Race, class, gender and property in women's writing of the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

By the 1920s, although slavery had been abolished in America decades before, many social, economic and legal inequalities remained between whites and blacks. This is well-known United States history, although to many, it still exists as a rather vague idea, all too easily over-looked, as the injustices are hard to personalize. Many black women writers in American history strived to bridge this gap by providing stories of black women whose life stories were deeply impacted by all of the types of inequalities that existed. Two of the most well known of these authors are Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Redmon Fauset. These women, with their similarities and differences, put a face to the modern black woman through their story telling. Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as her two short stories, “Spunk” and “The Gilded Six-Bits,” provide an interesting comparison to Fauset's novel The Chinaberry Tree and her short story “Emmy.”