Women's History Month: The "New Negro Woman" in the 1920s

This post is an excerpt from Dr. Cheryl’s unpublished dissertation, Race and beauty in Canada: print culture, retail, and the transnational flow of products, images and ideologies, 1700s to present (2014)

Between 1900 and 1930 blacks in North America were venturing into new territories in terms of migration, education, employment, and the arts. The United States witnessed a massive internal migration of African Americans out of the South and into northern cities; in particular, New York and Chicago grew exponentially. In what became known as the “Great Migration” (roughly from 1915 to 1930), Lerone Bennett Jr. estimates that roughly “two million blacks had moved from the plantations of the South to the Harlems of the North.”[1] The predominately black New York City neighbourhood of Harlem became an epicentre for black culture.

Source: Unsplash

Harlem in the 1920s

Source: Wikimedia Commons

LEFT: Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), American novelist; RIGHT: Langston Hughes, American novelist (1901-1967)

As Tiffany Melissa Gill explains, “Harlem in the first three decades of the century was at the center of the most volatile issues confronting the black community – namely, class and gender conflict and ideas about politics and leadership.”[2] Harlem was home to artists, educators, and writers, such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jamaican-born Claude McKay, not to mention an enumerable stretch of city blocks that housed some of America’s most successful black-owned businesses. As African Americans in Harlem began to define how the New Negro and New Negro woman appeared and was seen, blackness came to be viewed through a lens of racial uplift.

Deborah Willis and Carla Williams posit that

“the New Negro imagery was created during an era when the overwhelming majority of postcard, advertisements, and popular cultural artifacts made of African Americans consisted of crude, degrading racial caricatures.”[3]

As such, the New Negro and New Negro woman was simultaneously about re-imaging the black body as it was about emancipation. For example, in 1900, Booker T. Washington helped edit a volume titled A New Negro for a New Century and in that same year at the Paris Exposition, one of the largest international exhibitions of its time, W.E.B. Du Bois organized three hundred and sixty three photographs into three albums entitled, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (volumes I-3), and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., which challenged the photographic images of blackness that were made to uphold scientific discourses of “Negro inferiority” and “Negro criminality.”[4]

Significantly, where the “literary mulatto” had emerged as a favorite theme of antislavery fiction, embodying and dramatizing profound tensions and paradoxes of race and nation,[5] the “tragic mulatto” character emerged as the embodiment of a desire of whites to preclude mixed-raced women from full participation and acceptance in white society.

The tragic mulatto was first introduced in two nineteenth-century short stories written by Lydia Maria Child, “The Quadroons” (1842) and “Slavery's Pleasant Homes” (1843). In both instances, Child portrayed light-skinned women, the offspring of white slaveholders and their black female slaves as tragic by emphasizing their displacement in a society that needed to maintain boundaries between blacks and whites. As David Pilgrim explains,

She was ignorant of both her mother’s race and her own. She believed herself to be white and free. Her heart was pure, her manners impeccable, her language polished, and her face beautiful. Her father died; her “negro blood” discovered, she was remanded to slavery, deserted by her white lover, and died a victim of slavery and white male violence.[6]

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A similar portrayal of the tragic mulatto appeared in Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853), a novel written by black abolitionist William Wells Brown. As one of the earliest published novels by an African American, Clotel perpetuated the doomed plight of the light-skinned woman.[7] Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), one of the earliest known novels published by an African American woman, also drew from the tragic mulatto tradition to dramatize the theme of miscegenation as it bisected issues of division and dispossession.[8] While sentimental novelists created the literary mulatto, African American writers also penned narratives on the doomed light-skinned woman of mixed progeny.

In the novels of Charles Chesnutt, for instance, Claudia Tate found a

“preponderance of light-skinned heroes and heroines, while the comic and local-color character roles are reserved for the folk who are literally black in hue.”[9]

Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) also depicted beautiful mulatto heroines, although in both instances they struggled with their racial identity and their place in society.[10] The pitting of light-skinned characters against dark-skinned characters was just as detrimental to black women’s self-esteem as the stereotyped images circulating within the dominant culture. As such, African American novelists, who had been victimized by the racism of slavery and had survived it, unwittingly perpetuated a similar kind of colour prejudice and sexism. As Tate writes, 

These two prejudicial ideologies were heavily woven throughout the fabric of African-Americans postbellum social culture not as discourses of desire but as actual facts, because the dominant society sanctioned male privilege and those with light skin generally had more access to opportunities of advancement in both the black and white cultures.[11]

…

By the 1920s, the white avant-garde began to believe that African Americans were, as Noliwe Rooks asserts,

“the embodiment of exotic primitivism and that they did not have the sexual restraints and repressions … and confines of the Victorian era.”[12]

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Harlem’s Cotton Club, c. 1930

For this group, Harlem symbolized a form of freedom from the constraint of the cult of femininity, which had proscribed that white women remain virginal, demure, and constrained to the domestic sphere. With this new found freedom, white men and women traveled up to Harlem, attended nightclubs like the Cotton Club, and like the French avant-garde whose “admiration and borrowing of [Negro] forms was as much to satisfy its own need for the ‘exotic’ and the ‘real’ (something that was lacking in its own culture) as it was economic exploitation,”[13] the American avant-garde indulged in the supposed exoticism of the jazz club. Black and white audiences gazed at chorus lines made up of light-skinned, scantily clad black women whose hair was straighter or straightened and who, for patrons of these clubs, exemplified sexual freedom and exoticism.[14]

