1. Feminist Writers Contemplate Race and Class

2. Toni Cade Bambara
“When I look back at my work with any little distance the two characteristics that jump out at me is one, the tremendous capacity for laughter, but also a tremendous capacity for rage.” -Toni Cade Bambara, 1982
born Miltona Mirkin Cade on March 25, 1939, lived the first ten years of her life in Harlem. Bambara credits the Harlem community as having a significant influence on her writing. She learned the power of the word from “the speakers on Speaker’s Corner in Harlem” (Tate 28). She also credits the musicians of the forties and fifties with giving her “voice and pace and pitch” (Tate 29).
strong conviction and belief in family and community
rage came from the injustices she saw in the treatment of children, the elderly, and the oppressed black community
Toni Cade Bambara was a writer, activist, feminist, and filmmaker.
In 1972 she published Gorilla, My Love,which became her most widely read collection. Its fifteen stories focus on the relationships in African-American communities and includes the story “The Lesson.”
Bambara began teaching at City College of New York in 1965 and continued working there until During that time Bambara became involved in many socio-political issues and community groups. Bambara also attributes her mother’s influence as key to shaping her political being: “My mother gave us the race thing. [In school] we were to report back to her any stereotypic or racist remark” (Deep Sightings 216).

3. “Writing is one of the ways I participate in the struggle – one of the ways I help to keep vibrant and resilient that vision that has kept the Family going on. Through writing I attempt to celebrate a tradition of resistance, attempt to tap Black potential, and try to join the chorus of voices that argues that exploitation and misery are neither inevitable or necessary. Writing is one of the ways I participate in the transformation.”
Quoted in “The American Working Class Short Story” by Larry Smith
“The American Working Class Short Story” Larry Smith, pp
in The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story
edited by Blanche H. Gelfant, Lawrence Graver

4. The Black Woman (1970) non-fiction, fiction, and poetry
Black Arts Movement
First feminist anthology to feature work by Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and others.
Motivation: “impatience with the lack of writing for African-American women by African-American women”
Within the highly charged political atmosphere of the civil rights and women’s movements, Toni Cade Bambara edited and published an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, entitled The Black Woman. An important product of the Black Arts Movement, The Black Woman was the first major feminist anthology featuring work by Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and others. The genesis of the anthology, Bambara says, “grew out of impatience with the lack of writing for African-American women by African-American women. Bambara herself contributed three essays to the anthology.

5. “On the Issue of Roles”
“In a capitalist society a man is expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods, and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods.”
Bambara, Black Woman, 102
In “On the Issue of Roles,” she argues that “in a capitalist society a man is expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods, and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods” (Black Woman 102). This statement not only epitomizes the themes of many of the works within the anthology, but also explicitly reflects the emerging attitude of the time.

6. “The short story makes a modest appeal for attention, slips up on your blind side and wrassles you to the mat before you know what’s grabbed you. That appeals to my temperament.”
-Bambara in Janet Sternberg, The Writer and Her Work, 164.
The short story genre is Bambara’s favorite mode of written expression. Bambara says, for her, the short story “makes a modest appeal for attention, slips up on your blind side and wrassles you to the mat before you know what’s grabbed you” (Sternburg 164). The stories in Gorilla, My Love, as described by Bambara, are “on-the-block, in-the-neighborhood, back glance pieces” (Tate 24) that argue for the strength and empowerment of community. Not only is community a thread that binds the stories in the collection together, but also the identity of women within the context of community appears as a significant theme throughout the book. Bambara is deeply concerned with how the wisdom of the community passes from generation to generation and “manifests itself in the living” (Tate 66).

7. Who are these people that spend that much for performing clowns and $1000 for toy sailboats? What kinda work they do and how they live and how come we ain't in on it? Where we are is who we are, Miss Moore always pointin out. But it don't necessarily have to be that way, she always adds then waits for somebody to say that poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie and don't none of us know what kind of pie she talking about in the first damn place. But she ain't so smart cause I still got her four dollars from the taxi and she sure ain't gettin it Messin up my day with this shit. Sugar nudges me in my pocket and winks. Toni Cade Bambara “The Lesson”
"My eyes tell me it's a chunk of glass cracked with something heavy, and different-colored inks dripped into the splits, then the whole thing put in an oven or something. But for $480 it don't make sense" (309).
"Who'd pay all that when you can buy a sailboat set for a quarter at Pop's, a tube of glue for a dime, and a ball of string for eight cents?" (309).
Of Bambara: Her musical style, based on urban and African American speech, is dazzling in spirit, revealing themes of individualism within a community. In Larry Smith, “The American Working-class short story”

