An Excerpt from New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century

By Sabrina Fuchs Abrams

Seen as too smart, too sassy, too sexy, and too strident, female humorists have been largely resisted and overlooked. The foremothers of women’s humor used satire, irony, and wit as an indirect form of social protest. New York women of wit during the interwar period went beyond the domestic realm to address larger issues of political and social reform while questioning assumptions about traditional gender roles. These writers include Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote satiric sketches under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd; Tess Slesinger among the Menorah Journal group; Dorothy Parker among the Algonquin wits; Jessie Redmon Fauset among the Harlem Renaissance writers; Dawn Powell of the Lafayette Circle; and Mary McCarthy among the Partisan Review crowd. These women writers developed a more urban and urbane form of humor that reflects the increasingly cosmopolitan and sophisticated time and place in which they lived and helped shape the voices of feminist humorists of future generations.

The New Woman, the New Negro Woman, and the Racial, Gender, and Class Politics of Humor

The cultural shift in the 1920s and ’30s that gave rise to the modern women of wit was focused on urban centers, most notably New York City. 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 US society. Through the use of satire, the female humorists of the interwar period capture the ambiguity of the progressive ideals of modernism and the dream of urban possibility, many of which revolve around the figure of the New Woman. Issues of racial, class, and gender inequality in the interwar period were taken up by the Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Redmon Fauset and by Tess Slesinger in what Paula Rabinowitz terms her “socialist feminist” fiction and underlies much of the irony and satire of Dorothy Parker and Mary McCarthy. The changing role of the New Woman from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1920s and ’30s created both opportunities and conflicts for the modern, educated woman. The New Woman is defined in the North American Review in 1894 as “an independent, college-educated American girl devoted to suffrage, progressive reform, and sexual freedom.”[i] The figure of the New Woman shifted from the first-generation progressive social reformers and suffragettes of the late nineteenth century, who advocated for legal and economic equality for women, to the second-generation Greenwich Village bohemians of the 1910s and 20s, who were defined by the sexual freedom and personal independence that accompanied the advent of birth control and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote.[ii]

The New Woman of the Jazz Age and the possibilities of free love, radical politics, and artistic and professional freedom found expression in Greenwich Village in the 1920s. Home of the Marxist magazine The Masses; leftist intellectuals like Floyd Dell and Max Eastman; the social activists Mabel Dodge, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman; and writers like Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Heterodoxy Club, Greenwich Village was a nexus for progressive thought and modern morality. The radicalized Greenwich Village New Woman gave rise to a more commodified, commercialized version of the flapper in an age of mass media, consumer culture, and modern publishing and magazine culture, in which the progressive, urban values and styles could be spread across the country. The figure of the flapper was contradictory—while her androgynous bobbed hair, drop-waist dresses, and freedom to drink, smoke, and engage in premarital and extramarital sex offered the promise of freedom and autonomy, it was often in the service of the traditional, heteronormative goal of marriage. It is this world of the urban sophisticate and their purported progressive values that is the object of satire for such female humorists as Dorothy Parker, Tess Slesinger, and Mary McCarthy, among others.

The figure of the New Woman is further problematic in that she is seen largely as privileged and white; issues of racial and class equality were subordinated in her struggle for gender equality. While the New Woman embraced free love and individual autonomy, the New Negro Woman was engaged in a project of racial uplift whereby she sought the only avenue available to escape racial and gender exploitation, through bourgeois respectability and the model of marriage and motherhood associated with the “cult of True Womanhood” of the Victorian era. The emphasis on purity or sexual respectability was particularly important in that it combated the stereotype of the lascivious Black woman or “Jezebel,” an ironic reputation given the reality that Black women were historically exploited by white slave owners and treated as breeders rather than acting as temptresses. Given the legacy of slavery and sexual exploitation as well as the long history of minority women in the workforce as a financial necessity rather than an assertion of personal autonomy, African American women did not view sexual freedom and professional engagement in the same way as their white, bourgeois counterparts.

