18 pages • 36 minutes read
Alice Moore Dunbar-NelsonI Sit and Sew
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Harlem Renaissance
While she only lived in New York City for a short time, Alice Moor3e Dunbar-Nelson holds a particular place among the precursors to the Harlem Renaissance. Years before their marriage, Dunbar-Nelson and Paul Laurence Dunbar corresponded, and though Dunbar may have seen Dunbar-Nelson as more of a muse than a collaborator, he was inspired by both her beauty and her literary talent. Dunbar grew up in Kentucky and following a celebrated high school career and early publishing, he was forced to take work as an elevator operator. In Alice Moore—as she was known when they met—Dunbar found another talented young Black person publishing her work and continuing her education. As a Creole woman, Dunbar-Nelson’s identity gave her a much more fluid perspective on race, as well as the courage to unflinchingly address questions of race.
The Dunbars were literary celebrities, but his physical abuse was such a threat to her survival, Dunbar-Nelson left Dunbar and New York City for Delaware. Even at that distance, her work appeared in Harlem Renaissance publications such as The Crisis. She maintained friends like W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen—who published one of Dunbar-Nelson’s poems in his anthology Caroling Dusk. While Dunbar’s work is often seen as a herald of the more groundbreaking work of future Black artists, his depictions of dialect and reverence for the natural world prefigure writers like Zora Neale Hurston. Tuberculosis ended his life not long after the Dunbars’s divorce, but the impact of their work together and separately cemented both Dunbar and Dunbar-Nelson as founding figures in the Harlem Renaissance.
Social Context: Feminism
As a woman of color participating in social and intellectual movements well before the concept of intersectionality was articulated, Dunbar-Nelson would have been deeply aware of the way class and race affected women’s ability to take part in the movement for suffrage, in war relief efforts, or in any public activities benefitting the cause for women’s equality. Women without financial or material support could be hemmed in by childcare and household duties, unable to raise their hands or voices as part of a movement. This poem reflects the frustration and isolation of such women, whose hearts may have moved them to public service, but whose lives limited their physical activism efforts.
A much later work, feminist writer and activist Tillie Olsen’s 1956 short story “I Stand Here Ironing,” both echoes the title and the sentiment of Dunbar-Nelson’s “I Sit and Sew.” Olsen’s status as a working-class mother of four impeded but did not stifle her activism or her writing. Like Dunbar-Nelson, Olsen draws on her own perspective and experience to create characters like the mother in “I Stand Here Ironing,” who seems apathetic and detached toward the school counselor demanding attention to the grave needs of her daughter. But the mother’s thoughts show the reader a story the counselor can’t comprehend—a life too full of the survival-based tasks even to acknowledge the work that must be done to flourish and rise. In the end, the mother sees herself in the image she wants so much to avoid for her daughter: the “dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron” (Olsen, “I Stand Here Ironing”).
Though decades apart, both Dunbar-Nelson and Olsen use speakers practicing traditionally women’s tasks (ironing, sewing) to indict, if indirectly, the feminism that sidelines working women. When Dunbar-Nelson worked with the White Rose Mission, she and other activists helped teach young women to perform housekeeping duties, knowing that domestic work was the only option for young Black women in New York City at the time. Having been taught by her own seamstress mother that education and the arts were the avenue to class mobility, the practical realities of activism must have weighed on Dunbar-Nelson. The image of the seamstress in the poem is her mother, caught in the web of class. It’s also the young women of the White Rose Mission, caught in the trap of race. And it’s the poet herself—a multiracial, bisexual, female writer whose work fit no category and was thus easy to set aside.
