive to jettison femininity from the professional kitchen, as Pascual Soler shows, finds its most powerful exemplar in the work of Marco Pierre White, whose Devil in the Kitchen (first published as White Slave in England but renamed when reprinted for an American audience) showcases the "badass" celebrity chef who initiated a wave of "criminal confessionals," a genre that includes Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Gordon Ramsay's Roasting in Hell's Kitchen, and Jason Sheehan's Cooking Dirty. This genre of food writing, according to Pascual Soler, presents a persona that draws inspiration from detective fiction and criminal autobiography. As it does in Chapter 3, the book situates men's culinary autobiographies within various genres of fiction and autobiography. It does not, however, seriously ponder how life writing blends into food writing or examine in detail the gender ideologies that bifurcate men's and women's culinary autobiographies. It reviews only cursorily Traci Marie Kelly's "'If I Were a Voodoo Priestess': Women's Culinary Autobiographies," Denise Gigante's Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century [End Page 924] Gastronomy, and my own Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century American Women's Food Writing. The book would benefit from a more sustained engagement with the historical context laid out by these three works of literary food studies, a context that clearly establishes a history of gendered autobiographical food writing dating back to the early 1800s, and underscores that genre and gender within culinary literature have long been mutually constitutive. In particular, the autobiographies explored in Food and Masculinity are directly descended from the two most masculine forms of culinary literature—professional cookbooks and gastronomic essays, the latter of which "worked in many ways against the feminized aesthetic of the novel, founded on ideals of bourgeois domesticity" (Gigante xxxv). Rather than contextualizing the chefs' narratives within the tradition of food writing, Pascual Soler places them into the historical context of the heroic journey, criminal writing, and the hunting autobiography in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Using Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the foundation for her second chapter, Pascual Soler argues that the autobiographies by Michael Ruhlman, Bill Buford, and Grant Achatz construct narratives in which the author transforms...

Autonomous, but Not Alone: The Reappropriation of Female Community in The Women of Brewster Place and Housekeeping

‘Autonomous, but not Alone: The Reappropriation of Female Community in The Women of Brewster Place and Housekeeping’ outlines a shift in the literature of black and white women, as well as a shift in the genre of narrative of community. Gloria Naylor and Marilynne Robinson reveal the impact of the political and social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s in their novels, The Women of Brewster Place (1982) and Housekeeping (1980). Naylor examines the impact of racial and sexual oppression on one African-American community through an exploration of constructions of power in intra-racial relationships. She considers the extent to which African-American women challenge traditional gender roles, as well as how they are forced to adapt those roles as a result of oppression. Robinson also challenges traditional female gender roles through the experiences of her character Sylvie. Sylvie returns to her hometown and family home after having abandoned conventional society and roles altogether. In her return, she attempts to balance the binary of individualism and community. In the end, female community in both novels destroys “home” and thus directly challenges the alterity of women's position within the domestic sphere – moving on to reappropriate community by grounding it in individual identity. In resisting the binary between individualism and community, twentieth-century American women writers challenge community as a subordinate, alterior position for women and community itself is redefined.

Gendering Mobility: Women, Work and Automobility in the United States

AbstractThis article examines women's relationship with car driving in the United States. The growth of American ‘automobility’ increased throughout the twentieth century, but most historians have ignored its relationship with women. They have assumed that the motor car was a masculine vehicle in terms of both its technology and use. Even those who recognized the motor car as a machine for changing lifestyles and interpersonal relationships considered that the male head of household had authority over choosing and driving the family vehicle. Some women, however, always drove. Though their numbers were relatively small in the years before the Second World War, they quickly seized the opportunity to get behind the wheel in succeeding years as more and more cars were produced in the United States and imported vehicles became popular. Women needed to drive to manage their unpaid work in the home efficiently and, when they entered the paid labour force in increasing numbers, they needed to run their households and to travel to their paid work. By the end of the twentieth century American women were as likely to drive as their male counterparts, though their patterns of driving were different. In the process, the automobile had become a sex neutral vehicle.

Twentieth-century American women's fiction: a critical introduction

Introduction: The Genealogy of American Women's Narrative, 1892-1995 'Sickbed deathbed birthbed': Therapy and Writing in the 1890s Re-Making the Home, 1909 - 1933: Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Mary Antin Modernist Geographies: Space in the Fiction of Willa Cather, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein The Interwar Social Problem Novel: Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Agnes Smedley 'There are so many horrible examples of regional writers, and the South is loaded': Eudora Welty, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor Dysfunctional Realism: Ann Petry, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford, Jane Bowles 'What's Happening in America': Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Joyce Carol Oates Fiction for the Village: Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cynthia Ozick Index

Girls who became famous literalists of the imagination

This study identifies the early conditions of successful adults by an historical analysis of psychological traits and childhood environments of 38 notable twentieth century American women writers. The sample was derived from Sicherman and Green's (1980) biographies of 442 notable American women in over 50 fields of accomplishment. We rated multiple traits and conditions representing cognitive, affective, familial, and educational aspects of the sample. The results focus on the degree of persistence of the traits in essayists compared to the other notable women, and provide a developmental model of human potential.