8. Best Documentary Academy Award in 1986
May 13th, 1985 bombing of MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia.
Bomb dropped from a state helicopter ignited over sixty houses in Cobb’s Creek.
six adults and five children died
Community decimated
The mayor at that time, W. Wilson Goode, ordered the attack. With more than 500 police officers surrounding 6221 Osage, a 90-minute gun battle ensued, and a
Eyewitness accounts and interviews are the backbone of Bambara’s Bombing of Osage Avenue. Falling back on her ideology “to tell the truth in her writing,

9. Nellie Wong Chinese American poet, feminist, and socialist
Born Oakland, CA in 1934
Confronts racism, sexism, labor issues in her work
Poet and activist Nellie Wong was born in Oakland, California. She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and in her poetry and through her community activism, she confronts social problems such as racism, sexism, and labor issues. Her collections of poetry include Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park (1977), The Death of Long Steam Lady (1986), Stolen Moments (1997), and Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner (2012). With Merle Woo and Mitsuye Yamada, Wong coauthored 3 Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism (2003).
Wong is a member of various literary, artistic, and political groups, including Radical Women, the Freedom Socialist Party, and the National Asian American Telecommunications Association.
After high school, worked as a secretary
Took a writing class
Began college educatiion at SF State in 1970 while still working full time as a secretary

10. "I am interested in working with the movement for social change
"I am interested in working with the movement for social change. By doing so, my writing will also be strengthened by my political activism."
-Nellie Wong,
1983
Wong's second book, The Death of Long Steam Lady , was published in It is a collection of poems and a short story that serves as the title piece. In the autobiographical poems "Songs for My Father: In Four Photographs," "It's in the Blood," and "When I Was Growing Up" Wong records the facts of her parents' immigration and the fear and insecurity she experienced as an Asian American adolescent. Reviewers praised her vivid and realistic imagery, compassionate voice, and political insight.

12. Nothing on Long Steam Lady, nothing on names such as Wong, SooHoo, Young, Lee, Fong, Chin. Nothing on former dancers at Imperial City, on old women who fed pigeons in Portsmouth Square. On old men who died along in their rooms. Not that Chinese people didn't die, not that waiters, laundrymen, seamstresses, dishwashers didn’t die. Paisley lingered over an article about the death of a philanthropist… (678)
Discuss the significance of clothing, food, or names in Wong's story about Long Steam Lady. How do clothes, food, and names work as sites of meaning in Wong's story about Long Steam Lady? reflect Wong's commentary on the intersections of race, gender, and social class?

13. Gloria Anzaldúa
born in 1942 on a ranch in south Texas, near the border of Mexico
At age 11, joined family in migrant agricultural labor
stifled by traditional Chicano gender roles, Anzaldúa found what "an entry into a different way of being" through reading
B.A., Pan American University; M.A. UT-Austin, also studies at UC-Santa Cruz
died 2004
Gloria Anzaldúa's work is fundamentally concerned with articulating what she calls a "new mestiza consciousness," an identity characterized by hybridity, flexibility, and plurality and focused on the experiences of Chicanas (Mexican American women) and particularly mestizas (Chicana and Mexican women who have mixed Native American and Spanish heritage). Writing fiction, poetry, memoirs, and literary and cultural criticism (sometimes all within the same text), Anzaldúa has helped define and lend authority to women of color as well as gays and lesbians, whom she identifies as empowered by the inclusiveness and expansiveness of mestiza identity. (

14. published 1981
'"revolutionized women's studies by centering political struggle, lesbianism, and radical feminism."

15. Published stories, poems, critical theory, children's books, and a novel (La Prieta).
Complex identity as a woman, a Chicana, a mestiza, and a lesbian is reflected in contributions to gender studies, Chicano studies, queer theory, and creative writing.

16. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) stands as a manifesto of her ideas about culture and identity construction. 
Use of language
Anger and rage

17. How do race, gender, and class intersect in Anzaldua's poems?
In "To Live in the Borderlands Means You," how does she particularly problematize the concept of a singular identity?
How does Anzaldua invoke the history of racial and class-based violence?

18. Anger and Rage in “We Call Them Greasers”
Oh, there were a few troublemakers who claimed we were the intruders. Some even had land grants and appealed to the courts. It was a laughing stock them not even knowing English. Still, some refused to budge, even after we burned them out. And the women—well I remember one in particular. She lay under me whimpering. I plowed into her hard kept thrusting and thrusting felt him watching from the mesquite tree heard him keening like a wild animal in that instant I felt such contempt for her round face and beady black eyes like an Indian’s.

