Seen as too smart, too sassy, too sexy, and too strident, female humorists have been resisted and overlooked. This book looks at the pioneering women of wit who emerged in New York City during the interwar period and the ways in which they use irony, satire, and wit as an indirect form of social protest. Many of these writers stood on the periphery of largely male New York intellectual circles, which gave them a perspective from which to critique the worlds to which they partially belonged. These include Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote satiric sketches under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd; Tess Slesinger of the Menorah Journal group; Dorothy Parker of the Algonquin wits; Jessie Redmon Fauset among the Harlem Renaissance writers; Dawn Powell of the Lafayette Circle; and Mary McCarthy of the Partisan Review crowd.
These women writers developed a more urban and urbane form of humor that reflects the increasingly cosmopolitan and sophisticated time and place in which they lived. 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 like New York City in the 1920s and 30s gave rise to a new voice of women’s humor that challenged traditional gender roles. These foremothers of women’s humor set the stage for more overtly feminist humorists of today, who have turned the labels of bright, bold, and bitchy from a stigma into a rallying cry for future generations.
https://directory.sunyempire.edu/view/sabrina-abrams