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

War and peace through women's eyes: a selective bibliography of twentieth-century American women's fiction

Preface Introduction World War One Ward War Two Vietnam War Nuclear War War and Peace Author Index Title Index Subject Index

Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature , and: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature , and: Insatiable Appetites: Twentieth-Century American Women's Bestsellers , and: Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women's Romance Fiction , and: Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature, and: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature, and: Insatiable Appetites: Twentieth-Century American Women's Bestsellers, and: Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women's Romance Fiction, and: Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature Sharon O'Brien Beth Ann Bassein . Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature. Westport: Greenwood, 1984. 207 pp. $27.95. Linda Huf . A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature. NY: Unger, 1983. 159 pp. $13.50. Madonne M. Miner . Insatiable Appetites: Twentieth-Century American Women's Bestsellers. Westport: Greenwood, 1984. 142 pp. $27.95. Kay Mussell . Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women's Romance Fiction. Westport: Greenwood, 1984. 192 pp. $27.95. Janice A. Radway . Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. 222 pp. No price given. Beth Ann Bassein takes on a major project in Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature: to examine the "image, aura, and actuality of death as they relate to women's lives both in literature and, insofar as art represents life, in reality as people know or define it." In exploring what she sees as the "almost universal" associations among women, death, and sexuality in patriarchal Western culture, Bassein ranges widely throughout history and literature, devoting chapters to gender and language, Christianity, Renaissance poetry, adultery in fiction, the "death aura" in modern poetry, and twentieth-century British and American fiction. She ends with a chapter on Adrienne Rich, whose subversion and revision of the traditional identification of women and death allows Bassein to end the book on an optimistic note. An engaged feminist critic, Bassein is disturbed by [End Page 353] the links she senses between the negative attitudes expressed toward women in literature and male violence toward women in life; she concludes with an Appendix that provides a brutal list of social crimes against women (including female infanticide, foot-binding, rape, suttee, and murder), arguing that literary and symbolic associations of women with death help to legitimate such acts. The book's ambitious scope—Bassein's attempt to synthesize attitudes toward women and death across cultures and historical periods—is also its major weakness. Because Bassein assumes an unchanging continuity from the Middle Ages to the present in cultural attitudes toward "the inseparable triad: woman, sex, death," she gives us an ahistorical argument, failing to account for changing ideologies as well as for varying social and historical contexts. Hence she also oversimplifies the complex interplay between symbolic and social systems, image and attitude, prescription and behavior. Although she hopes to examine both the "image" and the "actuality" of women's lives, she tends to confuse the two, as in her assumption that a repressive Victorian sexual ideology "cut [women] off from real life" and "stifled their development." Recent studies by Carl Degler and Peter Gay, however, demonstrate that this was not the case: there was considerably more sexual freedom and enjoyment in the nineteenth century for both women and men than the prescriptive literature would suggest. Bassein's attempt to integrate systems of cultural representation—literature, myth, religion—with social/historical actualities is admirable, but her insufficient awareness of social history unfortunately places both her questions and her conclusions on shaky methodological ground. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman Linda Huf avoids the problems raised by interdisciplinary scholarship by restricting herself to a literary subject: her concern is the feminist exploration of the interconnections between gender and genre. Proceeding from the assumption that the male kunstlerroman does not tell the woman artist's story, Huf sets out to define and to analyze the female novel of artistic emergence. She devotes an introductory chapter to isolating the common elements in the female kunstlerroman and then applies her paradigm to six American novels, ranging from the midnineteenth to the twentieth century: Ruth Hall (1855), The Story of Avis (1877), The Awakening (1899), The Song of the Lark (1915), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), and The Bell Jar (1963...

Plucky Little Ladies and Stout-Hearted Chums: Serial Novels for Girls, 1900–1920

The early years of the twentieth century saw the sudden flowering of a specialized form of juvenile literature, the serial novels written for and about adolescent girls. From 1900 to 1917, literally dozens of new series emerged to chronicle the adventures of teenage heroines at school, at play, at work, and in what was invariably called “The Great Outdoors.” Although they are not as well remembered as the contemporaneous sagas of boy idols like Frank Merriwell, Tom Swift, or the Rover Boys, the many-volumed adventures of Dorothy Dale, Billie Bradley, Ruth Fielding, Polly Pendleton, Aunt Jane's Nieces, and other all-American heroines that began to appear in the decades before World War I provide a fascinating record of the diverse interests and often contradictory attitudes and expectations attributed to the first generation of twentieth-century American women.