ABSTRACT
Focusing on the obstacles black women faced in the1920s, this chapter reads Nella Larsen’s fiction as a critique of class and racial politics in the context of the uplift movement. Unlike white women, black women did not substantially benefit from the expanded employment opportunities afforded by Fordism. Those who could avoid domestic service through education sought work in “women’s” professions such as teaching, nursing, and social work. Now well known for her two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), Nella Larsen had a successful career as a nurse and a librarian before turning to writing. The novels draw on her experience working at Tuskegee Institute to develop a critique of Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism, which she then links to the class hypocrisies of uplift. However, because Larsen avoided representing women’s and working-class labor, her criticism is somewhat muted and was lost on many contemporary readers. Larsen chose to follow convention by fashioning herself and some of her characters as modern girls. While this strategy helped Larsen gain acceptance in Harlem’s elite literary circle, it also led to the misreading of these novels as defenses of the bourgeoisie, a misreading that led to Larsen’s marginalization in the 1930s.
