Overview

Seen as too smart, too sassy, too sexy, and too strident, female humorists have been resisted and overlooked. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century corrects this tendency, focusing on the foremothers of women’s humor in modern America, who used satire, irony, and wit as indirect forms of social protest. This book focuses on the women who stood on the periphery of predominantly male New York intellectual circles in the twentieth century. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams argues that the advent of modernism, the women’s suffrage movement, the emergence of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman, and the growth of urban centers in the 1920s and ’30s gave rise to a new voice of women’s humor, one that was at once defiant and conflicted in defining female identity and the underlying assumptions about gender roles in American society. Her study gives special attention to the contributions of the satirists Edna St. Vincent Millay (pseudonym Nancy Boyd), Tess Slesinger, Dorothy Parker, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy. Grounded in theories of humor, feminist and critical race theory, and urban studies, this book will find an audience among scholars and students interested in women writers, feminist humor, modern American literature, and African American studies.

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9780271095721

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Reviews

“Positioning her study as an insight into feminist humorists today, Abrams effectively shows how women engage with humor to navigate and illuminate intersectional struggles with disability, discrimination, and gendered hierarchies of power to build community among all women.” —Jordyn H. May Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies “The book is valuable: its focus on ambivalence, rather than humor based simply on superiority or subversion, is a significant contribution to humor studies. Fuchs Abrams helps us understand the sources as well as the payoffs of the conflicted ironies of the six women she discusses and builds a larger picture of a New York world in which different literary circles work through problems of gender in related but not identical ways.” —Rachel Trousdale Humor “Fuchs Abrams’s thoughtful attention to interwar historical and cultural contexts makes New York Women of Wit an excellent contribution to discussions of the subversive nature of satire and irony, the re-fashioning of cultural memory of interwar womanhood, and feminist scholarship on literary institutions.” —Allison Nick The Space Between “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 U.S. 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.” —Kirsten Leng Studies in American Humor “This book never flattens out its subject to construct a single, monolithic New York or gendered ‘type’ of wit. All these writers are represented as complex individuals, whose comedy came in many varieties and served diverse functions, reflecting the creators' identities and the concerns of their different communities. Fuchs Abrams's admiration for these women, with their groundbreaking approaches to urban style and humor, is evident throughout. She does a superb job of making readers share it.” —Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities, University of Delaware “Fuchs Abrams makes a critical and overdue intervention in comedy studies with this book. Through personal accounts, criticism, biography, and textual analysis, she gives texture to our understanding of these six women, their impetus for writing, and the response in their own time. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century offers us a persuasive argument for how the legacy of these sardonic writers continues to influence satire, and especially satire written by women, today.” —Danielle Fuentes Morgan, author of Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century

“This book never flattens out its subject to construct a single, monolithic New York or gendered ‘type’ of wit. All these writers are represented as complex individuals, whose comedy came in many varieties and served diverse functions, reflecting the creators' identities and the concerns of their different communities. Fuchs Abrams's admiration for these women, with their groundbreaking approaches to urban style and humor, is evident throughout. She does a superb job of making readers share it.” —Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities, University of Delaware “Fuchs Abrams makes a critical and overdue intervention in comedy studies with this book. Through personal accounts, criticism, biography, and textual analysis, she gives texture to our understanding of these six women, their impetus for writing, and the response in their own time. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century offers us a persuasive argument for how the legacy of these sardonic writers continues to influence satire, and especially satire written by women, today.” —Danielle Fuentes Morgan, author of Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century

Author Information

Sabrina Fuchs Abrams is Professor of English in the School for Graduate Studies at the State University of New York, Empire State. She is the author of Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Postwar Intellectual and editor of Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers and Literature of New York. She is founder and cochair of the Mary McCarthy Society and Associate Editor of Studies in American Humor.

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