ABSTRACT
Histories of the Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance now being written often discuss women who participated in the movement as authors, artists, performers, and mentors. The contributions of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Zora Neale Hurston, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Dorothy West have received increasing scholarly attention, as the lessons of revisionist history and especially of black women’s studies have informed many recent analyses. This newer research has opened the door to more in-depth study of the women who created and fostered this vital period in American culture. One significant way in which black women encouraged the Harlem Renaissance was through the means of literary production, including publishing, editing, and producing influential columns and editorials in periodicals such as Black Opals, Fire!!, Saturday Evening Quill, Palms, Challenge and its later manifestation New Challenge, The Messenger, Music and Poetry, and especially The Crisis and Opportunity, journals that can be considered “little magazines” due to the particularities of their nature, intentions, and audience.1 Among such magazines, a number featured women as arbiters and gatekeepers, including Fauset as literary editor of The Crisis during 1919-1926, Nora Douglas Holt as editor of Music and Poetry during 1921, Gwendolyn Bennett as editor of a literary and arts column for Opportunity during 1926-1928, Bennett and Hurston as members of the editorial collective behind Fire!! in 1926, and West as editor of Challenge/New Challenge during 1934-1937. Women also compiled special issues of journals, regular columns, and newspapers; Bennett, for instance, was guest editor for Black Opals in 1927, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson co-edited The Wilmington Advocate, wrote regularly for a number of periodicals, including Opportunity and The Messenger, and compiled the highly influential collections Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence (1914) and The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (1920). The vibrancy and texture that black women literary editors brought to the Renaissance, and their particular place among the number of women in publishing at that time, constitute an irresistible summons to find out what all the excitement was about. This chapter will characterize the general context in which black women
editors worked-as emphasized by the legacy of Pauline Hopkins-and then pay special attention to two figures-Jessie Fauset and Nora Holt-whose very different placements in Harlem Renaissance history call attention to the ways black women worked through the strong effects of gender-role expectations.