The progressive ideals of the modern, independent woman of the 1920s are further called into question by the financial crisis of the Great Depression and the social movements of the 1930s. The 1930s emphasis on class struggle and workers’ rights subordinated issues of gender equality, both in life and in literature. With the rise in unemployment (25 percent of the workforce was unemployed by 1923), women who were seen as vital to the workforce during World War I were being sent back to the home, and the focus on self-fulfillment characteristic of the 1920s was replaced by a sense of collective social responsibility for the poor and unemployed. Feminist issues of sexual freedom, gender equality, and reproductive rights were subordinated to more pressing and widespread issues of workers’ rights at home and the rise of fascism abroad.[i] The Great Depression exacerbated conditions of segregation, discrimination, and looming poverty in Harlem, contributing to the historic race riots of 1919 and 1935.

The changing role of the modern woman was crucial to the development of women’s humor in the 1920s and ’30s, since theories of humor have traditionally identified the aggressive, intellectual, and sexual tendencies of humor to be largely “masculine” and thereby inaccessible to women. From eighteenth-century conduct manuals to Victorian ideals of the “cult of true womanhood,” women were bound by feminine ideals of “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.”[ii] With access to higher education beginning in the nineteenth century, an increasing role in the workforce during World War I, and the advent of birth control, women began to enjoy a financial, intellectual, and sexual freedom that defied traditional gender roles.

This newfound freedom was seen as a threat to the existing patriarchal power structure, leading some to demonize the figure of the independent woman, creating a split between the domestic “Angel” and the liberated “Monster.” This defiant figure is identified with female empowerment, wit, and humor, which, according to Hélène Cixous, is falsely identified by men as a threatening, monstrous figure because they cannot see her for who she is. “You only have to look at the Medusa straight to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”[iii] The laughing Medusa, says the feminist theorist Susan Rubin Suleiman, is a “trope for women’s autonomous subjectivity and for the necessary irreverence of women’s writing and rewriting.”[iv] The relation of humor to knowledge and of knowledge to power is at the root of the female claim to humor and the denial especially among male critics of women’s humor.

Theories and Methods of Humor: Satire and Female Laughter

Satire, which is often written by an outsider, offers women and other marginalized groups an ideal way to voice their social protest through the socially acceptable form of laughter. “Satire is usually written by powerless people; it is an act of revenge.”[v] So wrote Mary McCarthy, a female satirist associated with the anti-Stalinist liberal magazine Partisan Review in the 1930s. The female satirist is in a unique position as somewhat of an outsider operating within mainstream society; this dual perspective shapes the often ironic, double-voiced, or dialogical nature of much of women’s humor. The aggressive posture of the satirist, however, is often seen as being “unfeminine” and is one reason why women’s humor has been overlooked and even resisted. For many of these women writers, the double-voiced irony of humor as well as the female self-fashioning of their appearance offers a necessary masking of their subversive message. Nonetheless, being a sharp and shrewd woman led to being labeled a “modern American bitch” or a “bitch intellectual.”[vi] These pioneering women of wit broke boundaries for the more overtly feminist humorists of today, who have turned bright, bold, and bitchy from a stigma into a rallying cry for future generations.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of female satirists of the interwar period is that many of them move beyond the domestic sphere and beyond male-female relations to write more far-reaching political and social satire. McCarthy satirizes attempts by intellectuals in the 1940s to form libertarian social utopias in The Oasis (1949); and The Groves of Academe (1952) exposes the hypocrisy of the fellow-traveling liberal faculty in their treatment of a self-proclaimed anti-Communist faculty member at a small, liberal arts college during the Joseph McCarthy era of the 1950s. She addresses the conflicted role of the woman intellectual and the failed idea of progress in the 1920s and ’30s in more autobiographical works like The Company She Keeps (1939) and The Group (1963). Tess Slesinger exposes the antibourgeois idealism of leftist intellectuals in the 1920s in The Unpossessed (1934), while addressing the conflicted role of the woman intellectual, trapped between traditional issues of marriage and family and assertion of her independence. Dawn Powell, who aspired to write more sweeping social satire, exposes the false ideals of Greenwich Village bohemians and the hypocrisy of the New York publishing world in the interwar period. Such female satirists were caught in a double bind for being too strident and serious in their social critique and not serious enough in taking on the seemingly trivial subject matter of the battle of the sexes.

