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Mary Loeffelholz Georgia Douglas Johnson and Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875 - 1935) were the elder mentors mentors of the renaissance generation of black women poets. Wary of combining racial issues with poetry, Dunbar-Nelson wrote some of her best-known poems protesting other ills than racism; " I Sit and Sew" is the dramatic monologue of a woman stifled by the " pretty futile seam" she works on, conscious of " The Panoply of war, the martial tread of Men" outside her " homely thatch. " (Dreams, 74). The poems " impassioned commentary on the narrowness of culturally defined sexual roles" (Hull, 80) is clear, as is the connection it draws between those sex roles and militarism. In " The Proletariat Speaks" (Dreams, 75), Dunbar-Nelson challenges the periods stereotypical leftist image of the proletarian as a burly, half-naked industrial worker.
Her proletarian is a woman, an office worker whose daily confinement is painfully at odds with her yearning for " beautiful things" the consolations of art and the sensual pleasures of a middle-class dream-life. Like her poetry, Dunbar-Nelsons political activism encompassed many forms of oppression: as public speaker and writer of fiction and journalism as well as poetry, she worked for womens suffrage, in peace organizations, and in anti-lynching campaigns. From Experimental Lives: Women and Literature, 1900 - 1945. Copyright? 1992 by Twayne Publishers. Gloria T. Hull Written for the 1921 Philadelphia Public Ledger " Woman in History" contest, Dunbar-Nelsons Italian sonnet " To Madame Curie" is notable for its brilliant allusiveness to Keats famous " On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and its fine literary style. " To the Negro Farmers of the United States" baldly announces its topica tribute to these peaceful " brave ones of the soil" for their agrarian simplicity and their " gift supreme to foil / The bare-fanged wolves of hunger. " This sonnet is reminiscent of Georgia Douglas Johnsons honorific race poems in Bronze.
Last among this group of works is " I Sit and Sew, " which has recently been revived for its feminist spirit. A war poem published in 1920, it is spoken by a woman who chafes against the " useless task" of sewing while more important fighting is needed A sharp distinction is made between the world of men (which is referred to in a heavier diction: " martial the, " " grim-faced, " " stern-eyed" ) and the slighter, confined world of women (typified by the repetitive sewing). Rhythmic disjunctions in the poems iambic meter reflect this distinction, as well as the speakers resulting agitation. The question of wars desirability aside, one womans complaint about her specific " uselessness" becomes an impassioned commentary on the narrowness of culturally defined sexual roles. From Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Copyright? 1987 by Gloria T.
Hull.
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