SOURCE: "'I Could Not Figure Out What Was My Village': Gender Vs. Ethnicity in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior," in MELUS, Vol. 12, No. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 5-12.

In the following essay, Hunt examines Kingston's treatment of the conflict and confusion created by her various roles as a woman and as a member of separate and distinct cultures and classes.

Feminist theorists have argued about the extent to which women share a common culture. In Three Guineas Virginia Woolf has a character assert, "as a woman I have no country…. As a woman my country is the whole world." This has a fine ring to it, but if the sentiment were wholly true we would not find in women's lives so much pain, confusion, and conflict. Temma Kaplan explains the complexity of the subject: "It is impossible to speak of 'women's culture' without understanding its variation by class and...