Modernism, Sex, and Gender by Celia Marshik and Allison Pease (review)

In August 2019, I attended the fortieth-anniversary celebration of the Women and Children First Bookstore in Chicago, one of the largest and longest-lasting feminist bookstores in North America. The founding of the bookstore was part of the Women in Print Movement, a consortium of bookstores, publishers, and writers intent on bringing more women and queer writers into print. According to co-founders and former owners Ann Christophersen and Linda Bubon, when they opened their doors in 1979, they could barely fill their shelves with women-authored books. Now the store they founded has 3500 square-feet of shelving jam-packed with books by women.

I begin with this anecdote because this history of feminists getting women and queer writers into print, recovering those left out of the literary canon until c. 1979, informs the subject matter of, and provides the motivation for, Celia Marshik and Allison Pease's Modernism, Sex, and Gender, the most recent publication in the New Modernisms series from the Bloomsbury Academic Press. Indeed, the authors state explicitly that "[t]he story of this book begins with second-wave feminism" (7). In keeping with this history, their goal is to detail the change in our understanding of modernism that resulted from scholarship which has shifted our critical gaze, changing the works we read and the topics we deem important. For feminist and gender scholars who have participated in this transformation, the book serves to remind us of our history and the ongoing recovery work that has long defined feminist scholarship—work, as the authors remind us, that is still necessary. For students and non-feminist scholars, this slim, illustrated volume serves to introduce them to the major themes, debates, and approaches that have defined feminist modernist studies. One finishes reading Modernism, Sex, and Gender convinced that gender and sexuality are integral to modernist literature and the culture of modernity, and equally convinced that it has been feminist scholarship that has made this case. As the authors write, "the history of modernist studies reflects many of the intellectual moves that were characteristic of feminist scholarship, and women's studies, across the disciplines" (17).

In showing how modernism has been reconceived by feminist and gender scholars, Marshik and Pease structure Modernism, Sex, and Gender around four main chapters, framed by a twelve-page introduction and a three-page coda, and ending with nearly a dozen short "Critical Bibliographies" of some key monographs addressing topics the authors cover, such as censorship, copyright, sexuality, and suffrage (166-73). The first chapter, "Feminine Difference" (13-50), most explicitly focuses on the history of feminist criticism from its initial work in recovering women writers who have been "written out of modernist literary history" (34) to a critique of the gender of modernity itself, attending to the gender of cultural forms and institutions rather than to the gender of the author. While Bonnie Kime Scott's anthology The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, with its dedication to "the forgotten and silenced makers of modernism" (27), represents the first strand, and Rita Felski's 1995 The Gender of Modernity, with its stated aim "to unravel the complexities of modernity's relationship to femininity" (39), the second, the proximity of these publications undercuts any sense of a chronological progression.¹ This uneven development—where the attention to sex, gender, and sexuality waxes and wanes depending on the author, cultural institution, or historical event one is looking at—should calm the lament that reverberates through the chapter: that the recent shift in attention in modernist studies to the global and the planetary will leave gender behind, eliding the still necessary work of recovery. An instance of canon-formation itself, affirming a cadre of well-known feminist scholars while supplementing that imposing tradition with works by lesser-known though no less influential critics, this chapter and the book as a whole assure that the scholarship of feminist and gender scholars will not be...