This chapter traces the influence of second-wave feminist activism, scholarship, and fiction in the US on women’s fiction of the 1990s. The first half examines a selection of literary texts published between the late 1960s and late 1980s that attest to the innovative techniques that women and genderqueer writers developed in this period to articulate feminist ideas, record the movement’s reception by the public, and recuperate aspects of American history long overlooked by a male-dominated academy. The second half turns to two novels by women published at the twentieth century’s close, both of which move between the 1990s and the previous six decades: Whitney Otto’s How to Make an American Quilt and Paule Marshall’s Daughters. The narrative strategies these novels use to challenge universalist accounts of history are revealed. These two novels featuring female protagonists who abandoned PhD projects dismissed as trivial by their white male supervisors are representative of a broader tendency in women’s fiction of the period, which is best approached as a repository for the historiographic narratives rejected by a white male-dominated academy.

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s long-neglected service as a literary ambassador. Focusing on Hughes’s 1965 trip to France and his 1966 visit to Senegal, the chapter demonstrates that the eminent poet used Cold War cultural diplomacy to promote Black internationalist connection and, more surprisingly, to express his political and aesthetic disagreements with an incipient Black Arts Movement.