Eleven female authors who wrote counternarratives to the “sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia that women faced during the Jazz Age,” are featured in Peninsula College English Professor Matt Teorey’s new book, Self-Made Women in the 1920s United States.
In the book (Teorey) brings their novels, poems, plays, film scenarios, and blues lyrics into conversation with each other for the first time to show different approaches female readers could take to become autonomous individuals and full citizens, according to publisher Rowman & Littlefield.
“It takes an integrated look at the literature, music, dance, film, fashion, drama, advertising, and popular culture of the 1920s," Teorey said. The book is based on a BAS humanities seminar he taught several times between winter 2011 and winter 2018.
He first developed the ideas for the book in the paper "Mae West and Josephine Lovett: Performing Feminism in the 1920s," which he presented at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference in Bellingham in 2018.
“A short time after that, an editor at Lexington Books contacted me and asked if the paper could be developed into a monograph,” he said. “After much work and several revisions, I finished the book.”
Matt Teorey has worked at Peninsula College since 2005. For more on his published works, visit pencol.edu/faculty-staff/matt-teorey.