Elaine Showalter (Essay Date 1991)

SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. "The Other Lost Generation." In Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing, pp. 104-26. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Showalter discusses the difficulties faced by women writers in the 1920s and 1930s, notably postwar hostility toward the women's movement, negative reactions against women in academia, and the secondary domestic and social roles relegated to women that marginalized female artists.

'I never was a member of a "lost generation,"' the poet Louise Bogan wrote to her friend Morton Zabel in the 1930s, trying to account for the problems she was facing in her career.¹ Bogan meant that she had not belonged to the famous group of literary pilgrims who fled the United States in disillusionment after World War I, to cultivate their Muse in London or Montparnasse. Yet in another, and more important sense, Bogan and her...