Josephine Baker became the most famous of these light-skinned New Negro beauties. It is interesting to note, however, that when she auditioned for Eubie Blake’s and Nobel Sissle’s Shuffle Along (1921), she was not offered the job because her skin was considered “too dark” for the part.[15] When one of the regular chorus girls did not show up, Baker convinced the director to let her go on and she eventually became a permanent cast member of Shuffle Along. Petrine Archer-Straw asserts that when Baker moved to Paris, in an era when artists were grappling with a polarized view of women that embraced both the creative and the subversive, Baker was an icon of female sexual expression. Baker’s image was a powerful one because she appeared to have liberated her female sexuality, and also because her blackness and the fantasy of her accessibility threw into contradiction social and moral mores regarding both sex and race.[16]

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A Portrait of Josephine Baker (1906-1975), c. 1930

Baker became the most famous African American woman in the world in the 1920s but for the average black woman, her light skin and straightened hair was hardly attainable. With further advancements in photography, black women were now able to use the photographic image to create a new self; lighting and settings could be used to create a modern appearance.

Ultimately, the technological advances in visual imagery that occurred from the mid-nineteenth century onward would supersede eighteenth-century paintings and print culture in terms of their imperial function. Joy Sperling notes that prints and photographs crossed almost seamlessly between

“overlapping visual cultures as independent works of art, as surrogates for paintings and for each other, and as illustrations and other visual ephemera.”[17]

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Chromolithograph poster by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) announcing an exhibit at the Galerie Rapp, Champ de Mars, Paris, for the centennial celebration of the founding of lithography, 1895

Prints and photographs were symbolically interconnected with ideas, themes, and materials related to exchange, reproduction, and consumption. For the first time, printmakers and photographers were able to offer relatively inexpensive pictures of people and places, which could then be proudly displayed on living room walls, or stored privately in cases or folios.[18] In the eighteenth century, British engravers and etchers had perfected the aquatint process, which, when finished with watercolor resembled an original watercolour.[19] Lithography, however, became a faster, inexpensive method of reproduction. In the United States, as Georgia Barnhill notes, 

“with a relatively small elite class and large middle and working class, lithography was the perfect medium to meet the demands of the public.”[20]

If the nineteenth century was the age of mechanical reproduction, wherein the image became the most valued visual form, and print and photography were its agents, in the twentieth century, visual forms were also subject to the latent demands in society. These new images helped to co-create the modern visual landscape, and in so doing, Black women and men became part of the "new."

Notes

[1] Lerone Bennett, Jr., The Shaping of Black America: The Struggles and Triumphs of African-Americans, 1619 to the 1990s (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1993), 269. The Great Migration also resulted in a steady rise in the proportion of African Americans living in cities, from 27 percent in 1916 to 35 percent in 1920 and 44 percent in 1930, and by 1940, nearly half of all African Americans were urban. See Susannah Walker, Style & Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920 – 1975 (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 15.

[2] Tiffany Melissa Gill, “I Had My Own Business … So I Didn’t Have to Worry”: Beauty Salons, Beauty Culturists, and the Politics of African-American Female Entrepreneurship,” in Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America, ed. Philip Scranton (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 179.

[3] Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 144.

[4] Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2004), 6-7. Also see Noliwe M. Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 80; Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 28.

[5] Eve Allegra Raimon, The ‘Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 93. The “literary mulatto” was a character that appeared in nineteenth century fiction as the light-skinned woman whose body and dressed was aligned with that of white women.

[6] David Pilgrim, “The Tragic Mulatto Myth,” Ferris State University, http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/mulatto/ (date of last access 11 October 2013).

[7] Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 137. Clotel ends with a gang of white men chasing Clotel, a mulatto woman, who, unable to escape, drowns in the Potomac River within sight of the White House.

[8] Raimon, “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited, 13.

[9] Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 62. See also Charles Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (1899). Similar tragic mulatto tropes appear in J. McHenry Jones’ Hearts of Gold (1896) and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902).

[10] Russell, Wilson and Hall, Color Complex, 138; 139.

[11] Tate, Domestic Allegories, 58.

[12] Rooks, Hair Raising, 78.

[13] Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 18. The 1939 song “Take the ‘A’ Train” by jazz legend Duke Ellington famously celebrated the fact that the A train on the west side of Manhattan was the best way to get to Harlem.

[14] Rooks, Hair Raising, 78.

[15] Russell, Wilson and Hall, Color Complex, 142. Blake and Sissle brought Shuffle Along to Toronto in 1923 and 1924. See “Music in the Home,” The Globe, 25 August 1923, 25; “Shuffle Along Scores Again,” Dawn of Tomorrow, 19 January 1924, 6.

[16] Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, 119. While Harlem may have popularized black culture, it was nurtured and sustained in Paris in the 1920s; also see Negrophilia, 63-183.

[17] Joy Sperling, “Multiples and Reproductions: Prints and Photographs in Nineteenth-Century England – Visual Communities, Cultures, and Class” in A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century, eds. Jane Kromm and Susan Benforado Bakewell (New York: Berg, 2010), 296..

[18] Sperling, “Multiples and Reproductions,” 296.

[19] Georgia B. Barnhill, “The Pictorial Context for Nathaniel Currier: Prints for the Elite and Middle Class,” Imprint 31.2 (Autumn 2006): 32-3.

[20] Barnhill, “Pictorial Context,” 33.