Feminism and modernism: Gender and cultural politics in America, 1910-1940

My dissertation concerns the interrelation of modernism and feminism from 1910 to 1940. By interpreting autobiographies, fiction, essays, and visual texts, I illuminate how modern women articulated new subjectivities in the context of modernist culture that challenged "woman's place" in America. I also explore the politics of gender within debates over art and political commitment. In doing so, my dissertation bridges studies of modernism and women's history. Each chapter focuses on a figure who vividly articulated central tensions. Chapter 1 interprets the dancer Isadora Duncan from 1910 to 1927. Duncan used ideas about modernity and feminism to construct herself as an artist, and her contemporaries believed she represented liberation. I analyze the dialectic of Duncan's use of feminism to generate a vision of a whole, unified world through her body and the emergent contradictions in this vision. Chapter 2 explores Margaret Anderson's self-expression as editor of the Little Review from 1914 to 1929. Anderson transformed self-expression into rebellion from the "reality" of womanhood. Chapter 3 turns to the "revolution in manners and morals" by focusing on cultural radical Floyd Dell. While Dell promoted "feminism for men" in the 1910s, his ideas changed with the decline of the women's movement in the 1920s and the ascendance of popular culture. His interest in self-fulfillment led him to situate liberation through heterosexuality. Chapter 4 interprets novelist and journalist Josephine Herbst and her attention to gendered contradictions in the "culture of commitment" of the 1930s. Herbst's critical view helped her to forge a complex account of her own history. My introduction and conclusion argue that modern women posed important questions about language, power and representation central to contemporary feminist debate.