19. you are the battleground where enemies are kin to each other
In the Borderlands
you are the battleground
where enemies are kin to each other
you are at home, a stranger,
the border disputes have been settled
the volley of shots have shattered the truce
you are wounded, lost in action
dead, fighting back;
To live in the Borderlands means
the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off
your olve-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart
pound you pinch you toll you out
smelling like white bread but dead;
To survive the Borderlands
you must live sin fonteras
be a crossroads.
Gloria Anzaldúa

20. Leslie Marmon Silko Born in 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Raised on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation in northern New Mexico
Cultural and ethnic heritage is a mix of Laguna Pueblo, Plains Indian, Mexican, and Anglo–American. 
Notable works: Ceremony (1977), Storyteller (1981), Almanac of the Dead (1991).

21. “You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.”
“The American public has difficulty believing ... [that] injustice continues to be inflicted upon Indian people because Americans assume that the sympathy and tolerance they feel toward Indians is somehow 'felt' or transferred to the government policy that deals with Indians. This is not the case.”

22. Themes Storytelling (central to all of Silko’s work)
Matrilinear relationships
Racial and Cultural Oppression
The Lullaby
“She could not remember if she had ever sung it to her children, but she knew that her grandmother had sung it and her mother had sung it.”
Ayah, as an old woman, recalls traditional forms of blanket–weaving, as practiced by her mother and grandmother. She also recalls giving birth to her first child with the aid of her mother. When her husband is dying, she turns to a traditional lullaby sung by her grandmother in order to comfort him through the process of death.
Storytelling (central to all of Silko’s work)
“Lullaby” appears in a collection entitled Storyteller
storytelling can heal and transform the experience of loss—both personal and cultural
Matrilinear relationships
granddaughter–grandmother relationship signifies link between modern and traditional Native American culture.
Racial and Cultural Oppression
The Lullaby
represents the passing of oral tradition from generation to generation of women in the Native American family
“She could not remember if she had ever sung it to her children, but she knew that her grandmother had sung it and her mother had sung it.”
The lullaby itself combines images of nature and family to affirm both in eternal unity.

23. The sun had gone down but the snow in the wind gave off its own light
The sun had gone down but the snow in the wind gave off its own light. It came in thick tufts like new wool—washed before the weaver spins it. Ayah reached out for it like her own babies had, and she smiled when she remembered how she had laughed at them. She was an old woman now, and her life had become memories. (opening lines)
combines images of nature and family to affirm both in eternal unity.

24. [T]he green wool was faded, and it was unraveling on the edges
[T]he green wool was faded, and it was unraveling on the edges. She did not want to think about Jimmie. So she thought about the weaving and the way her mother had done it. On the tall wooden loom set into the sand under a tamarack tree for shade. She could see it clearly. She had been only a little girl when her grandma gave her the wooden combs to pull the twigs and burrs from the raw, freshly washed wool. And while she combed the wool, her grandma sat beside her, spinning a silvery strand of yarn around the smooth cedar spindle. Her mother worked at the loom with yarns dyed bright yellow and red and gold. She felt peaceful remembering. . .
Passage continues: She didn’t feel cold any more. Jimmie’s blanket seemed warmer than it had ever been. And she could remember the morning he was born. She could remember whispering to her mother, who was sleeping on the other side of the hogan, to tell her it was time now.
“Time limits are fictional. Losing all sense of time is actually the way to reality. We use clocks and calendars for convenience sake, not because that kind of time is real.”
“When someone dies, you don't get over it by forgetting; you get over it by remembering, and you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our life and loved us, as we have loved them.”

25. Ayah could see they wanted her to sign the papers, and Chato had taught her to sign her name. It was something she was proud of. She only wanted them to go, and to take their eyes away from her children. . . She hated Chato, not because he let the policeman and doctors put the screaming children in the government car, but because he had taught her to sign her name. Because it was like the old ones always told her about learning their language or any of their ways: it endangered you.

26. The bar owner didn’t like Indians in there, especially Navajos, but he let Chato come in because he could talk Spanish like he was one of them. The men at the bar stared at her, and the bartender saw that she left the door open wide. Snowflakes were flying inside like moths and melting into a puddle on the oiled wood floor. He motioned to her to close the door, but she did not see him. She held herself straight and walked across the room slowly, searching the room with every step. . . She felt calm.

27. In past years they would have told her to get out
In past years they would have told her to get out. But her hair was white now and her faced was wrinkled. They looked at her like she was a spider crawling slowly across the room. They were afraid; she could feel the fear. She looked at their faces steadily.

