Women Writers, Generic Form, and Social and Political Activism

Abstract

The early twentieth century abounded with movements that reshaped women’s lives—including those for women’s suffrage, peace, birth control, and better working conditions, among others. Women writers addressed these issues not only in socially and politically engaged journalism, but also in fiction, essays, and other forms of writing. This special issue explores the relationship between women’s writing and social and political activism, from the 1890s to the 1950s. The collection comprises a series of case studies, with a focus on non-canonical authors and under-read works. Responding to recent calls for more scholarship on women writers in the period, contributors seek to recover the place of social and political activism in shaping women writers’ relationships to modernity. The collection at once foregrounds neglected writings by activist women and highlights the diversity of generic forms through which activism was expressed, thus enriching our understanding of women’s contributions to early twentieth-century literary and cultural history. The essays included here engage with a wide range of genres, many of them understudied. Doing so enables contributors to reassess women’s writings that seldom feature in anthologies or syllabi—goals that have always been central to feminist scholarship