New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century

In New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century, Sabrina Fuchs Abrams analyzes the work of six New York–based women writers active during the early to mid-twentieth century. The authors under examination—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Tess Slesinger, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy—hailed from diverse class, ethnic, and racial backgrounds and vary in how familiar they are to present-day readers. However, they were all enmeshed in influential (predominantly male) New York cultural, social, and intellectual scenes in their own times, and they all used humor—particularly satire and irony—for critique and protest.Satire was a crucial mode for women writers at the time for many reasons. Satire is often used by outsiders to render their critiques of power more palatable by making audiences laugh. Given the strictures imposed by oftentimes contradictory gender (and racial) norms during this period, the capacity of satire to simultaneously express and mask a subversive message was essential for women. Abrams deftly elucidates how women writers navigated the line between the acceptable and unacceptable in the interwar period to not only appeal to readers but also their male intellectual interlocutors. For instance, they could be neither too aggressive nor clever (i.e., masculine) nor too gentle, trivial, or soft (i.e., feminine) in their work or their personae. Indeed, these writers were, as Abrams repeatedly highlights, always at risk of being too “something”: “too smart, too sassy, too sexy, and too strident” (1) or “too bold, too brainy, too bawdy, and too bitchy” (193). The “double voice” of satire and irony thus gave witty women a vehicle for critical self-expression as they navigated the minefield of gender expectations.The targets of women’s satire were many and varied. Unlike many women writers who preceded them, the writers Abrams has assembled chose topics “beyond the domestic sphere and male-female relations” (26). They took aim at the promises and pitfalls of New Womanhood by showing how women’s newfound freedom was still hemmed in by older gender norms, heterosexual power dynamics that favored male demands and desires, and, in Fauset’s case, racist assumptions about Black women’s sexuality, which made it dangerous to fully embrace the sexual liberation associated with the New (white) Woman. They also frequently and gleefully skewered the professed progressive ideals and actual practices of their fellow travelers in New York’s artistic and intellectual scenes. Thus, as Abrams demonstrates, while offering a powerful vehicle for protest, their satire could easily be misinterpreted. Humorously invoking gender stereotypes in order to subvert them was a risky gambit, as it could also reinforce these stereotypes among some readers. Moreover, the uncomfortable realities highlighted by their critiques certainly made many readers uncomfortable—especially male readers. This may help explain why their work and the humor embedded within it have been overlooked, dismissed, and misunderstood for so long.The book unfolds chronologically, and each chapter explores one author and offers a close reading of her satirical texts. The writers and their works are contextualized within major social, cultural, and political developments occurring both in New York and the US broadly throughout the first half of the twentieth century. These include the advent of modernism, the women’s suffrage movement, the New Woman and the New Negro Woman movements, the rise and fall of bohemian scenes associated with radical politics and free love (particularly in Greenwich Village), the Harlem Renaissance, the “Jewish humanist” movement associated with the Menorah Society, and the emergence of the midtown Manhattan publishing scene (2). Perhaps not surprisingly, New York itself figures prominently in the analysis, as each writer was shaped by and helped shape the city. Abrams notes that after the first world war, New York’s “urban modernity and irreverent spirit” (3) made it a space of self-making and remaking and chronicles the impact of the city’s cultural and spatial changes, including the sweeping infrastructural changes engineered by Robert Moses, on the writers she examines. This robust historical contextualization is accompanied by a nuanced analysis of each writer and the group as a whole, analyses that are informed not only by major theories of humor but also by scholarship on women and feminist humorists, Black humorists, ethnic humor, and critical evaluations of satire as a genre. Through this marriage of history and theory, Abrams gifts the reader with a detailed, complex, and compelling evaluation of the critical interventions made by this collective of writers and of the crucial role humor played as a mode of protest given the constraints the authors were subjected to.Abrams concludes her study by highlighting how these writers laid the groundwork for future generations of feminist humorists. Though the writers Abrams examines often had complicated relationships with feminism, particularly the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s and even to the category of the “woman writer,” Abrams argues that their satirical writing provided an opening for a kind of feminist discourse that explicitly combines impassioned political critique with humor. These early modern humorists were precursors to feminist/women stand-up comics like Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, Wanda Sykes, Ali Wong, Hannah Gadsby, Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones (195–96). Linkages between the writers Abrams examines and later New York witty women writers, like Susan Sontag and Fran Lebowitz, who also had complex thoughts about and relationships to feminism, would be a fruitful topic to pursue. Hopefully this book will inspire future scholars to tease out and explore those connections.This incredibly readable, comprehensive, and nuanced study brings to light the work of writers who deserve to be better known. Abrams’s enthusiasm and admiration for her subjects is palpable, and readers will appreciate that. New York Women of Wit will appeal to students and scholars of women’s humor, modern US humor, and satire. Moreover, although dedicated to the study of New York women of wit, this book’s thorough engagement with major theories and developments in humor studies makes it a wonderful gateway to the field for curious newcomers.