Reforming Fictions: Native, African, and Jewish American Women's Literature and Journalism in the Progressive Era (review)

Reforming Fictions: Native, African, and Jewish American Women's Literature and Journalism in the Progressive Era. By Carol J. Batker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. 256 pp. $49 .50 /$17.50 paper.

In Reforming Fictions, Carol J. Batker provides readers with a new framework for examining the domestic fiction and journalism written by Native American, African American, and Jewish American women during the progressive era. Batker makes a strong and convincing argument for reading the domestic novels of this period as reformist and in dialogue with the political agendas of their activist sisters in journalism. She examines the way Mourning Dove, Jessie Fauset, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Anzia Yezierska, Edna Ferber, and Fannie Hurst used marriage plots to address political issues and struggles pertinent to their communities. Moreover, Batker argues that these novelists offered a transformed version of domestic politics, portraying characters that both subscribed to a mainstream definition of womanhood and challenged it through committed activism.

In addition to re-examining specific novelists, Batker recovers an overlooked history of women's political activism and journalism. Although previous works have uncovered women's groundbreaking achievements during the nineteenth century, little attention has been given to women's contributions in journalism and editing during the progressive era. Batker discusses women such as Angel DeCora, Zitkala-¨Sa, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Jessie Fauset, Cecilia Razovsky, and Estelle Sternberger who worked as editors and vocal partners with more well-known male activists in the creation of political discourse.

For Batker, the progressive era is central to the understanding of these women journalists' and novelists' dialogue with each other, as well as to the bridges formed between ethnic groups. This period's importance lies in the work done by women in reform institutions centrally concerned with domesticity as well as women's self-definition and labeling. Batker sees the specific struggles of congressional control over Native American resources, disenfranchisement and lynching, and immigration limitations and citizenship requirements as connected to the larger political struggles faced by ethnic groups. The strategies used by the activists and political leaders of ethnic communities—acculturation, racial uplift, assimilation, ethnocentric education, and a general "Americanization"—are simultaneously adopted and critiqued by the writers Batker examines. Ultimately, the dialogue between journalists, novelists, and communities presented in this text exposes the profound exclusionary practices of the United States government, the nation's inability to live up to its classification as a democracy, and the hegemony of ethnocentric ideology.

More disturbing is the exposure of how some ethnic communities conformed to hegemonic ideals in the hope of being included in the image of America(n). Native American, African American, and Jewish American communities, while ceaselessly condemning and critiquing the racist, anti-Semitic and exclusionary practices of the nation, nevertheless adopt patriotic and hegemonic rhetoric as a strategy for their own inclusion. Unfortunately, the use of such rhetoric often excluded other communities and therefore weakened their own arguments. Although Batker insists on a dialogue between communities, her examination of the strategies and rhetoric used often suggests an "every community for itself" philosophy. Thus, while a journalism-fiction dialogue clearly exists, Batker's cross-ethnic community dialogue argument is not as persuasive. Her attempts to demonstrate an inter-ethnic solidarity seem a bit forced with texts that contain expressions of nativism and racism.

Nonetheless, her study offers a fresh examination of the connections between women journalists and women novelists within the Native American, African American, and Jewish American communities, giving readers a thorough discussion of the central arguments, political strategies, and important figures during the progressive era. And her look behind the scenes of the struggles against exclusion faced by communities defined as inferior, Other, or "foreign" continues the re-examination of the constructed myth of America as a democracy.