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Space Occupied: Women Poet–Editors and the Mimeograph Revolution in Mid-century New York City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2020

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RONA CRAN*
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Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham. Email: r.cran@bham.ac.uk.
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Abstract

This essay explores the formative but largely unacknowledged role played by women in shaping the material and intellectual cultural productions of the mimeograph revolution in mid-century New York City. I argue that women poets used their positions as editors of little magazines to claim space – material, textual, cultural, and metaphorical – in literary and social networks in which they faced gendered marginalization. I suggest that the varied success with which they were able to do so reveals the complexities of editing, the uneven nature of the influences of gender, the determining role of domestic spaces, and the significance of affective labor in relation to the mimeograph revolution.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 474 - 501
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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