The gendered hierarchy of society has historically necessitated a masking of critical female voices through a double discourse. In “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” Elaine Showalter identifies the dual text found in much of women’s writing: “The feminist content of feminine art is typically oblique, displaced, ironic and subversive; one has to read it between the lines, in the missed possibilities of the text.”[vii] This “carnivalization” of dialogue is traced by Judy Little to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “heteroglossia” or the “dialogic” voice found in “the Menippea” (Menippean satire).[viii] While Bakhtin sees the carnivalesque as a temporary state of transgression or challenge to the status quo, Little suggests that women use this carnivalesque spirit to pose a more lasting challenge to the status quo through a masked, double-voiced discourse. The double voice of much of women’s writing and of women’s humor in particular is part of the modernist project, which uses irony to pose a critical, subversive meaning beyond the literal or overt meaning. For women, this dichotomous humor is often masked through the invocation of gender stereotypes in order to subvert them. As Nancy Walker observes, female humorists often “employ stereotypes of women for the purpose of mocking those stereotypes and showing their absurdity and even danger.” Such stereotypes include “the gossipy spinster, the nagging wife, the inept housekeeper, the lovelorn woman, the dumb blond.”[ix] The use of stereotypes, as in the case of Dorothy Parker, can be misinterpreted as an endorsement of them rather than a critique of the society that created them.

Women’s Humor and Public Perception/Reception

The question remains, why does women’s humor continue to be overlooked and undervalued? And why did these New York women of wit feel the need to mask their social critique through humor? The primary resistance to women’s humor goes back to false assumptions about feminine versus masculine behavior associated with the expression of intellect, aggression, and humor. Women were not supposed to “get” jokes, and they were certainly not expected to tell jokes. Furthermore, humor was considered a “public” or performative function, usually requiring an audience, while women were traditionally constrained to the “private” spheres of home, church, or other gatherings of women. Thus, if women were acknowledged to have a body of humor, it was dismissed (by predominantly male critics) as revolving around “trivial” domestic or “lady’s” matters. Rebecca Krefting offers a cultural materialist explanation for women’s perceived lack of humor: simply put, audiences pay to hear male comics affirm their mainstream views, while there is little incentive to listen to female and other marginalized comics challenge the dominant power structures of society through “charged” humor.[x] Marginalized humor by women or other minorities is further resisted because it is seen as a threat to people in positions of power.

But this does not mean that such humor does not exist or that it is not funny; it is a matter of perception and access, and increasingly female comedians are finding a venue through multiple media outlets to find an audience for their humor. With the recent proliferation of female humorists on the stage and in the media and with the mantle of the smart, outspoken woman being heralded as a form of female empowerment in the era of Bitch Media, it is time to look back at the pioneering women of wit with a serious view.

Sabrina Fuchs Abrams is professor of English at the State University of New York, Empire State University in the School for Graduate Studies. She is the author of Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Postwar Intellectual, editor of Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers and Literature of New York, and associate editor of Studies in American Humor. This blog is adapted from her latest book, New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century (Penn State University Press, 2023).

[i] Qtd. in Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 2.

[ii] See Lois Rudnick, “The New Woman,” 71. In 1915, The Cultural Moment, edited by Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick, 69-81. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991, 71.

[iii] Alice Kessler-Harris and Paul Lauter, introduction to The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger. 1932. Reprint, Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1984.

[iv] Barbara Welter. "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860." American Quarterly (Summer 1966): 151-167.

[v] Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa." Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs vol.,1 no.1 (Summer 1976), 885.

[vi] Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, 168.

[vii] Qtd. in Doris Grumbach, The Company She Kept: A Revealing Portrait of Mary McCarthy. New York: Coward-McCann, 1967, 147.

[viii] Norman Mailer branded McCarthy a “modern American bitch” in his 1963 review of The Group, and Hilton Kramer called her “our leading bitch intellectual. Mailer, “The Mary McCarthy Case,” New York Review of Books 17 Oct. 1963:1-3; Kramer, “Mary McCarthy’s Valentine to Fanny Farmer,” Washington Post 23 (May 1971): 1.

[ix] Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics” rpt. In Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader edited by K. M. Newton. Palgrave Macmillan, 1997, 217.

[x] Judy Little, “Humoring the Sentence: Women's Dialogic Comedy." In Women's Comic Visions, edited by June Sochen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991: 20; Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, 106-37.

[xi] Nancy A. Walker, A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 9, 11, 20.

[xii] Rebecca Krefting, All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, 107.

Arts & Culture, Excerpts, Gender & Sexuality, Progressive Era, Women, Race & EthnicityRachel PitkinSeptember 13, 2023Comment