28. The sky cleared. Ayah saw that there was nothing between her and the stars.
The light was crystalline. There was no shimmer, no distortion through earth haze. She breathed the clarity of the night sky; she smelled the purity of the half moon and the stars. He was lying on his side with his knees pulled up near his belly for warmth. His eyes were closed now, and in the light from the stars and the moon, he looked young again.

29. Ayah knew that with the wine he would sleep. He would not feel it
Ayah knew that with the wine he would sleep. He would not feel it. She tucked the blanket around him, remembering how it was when Ella had been with her; and she felt the rush so big inside her heart for the babies. And she sang the only song she knew to sing for babies. She could not remember if she had ever sung it to her children, but she knew that her grandmother had sung it and her mother had sung it:
The earth is your mother,
she holds you.
The sky is your father,
he protects you.
Sleep, sleep.
Rainbow is your sister,
she loves you.
The winds are your brothers,
they sing to you.
We are together always.
There never was a time
when this was not so.

30. Kate Braverman American novelist, short story writer, and poet
Born 1950; grew up in L.A.
B.A. in Anthropology from UC Berkeley
M.A. in English from Sonoma State
Works include novels Lithium for Medea (1979), Palm Latitudes (1988), Wonders of the West (1993), and The Incantation of Frida K (2001); short story collections Squandering the Blue (1990) and Small Craft Warnings (1997); four books of poetry.

31. “I have always hoped that my books would not be novels but assaults on society. I am a brick-throwing survivor of the 1960s and there is some part of me that will be forever Berkeley. I hope that all my works will be acts of outrage and revolution. To write for anything less than that is really unworthy of the task.”
--Kate Braverman

32. Braverman writes about “women controlled by destructive men
Braverman writes about “women controlled by destructive men.” How does Braverman portray Jessica’s relationship with Frank? with Maria? with Ashley?
Blanche H. Gefant, Lawrence Graver, ed., The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story, 167.

33. These skies are not tainted by smog and the human residues that slope upward from cities. It might be a region in an elemental state of grace. Or a region where pollution has been completely banished, where there has been some complex accommodation. And the greens seem mysteriously illuminated, as if their essences had been somehow defined and freed.
“It’s the green of money,” Frank says. He is serious… (418)

34. “You’ll have to economize,” Frank tells her
“You’ll have to economize,” Frank tells her. Then he said he won’t pay for Westford Academy anymore, or Ashley’s violin lessons or Ryan’s karate classes. Her children will have to attend public schools. Frank’s accountant will make the stocks and bonds disappear. He will make Frank’s assets confused and ambiguous. Frank is an attorney. He knows hoe to go to court, what a judge and jury will find credible. Frank specializes in these matters, these unique parameters. And she will have to rent an apartment in an inferior part of the city where her neighbors will speak languages she does not want to know. (419)

35. The apartments that Frank takes her to only have living rooms
The apartments that Frank takes her to only have living rooms. The dining room has disappeared like the markers on graves. We give our dead indented slabs. We know they are not coming out of the ground. And we don’t need dining rooms. We eat standing up in the kitchen or on a sofa in front of the television. A dining room implies a world where a family gathers and shares food. There are no families anymore, only women with children. Is that what one learns from the architecture? Is this how rooms speak?
But yes, she can imagine Christmas in the town house with the brown carpet the color of all the subtle crimes of trapped people. It would rain. She would hand a wreath on the living-room door. She would hold Ashley’s hand…. (421)

36. She would be required to carry wash to and from a shared laundry facility where coins were necessary.
Jessica wonders how women do this and the other labor of stove and floor, or bathroom, toilet, and tile. How do they master the intricacy of so many surfaces? How is it possible to provide such services and also do conventional work, go to offices, remain the appropriate hours? What happens when your children are sick?
When Jessica reaches this particular juncture, when she imagines the feverish Ashley in an unadorned room in a stucco building ripped by the noise from radios and cars and words shouted in alien languages, Jessica reaches for a glass. She finishes the cognac. Frank pours her another. (423)

37. …one day she is going to leave. She is certain
…one day she is going to leave. She is certain. She will simply walk out in the morning, as if she were going to the gym or the florist or a medical appointment. She will drive over Mulholland instead, down into the enormous concrete mouth of the Valley. One day she will go over the hill. She will take her children and nothing else and this divestiture will free her. It will be like crossing Donner Pass. It will be the end of isolation and spiritual starvation. It will be what happens after a woman has been alone with prophecies of cancer and water and madness and savage inhabitations in the primitive country. It will be like discovering that time and space are indeed a continuum. It will be like arriving in another country. It will be like finding God. (427)
Donner Pass?