New Women and New Negroes: Archetypal Womanhood in "The Living Is Easy"

Cleo's poor fit within her preWorld War I context raises the question of how late 19th- and early 20tn-century ideals of womanhood and racial citizenship colluded to circumscribe women's identities, narrowly defining their roles even as the dawn of New Negrohood promised African Americans greater self-determination and social mobility. If, as historian Paula Giddings contends, "the cult [of true womanhood] caused Black women to prove they were ladies" and "forced White ladies to prove that they were women" (54, italics added), then novels such as West's The Living Is Easy demand a revised, modernist conception of political desire, one in which economically and socially privileged African American women struggle to come full circle, that is, to shed the constraints of a protected "lady-hood" for the freedom of an empowered womanhood. Jennifer M. Wilks is Assistant Professor of English and African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also an affiliate of the Program in Comparative Literature.