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

In Reforming Fictions, Carol Batker offers an important reevaluation of Native, African, and Jewish American women's writing during the decades of the Progressive Era, primarily the 1910s and 1920s. From her examination of connections between social activism and networks among writers, reform and politics in domestic fiction, and cultural pluralism and literary politics, Batker hypothesizes that authors thoroughly integrated the political commitments of their periodical writing into their fiction. This reevaluation indicates a greater complexity in the cultural work these writers accomplished as they negotiated various discourses and refashioned them to suit their own political ends, with a sophistication many critics have not previously noted. Batker devotes two chapters to each ethnicity: the first provides an overview of journalistic writing and cultural context and the second focuses on the fiction of two or three authors.

In "Her Rightful Place in the New Scheme of Things," Batker examines Native American women's journalism under the General Allotment or Dawes Act, in force between 1887 and 1934, that opened land for Westward settlement. Batker explains three rhetorical strategies Native women employed: an integrationist strategy that positioned Native Americans as deserving equal rights though maintaining a separate Pan-Indian identity; a preservationist strategy that represented Native cultures as essential to, although distinct from, American society's ethnocentric view of assimilation; and a combined strategy that advocated treaty rights and self-determination within an integrationist program. The third view was espoused, with variations, by Zitkala-Sa ("Red Bird," also Gertrude Simmons Bonnin [1876–1938]), an Okanogan Colville, and Mourning Dove (also Humishuma [?1882–1936]), a Yankton Sioux, the two Native American women writers upon whom Batker focuses.

Primarily a journalist, Zitkala-Sa mediated between integrationist and preservationist rhetoric. She wanted to see the reservation system removed yet Native political and treaty rights preserved, arguing that citizenship would provide a basis for gaining tribal rights. Citing uncollected essays as well as the primarily autobiographical collection American Indian Stories (1921), Batker shows the ambivalent verbal dance Zitkala-Sa executes as she negotiates her tribal identity while participating in U.S. society. Her use of stereotypes such as "stoic" or "noble" becomes a basis for repositioning Native Americans within the larger society—especially as these qualities emerged through heroic action during World War I. Comparably, Mourning Dove in Cogewea: The Half-Blood (1927) reconfigures Native debates after the practice of her own activist popular politics. Batker notes: "On the one hand, Mourning Dove's reliance upon popular discourses of the ‘dying Indian' is anti-integrationist, reinforcing the inability of Native Americans to survive in U. S. society. . . . On the other hand, the integrationist thrust of Mourning Dove's novel is evidenced through her manipulation of a discourse that positions Native Americans as central, if only in the distant past, to U.S. history" (46).

African American women likewise reveal ambiguities in their rhetoric, but closer examination, as with the texts by Native women, indicates that they developed strategies to negotiate complex social territory, which permeate essay and fiction alike. Foregrounded in the two chapters on African American writers are Jessie [Redmon] Fauset (1882–1961), editor of the NAACP's the Crisis and author of allegedly "accommodationist" fiction, and Alice [Ruth Moore] Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935), war relief and race relations activist as well as freelance journalist. In "The Democracy for Which We Have Paid," Batker demonstrates how Fauset's Comedy, American Style (1933) both reveals and rejects French colonialism: "foreignness" critiques U.S. racism as characters experience greater "democracy" in France than at home, while journalistic criticism of segregation and Jim Crow appeared beside reports of African American sacrifice and patriotism in World War I, Batker observes. The chapter "An ‘Honest-to-God' American" demonstrates how these writers shifted from bourgeois to ever...