A Gilded Awakening: Othering the New Woman Narrative in Anzia Yezierska’s Short Fiction

Abstract

The Progressive Era’s New Woman, epitomized in Edna Pontellier’s awakening, has been hailed as an icon of feminist rebellion. Recent scholarship, however, has interrogated the subversive potential of this icon, exposing its conservatist purchase on classism, eugenics, and white supremacism. Drawing from this intersectional inquiry into New Woman activism and literary production, this paper examines the short fiction of the Polish-American New Woman writer Anzia Yezierska (1880-1970). Through the appropriation of the awakening narrative, Yezierska sheds light on the failure of the first-wave feminist project to empower women in outsider locations and proposes alternative paths to liberation construed upon the working-class, Jewish values of community and solidarity, thus putting forward an alternative to the exclusionary designs of white feminism and anticipating intersectional demands by second and third wave feminism.