Domestic violence in the Harlem Renaissance: remaking the record in Nella Larsen's Passing and Toni Morrison's Jazz

African American Review, Spring, 2004 by Stephen Knadler

Prior to the First World War the New York Age circulated as one of the leading national African American newspapers. Founded in 1879 as the Rumor, renamed the Globe in 1881, and rechristened again as the Freeman in 1889, the New York Age carried columns by Ida B. Wells and served as the forum for race spokespersons such as Frederick Douglass. In the 1890s, under the editorship of one of its original founders, T. Thomas Fortune, the New York Age was adopted by Booker T. Washington as the national organ to publish his conservative views of economic self-help and sufficiency against a philosophy of activist protest for political rights and equality. As a result of this continued tendency to downplay the newer black radicals, the New York Age began to lose readers during the 1920s (Pride 95, 121-22). In contrast, the New York Amsterdam News accumulated a wider readership during the post-war years and followed a reverse political trajectory toward a more left-leaning perspective. Started by James Anderson in December 1909, the Amsterdam News became widely known for its campaign to end employment discrimination in the 1920s. The slogan it coined, "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work," spread as a household buzzword in the community. In contrast to the practice at other city papers, editor C. B. Powell, moreover, allowed for the unionization of his employees and started a Harlem Community Welfare Fund with 20,000 dollars from the paper's profits. During the 1930s, with the hiring of writers with strong left-wing opinions, the paper became even more radicalized (Pride 141-42). But despite the New York Age's and the News's respective conservative and progressive viewpoints, both promoted the pornographication of Harlem culture such that the private details of public figures' (and even not so public figures') domestic lives became political news.

In newspapers and magazines, women daily encounter stories that promote traditional gender norms and tap into social anxieties that can be used to cause the woman's self-consent to these norms. While the New York Age and the Amsterdam News were consciously using tabloid techniques to sell more copy, these stories tapped into the fears and fantasies of Harlem women and circulated, amidst the sensationalism, a particular construction of the female body. In "Writing Femininity," Susan Bordo has argued that "the body is not only a text of culture. It is ... [also] a locus of social control" (91). In its women's section entitled "Clubs, Sororities, Fashion, and Beauty," for example, the Amsterdam News clearly sought to advise migrant women how to adapt to middle-class ideas of dress, housekeeping, social conduct, and sexuality. In columns such as "Beauty Hints," "Household Exchange," and "Club Chat," women were taught how to feel about their bodies, how to live as the helpmate, cook, and caretaker to their husbands, and how to find their fulfillment in charitable women's work. Yet if the inside pages stirred a desire for middle-class womanhood, the front-page headlines told a different reality about black women's lives, one that played on women's anxieties about the realization of an "ideal" bourgeois marriage. In studies of how the black female body has historically been a contested site of meaning both within mainstream culture and in the black community, Carla Peterson has argued that depictions of African American womanhood have often "vacillat[ed] between the poles of sentimental normalization and the flaunting of eccentricity" (xv). In the contradictory images of black women--respectable middle-class true women and hysterical unstable lovers--in the weekly black press, Harlem women would have internalized the contradictory "vacillations" of black female identity and equally have assimilated a message about their own "eccentric" emotional lives. (3)