Dogged by Domesticity

Alice Dunbar-Nelson painted by Laura Wheeler Waring

“A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the saying goes, but in the case of the possible career advancement offered to African American writers during the 1920s, male ships had much more buoyancy. The interest in Black life and Black writing as evinced by race-related journals (The Crisis, Opportunity), publishing houses, and even the occasional mainstream magazine provided platforms for women writers as well as men. Scores of women published poems, wrote plays (usually unproduced), and even the occasional novel.

But now, 100 years later, which names survive? Who has been rediscovered? Who anthologized? Who still discussed? If you can name anyone besides Nella Larsen, whose posthumous rediscovery has made her reputation soar far beyond the modest acclaim she achieved during her lifetime, or Zora Neale Hurston, who didn’t start publishing her novels until after the Depression of the 1930s had strangled the literary wing of the Renaissance, you have an extraordinarily deep knowledge of the period.

Who published the most novels during the Harlem Renaissance? Jessie Fauset (4). Who wrote the most plays? Georgia Douglas Johnson (28). Who cares? Who reads them? One of the young poets who recited at the famous 1925 Civic Club dinner that intentionally launched the literary Harlem Renaissance was Gwendolyn Bennet. (Langston Hughes was the other young poet on display.) Bennett was a double threat girl. She trained as a visual artist at both Columbia and Pratt and in 1924 was the beneficiary of a scholarship enabling her to study fine arts in Paris. When she returned to Harlem in 1926, she participated in the full flower of the Renaissance both in the visual arts and in print.

Women writers were all over the Harlem Renaissance, even when they didn’t live in Harlem. Anne Spencer’s poetry was widely praised, and her Virginia garden provided a Southern outpost of hospitality to visiting Harlemites. Georgia Douglas Johnson (she of the 28 plays) not only published three volumes of poetry during the period of the Renaissance but hosted a weekly “S Street Salon” in her Washington, DC home for writers and intellectuals, including women you’ll never read: May Miller, Marita Bonner, Mary Burrill, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Angelina Weld Grimke.

There are obvious reasons why women writers didn’t get as much traction during the Harlem Renaissance as the men – sexism and the demands of domesticity. No matter how much they wrote and whatever the quality of their output, the gatekeepers and assessors of literary value were all men. The editors were men (Jessie Fauset being the one exception); the publishers were men; men dominated the awards committees. The sexism of the period was so much a part of the cultural landscape that it wasn’t even perceived, much less challenged.

The final scene of Nella Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, sounds the alarm plainly enough – and it could probably have only come from a woman’s pen. In escaping a life scrambled by her bi-racial background, the sexism and confusion brought on by her beauty, Helga Crane, the novel’s protagonist, thinks to put all her confusion and sadness to rest by marrying the backwoods preacher of an Alabama town. By the time she has her fourth child, she realizes that she is trapped in the quicksand of domesticity. She hates her husband, the town, and everything about her life, but she has no resources available for her escape. Nor can she bear the thought of abandoning her children. She falls sick after the birth of her fourth child and, while in recovery, fantasizes about a possible return to her former life. “And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child.” It is a stark and shocking ending.

For women writers of the Harlem Renaissance who, after all, still had to find a man to support them or support themselves, the choice was either a precarious existence as a single woman or some kind of domestic deal with the devil (i.e. marriage). (Lesbians naturally didn’t face that choice since they never thought of themselves as appendages to any man.)

Oftentimes marriage, especially when it produced children, signalled the end of their literary careers. Jessie Fauset married in 1929 at the advanced age of 47, moved with her husband to Montclair, NJ, published two more novels, and went silent. Gwendolyn Brooks fell in love with a fellow instructor at Howard University, a relationship the administration deplored. When they married in 1927, Brooks followed her husband to Eustis, FL, where she had to endure Southern racism and isolation from the community, which inspired her until the couple moved to Long Island in 1930. She remained passionately involved in the Harlem art scene, but her days as a writer were over.

The life and career of Georgia Douglas Johnson illustrates the challenges of a heterosexual woman writer who marries, not unwillingly. Born in 1880 in Atlanta, she married a local lawyer and prominent Republican party member ten years her senior. They had two sons and moved to Washington, DC, where her husband had been appointed to a political patronage position. Torn from her childhood home, Douglas found solace in writing, but her husband insisted that she devote more time to keeping his house and raising his family. Nonetheless, she brought out her first volume in 1918. (In its relation to the published works of the Harlem Renaissance, it is remarkably early.)

Its lead poem, giving title to the whole volume, is dedicated to her husband and says it all.

The Heart of a Woman

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,

As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,

Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam

In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,

And enters some alien cage in its plight,

And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars

While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

--Dr. Robert Philipson

Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in "The Pit Bull of AIDS Litigation"

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