Politics, pacifism, and feminist liberation in the works of Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter's location within the feminist movement has traditionally proved problematic, for Porter has continuously disavowed any affiliation with feminism. Publicly, she made repeated efforts to avoid being perceived as a feminist. Yet she also created a labyrinth of lies around her biographical record and only recently have critics discovered how far her own accounts of her life (including her ancestry and her first marriage) depart from reality. Porter's biographer Joan Givner was one of the first to seriously challenge Porter's biographical narratives and then disregard them as highly unreliable. This dissertation follows Givner's mode, with the premise that Porter's self-designations, particularly in regards to feminism, also cannot be trusted.; Porter's life and works undercut her intention to subvert a feminist association and align her with cutting-edge feminist thought of her era. The years spanning the two World Wars defines the scope of this dissertation because of the distinctive feminist activity that occurred during this period and also because this time frame encompasses Porter's most significant literary output. This study connects Porter's biographical and fictional worlds to historical feminist developments occurring in the 1920s and 1930s in three particular arenas: political; professional; and personal (i.e. sexual and familial). These categories represent the fundamental issues addressed by one of the earliest organized feminist groups, the women who gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848.; Establishing the links between Porter's ideology and the feminist movement is important for several reasons. For example, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Second Edition, calls Porter "politically quite naive," yet her political views can be historically connected to leading feminist social activists of her day, including Jane Addams, Rosika Schwimmer, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Emily Greene Balch. The Norton's dismissal of Porter's political thought is consistent with the national/patriarchal dismissal of women's thought worldwide, prior to the two World Wars.; There remains a dearth of feminist readings and applications within Porter scholarship today. However, contextualizing Porter within a feminist framework enables her pacifism to be viewed in newer and richer ways.