Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era (review)

The New Woman, as an iconic figure of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century culture in America, has had "her" share of scholarly attention, but as Charlotte J. Rich shows this iconic figure was already being interrogated by women of color, even as "she" gained an established place in American culture. Women of color in this era wrote narratives that both endorse a search for female empowerment but also critique the predominantly white, middle-class ideology of the so-called "First Wave" womanturned-suffragette movement that had, in part, given the New Woman a socio-political life. As Rich says in her conclusion, the full flowering of that interrogation would not come to pass until women of color, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, would once again critique how white privilege inflected the socio-political quest for female empowerment. But Rich makes it clear how whiteness-as-power had been under scrutiny even as the New Woman was being consolidated.

In her book, Rich takes a close look at the Amerindian women writers S. Alice Callahan and Mourning Dove, the African American novelist Pauline Hopkins, and immigrant writers Sui Sin Far, Maria Cristina Mena, and Anzia Yezierska. All of them engaged in their works with the figure of the New Woman in the Progressive era, not only to lay narrative claims to independence—particularly independence from the control men, whether fathers, brothers, uncles, or husbands—but also to expose the shortcomings of a female independence predicated on race. In most of these women's narratives, the dual disempowerment of being both female and non-white is highlighted. A female character asserts her rights as a New Woman, only to be caught and sometimes impaled on the horns of race or, as Rich says, "multiethnic women writers at the turn of the twentieth century, though sometimes upholding the New Woman's independent values, could see and critique in particularly trenchant ways the limitations of this ideal." For example, when the spunky, outspoken Cogewea in Mourning Dove's novel asserts her right to choose her own husband and elopes with the conniving easterner Densmore, she is robbed and beaten up by him. His brutality, says Rich, falls short of actual rape but suggests "metaphorically her sexual vulnerability to his desire to degrade and humiliate her." But despite the prevailing narrative pattern and Cogewea's brutalization, she doesn't have to die to fulfill a racist mythos.

Of course, the problem with attempting to both celebrate the New Woman and criticize "her," as Rich well knows, was the market, comprised of readers who were mostly middle-class white women—or as Rich says, "these authors' discomforting assertions of the blind spots in the iconic New Woman's values likely did not play well, ultimately, with the American public." Just getting published was one hurdle; being read another, which meant that some writers sought more remunerative work. And as Rich points out, many of these works by attempting what is essentially a high-wire act or what Rich calls "delicate editorial negotiations" end up flawed, unevenly written, or too didactic. Yet Rich makes a compelling argument for re-reading these narratives as precursors to authors like Nella Larsen or Fannie Hurst. She quite rightly concludes that the women of color who emerged as leading cultural voices in the late 1970s through the 1980s not only inherited and but also made good on these earlier women's struggles for the right to be both independent women and proud of their multiethnic heritage.