Research Guide to American Literature

in The Feminine Mystique and Sexual Politics. In Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973)
a poet leaves her husband to overcome her “fear of flying”—a metaphor for inde-
pendence in both creative and sexual expression. Gail Godwin also creates women
who define themselves outside the home. She signals the anomalous situation of
her protagonist in the title of The Odd Woman (1974), about a female professor
who teaches a course on “Women and Literature.” Eleven of the seventeen sto-
ries in Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) feature women
without husbands. Paley’s depictions of close friendships between female charac-
ters challenge the notion that women need men in order to have fulfilling lives.
As early as 1970 women of color challenged the notion that all women share
the same experience and began to frame feminism to reflect concerns related to
racism as well as patriarchy. Works by three important African American women
writers appeared that year: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Alice Walker’s The
Third Life of Grange Copeland, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings; all three writers continue to publish significant works in the twenty-first
century. Also in 1970 an anthology, The Black Woman, gathered a selection of
stories by black female writers that suggested a tradition separate from that of
white women; the editor, Toni Cade Bambara, published a collection of her own
of stories, Gorilla, My Love, in 1972. Black women expressed themselves in other
forms, as well. Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, and
Audre Lorde published important poetry collections in the 1970s, and Ntozake
Shange’s “choreopoem” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rain-
bow is enuf was the second play by an African American woman to be performed
on Broadway when it was produced in 1976. All of these writers reject hierarchies
based not only on gender but also on race—the latter of which they found present
in the women’s movement—while celebrating traditions rooted in the African
American experience.
Since the 1980s there has been an explosion of creative works by women
engaging in and contributing to feminist efforts and debates begun in the 1970s.
Women writers continue to challenge traditional domestic roles assigned to
women; but leaving the literal and metaphorical confinements of the home no
longer means entering the nine-to-five working world, as it did in women’s fiction
of the 1970s. In Housekeeping (1980), for example, Marilynne Robinson merges
realism and fantasy to fashion a modern fairy tale about two orphan sisters: Ruth,
who embraces the outdoors and a vagabond life, and her younger sister, Lucille,
who adheres to a traditional role. The female wilderness fantasy later informed
works as diverse as Ursula K. Le Guin’s “She Unnames Them” (1985) and Mor-
rison’s Jazz (1992) and eventually found its way into realist fiction such as Pam
Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness (1993) and Waltzing the Cat (1999). Dorothy
Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina (1992) targets the intersection of gender, poverty,
and the abuse of female children. The depiction of women in occupations tradi-
tionally occupied by men also challenged traditional roles. Sara Paretsky’s Victoria
Iphigenia “V. I.” Warshawski and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone offered female
versions of the hard-boiled detective and ushered in a new golden age of mystery

Feminism and Women’s Writing 1