Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation

by Ronna C. Johnson (Editor), Ann Charters (Foreword), Nancy McCampbell Grace (Editor)

"Girls Who Wore Black recovers neglected women writers who deserve more attention for their writing and for their historical role in the mid-century arts scene. This collection of essays reopens and revises the Beat canon, Beat history, and Beat poetics; it is an important contribution to literary criticism and history."-Jennie Skerl, author of A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles "Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace have done an invaluable service for students of American literature: their collection begins with an essential essay about the three generations of Beat women and then provides fine contributions by critics Anthony Libby, Linda Russo, Maria Damon, Tim Hunt, and others. The value of this book is so clear one must wonder why it wasn't available much earlier."-Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill What do we know about the women who played an important role in creating the literature of the Beat Generation? Until recently, very little. Studies of the movement have effaced or excluded women writers, such as Elise Cowen, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Hettie Jones, and Diane Di Prima, each one a significant figure of the postwar Beat communities. Equally free-thinking and innovative as the founding generation of men, women writers, fluent in Beat, hippie, and women's movement idioms, partook of and bridged two important countercultures of the American mid-century. Persistently foregrounding female experiences in the cold war 1950s and in the counterculture 1960s and in every decade up to the millennium, women writing Beat have brought nonconformity, skepticism, and gender dissent to postmodern culture and literary production in the United States and beyond. Ronna C. Johnson is a lecturer in the departments of English and American Studies at Tufts University. Nancy M. Grace is an associate professor in the department of English and director of the Program in Writing at The College of Wooster in Ohio. She is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

318 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2002

Reviews

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a series of literary criticism essays about some of the writing of the women beats. Unfortunately, I found it to be a bit too critical of the men in the movement who it blamed for not giving enough support for the women writers. (When surely the lack of recognition comes from the "literary critics, be they academics or commercial and not the men themselves). There seemed to be a bit of confusion over the cross-over between beat subculture and the beat literary movement. Women who weren't considered great writers were thought to have been excluded, but were they excluded from the movement? Did you have to be published to be a beat? Surely Neal Cassady is the best example that being a published writer is not a prerequisite for being accepted into the culture. The biggest problem of this type of criticism was that it was all literary without looking at the social history side of things. People were trying to understand the movement purely through the writing, and a few comments, not all the works, of the leading male figures of the movement. And as such the fact that the majority of the male figures, (2 out of the top 3) were homosexual was ignored. Surely this would affect the dynamics of their relationships and it wasn't simply the fact that they had the misogynistic views of men in the 50s and 60s. The essays themselves focused on a few poems in most cases, or lines from a few poems. Something as someone who doesn't have a literary criticism background to be rather odd. I did learn quite a bit about the different writers, particularly about Di Parma's anti-birth control and abortion stance, which I found rather horrendous. All told though it didn't make me want to read anything by the women. I'm not sure if this was a failing of the book or just my lack of appreciation for the styles and types of writing. When I first started reading Kerouac I was really wanting to learn more about the women who were living that lifestyle, the non-conformist rebels of the 40s and 50s. But I wanted a social history not a literary criticism and I've not seemed to be able to find that book yet. I don't even know if it's been written. This was definitely not it.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this from the library expecting an anthology of work by women Beat artists, but it's actually an anthology of essays about women Beat artists. It's overall pretty good - as with all anthologies some essays are better than others - trends toward the academic. Tragic how many of these women I was unfamiliar with, and trying to remedy that is tricky - the library, at least, is less than thorough about preserving their work.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Each chapter highlights a different female beat artist. A nice easy read. I read it because I was researching a specific female beat writer and it was a good information source.