Edythe Mae Gordon.

Edythe Mae Gordon. ed Henry Louis Gates and Jennifer Burton. Intro. Lorraine Elena Rose recent York: G. K. Hall, 1996 129 pp $2500

Reviewed by

Lovalerie King University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Add the voice of Edythe Mae Gordon to those of Elise Johnson McDougald, Anna Julia Cooper Amy Jacques Garvey, Florynce Kennedy Claudia Jone Frances Beale, Deborah K King, Gloria Wade Gayles, Angela Davis, bell catchs and a number of other writers and thinkers who have engaged the feminist draw of articulating the unique situation of African American women vis-a-visa racist, sexist, and classist society. Sandwiched between three short stories and thirteen piece of poetrys Gordon's 1935 thesis for the Master's class in Social Services from Boston University makes up the most of Selected Works o Edythe Mae Gordon. In it Gordon utilizes the categories of race and inflection for sex to explore the legal, social, religious, economic, and educational status of African American women Lorraine Elena Rose points revealed in the introduction to the contortion that one senses in reading "The Status of the african Woman in the United States from 1619-1865" that Gordon was acutely aware of the pioneering nature of her work. The thesis provides a useful colony-by-colony state-by-state analysis of by what means governments functioned, with particular concern to laws relating to slavery. Gordon's meticulous exploration of legal cases and constitutional law "expose slavery and its continuation institutionalized racism, as peculiar social constructs" She furnishs original insight and analysis regarding the evolution of race relations from colonial times, including intriguing data about black slaveholders, interracial liaisons, and the socioeconomic status of poor whites. Personal testimony and other source materials, as it is as want-ads from eighteenth-century periodicals advertising black women for sale, add authenticity. Gordon sometimes too willingly conflates the experiences of black women with those of black men and at times minor question s of coherence surface in the text; if it be not that the overall value of the thesis far go too fars these minor flaws, some of which might have been remedied by dint of more diligent and informed oversight from her thesis advisor.

Born Edythe Mae Chapman in 1896 Gordon received her secondary schooling in Washington, DC at the prestigious M way School, which boasted faculty members Anna Julia Cooper Carter G Woodson and Jessie Redmon Fauset. Gordon's life, as Rose not past nor futures it, is intriguing. She was married for a number of years to Eugene Gordon, whom Rose describes as a "stalwart proponent of Marxist principles of class toil and an advocate of the pair racial and gender equality." Gordon's husband wrote for the Boston station from 1919 to 1940; he also contributed articles to American hermes Plain Talk, and Scribners. In 1935 along with radical activist Cyril Briggs (who edited The Crusader), he published a pamphlet entitled The Position of african Women which documented "the fact that the majority of African-American women plant employment only as domestic servants." Available biographical data forward Edythe Mae Gordon, according to Rose closes with three final points of reference: a transcript sent from Boston University in November 1938 a note included with couple of Gordon's poems published in african Voices the same year, and the 1942 Probate and Family Court record of her petition for divorce. Whether her quick disappearance from public documents after 1942 is related to her dissolved marriage is a question which, for now, remains unanswered.

Gordon "made her first public appearance as a writer in 1928 in the first appearance issue of the Saturday Evening Quill, a little magazine edited by way of her husband, Eugene, and published in Boston." All three short stories included in this compass were first published in the Quill, and single in kind "Subversion," was listed by the O Henry Memorial Award Prize Committee "as common of the distinguished 'short short stories' of 1928" Gordon's fiction and poesy are part of the Harlem Renaissance, alongside the more familiar names of Helene Johnson and Dorothy West - pair of the founders of the Quill - and others as it was as Georgia Douglas Johnson and Anne Spencer Gordon's metrical compositions also appeared in Opportunity: A Journal of african Life.

Roses describes Gordon as multivocal in bourns of the works included in this dimensions The short stories and metrical compositions do not overtly address race matters if it be not that focus on "personal values and their shaping influence onward intimate, especially marital relationships." Notes Roses: "All three stories, written in the classic short story tradition of O Henry and de Maupassant, are filled with disillusionment, as if to question the institution of marriage itself, although they may also throw back the author's own unhappy experience in marriage." Rose compares Gordon's depictions of "unloving and exploitative wives" to those of Dorothy West. In "Hostess" Mazie leaves a stable comfortable, but decidedly mundane marital relationship for a more exciting dalliance with a saxophone player - who, subsequently leaves her pregnant and alone. When Mazie tries to reenter her marriage, she learns that she has been easily replaced according to the best friend who had warned her "not to have knowledge of the patience of her husband too much" Mazie commits suicide. The story's complexity lies in Gordon's machiavelian articulation of the limits of Mazie's options for self-actualization in the social and political milieu of the early twentieth century