The Woman Warrior

Linda Hunt (Essay Date Fall 1985)

SOURCE: Hunt, Linda. "'I Could Not Figure out What Was My Village': Gender v. Ethnicity in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior." MELUS 12, no. 3 (fall 1985): 5-12.

In the following essay, Hunt examines the relationship between gender and ethnicity in The Woman Warrior.

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."¹ 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 ethnic group. Women's culture...