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<\/a>Fernald\u2019s new book, \u201cHer Own Voice: Eight Women Who Rewrote Life and Art,\u201d is a collective biography on eight 20th century women who shaped modernism. (LUCIEN FISCHER)<\/p>\nFernald added that she always thought the stories would be interesting, but did not imagine that \u201cwe would be in a place where people would be so hungry for these stories.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of the eight women, Harlem Renaissance novelist Jesse Redmon Fauset and English writer Vera Brittain are Fernald\u2019s favorites: Fauset for her endurance and Brittain for her tenacity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fernald described Brittain\u2019s rage at the discrimination she faced as a woman and how it is conveyed in her writing. This contradicts the associations with conservative values that Brittain\u2019s proper and feminine image might bring.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brittain was a conventionally attractive woman, and being pretty was something that she wrote and thought a lot about. This was not mere vanity; Brittain felt that, as an activist representing left-wing social movements, she would be taken more seriously if she looked like the stereotypical portrayal of a nice, respectable young woman \u2014 sweet and mild-mannered \u2014 according to Fernald.<\/p>\n
The politics of fashion and gender expression played out in each of the eight women\u2019s lives in different ways, Fernald explained.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The underestimation of especially feminine women like Brittain really stood out to Fernald.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes I, even in my own thinking, still get caught in \u2018pretty and vulnerable, ugly and strong.\u2019 And so, \u2018pretty and strong\u2019 is always super cool,\u201d Fernald said. \u201cAlso, I\u2019m very interested in and affected by all the same pressures of attractiveness that all women are affected by. I\u2019m not proud of that, and I fight it in my own way, but I think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The politics of fashion and gender expression played out in each of the eight women\u2019s lives in different ways, Fernald explained.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWarner was not pretty, got over that (and) didn\u2019t think of herself as pretty, but had an entire girlhood with a mom who was disappointed not to have a pretty daughter,\u201d Fernald said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s scarring.\u201d<\/p>\n
Una Marson, a Jamaican activist and writer in 1930s London, refused to straighten her hair and wore colorful clothes that were popular in Jamaica at the time despite the pressures, as a Black woman, to conform to white beauty standards.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of what I\u2019m trying to write about in this book is there are different paths for different people and different performances of your gender that\u2019ll be available to you depending on who you are and what you\u2019re comfortable with and where you are in your life,\u201d Fernald said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cChanging your mind is so powerful, and it\u2019s so hard to admit, and we have so little grace for it in the political landscape right now, but it\u2019s so necessary.\u201d Anne Fernald <\/p>\n
Another message that was particularly important to Fernald from Brittain\u2019s life was how vocal and public she was about changing her mind. Brittain wrote a memoir, \u201cTestament of Youth,\u201d about World War I. As a young woman, she was staunchly patriotic and encouraged her fiance and brother to enlist in the war. Two of her brother\u2019s best friends also enlisted. All four died. After these losses, Brittain spent the rest of her life advocating for peace. Nonetheless, she remained quite generous to her younger self, which Fernald found \u201cdeeply, deeply touching.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cChanging your mind is so powerful, and it\u2019s so hard to admit, and we have so little grace for it in the political landscape right now, but it\u2019s so necessary,\u201d Fernald said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This concept aligns with Fernald\u2019s broader vision for the book, which is to depict women who made bold decisions about who they wanted to be and what they wanted their lives to look like, in ways that would have been unimaginable for their mothers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To open the event, Fernald read from her chapter on Fauset. The reading focused on a party celebrating the publication of Fauset\u2019s first novel, \u201cThere is Confusion,\u201d at which, to quote Fernald\u2019s electric cold open, \u201cFauset\u2019s career as a novelist nearly ended the night it began.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is Confusion\u201d served as a major catalyst for the start of the Harlem Renaissance. During the party, a series of male writers, editors and publishers gave speeches diminishing Fauset\u2019s achievements and praising the younger generation of Black writers, a group from which Fauset (at 42 years old) was clearly excluded.<\/p>\n
With characteristic humor, Fernald acknowledged the irony of reading about a book launch that went awry.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI realized when I picked this that I maybe was tempting fate by reading about an event gone wrong at an event, but so far so good,\u201d Fernald laughed.<\/p>\n
Fauset struggled for much of her life with being taken seriously as a Black woman in male-dominated literary circles. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she worked as an editor and mentored various younger male writers, helping them not just for the sake of their own personal success, but for the proliferation of Black art, and, more broadly, the advancement of literature itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, she had a real \u201chunger to be considered as a peer of the younger men whom she mentored,\u201d Fernald said. Fauset also did not shy from standing up for herself throughout her life.<\/p>\n
Of the eight women, Dorothy Arzner, a pioneering American filmmaker, stands out as the only one who is not a writer \u2014 though she wrote some screenplays early in her career. Fernald decided to include Arzner after she kept coming up in her courses, particularly in conversation with students who are dancers.\u00a0<\/p>\n