Like their more recognizable male counterparts, women participating in the Beat movement were fascinated with creativity. They expressed this creativity in numerous ways. Primarily, they read, studied, discussed, and, of course, wrote literature. Ginsberg wrote of a female he encountered through the movement, “Where there was a strong writer who could hold her own, like Diane Di Prima, we would certainly work with her and recognize her.” Di Prima—who published her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, in 1958—is by far the most recognizable female Beat writer. She is often the only woman whose works are studied as part of the Beat canon. Many male Beats felt her to be their own equal.
Di Prima had the most prolific publishing career of any Beat woman, but she wasn’t the only woman to publish. In 1962, Joyce Johnson published her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, which is considered the first beat novel written by a woman (and about a woman). In an interview with Nancy Grace, Johnson stated, “I felt a part of the Beat scene, as in sympathy with it, and I felt that this was a novel [the Beats] would understand.” She also claims that she was nervous while writing this novel because she knew that it would be shocking. “I was quite aware that I was writing about things a nice young lady shouldn’t write about.”
Johnson wasn’t the only beat woman to feel such anxiety. Many women were writing during this period but very few published. Perhaps they lacked faith in their abilities; perhaps they felt only male Beats could get works published; perhaps they knew that critics, while hesitantly embracing novels by male Beats featuring behavior anathema to that of the ideal American, would receive such subject matter scathingly if published by a young woman.
Some women worked with male Beats to create masterpieces—such as Fran Landesman, who wrote remarkable songs for The Nervous Set,” a musical play written by her husband, Jay—while others worked almost symbiotically with their counterparts, feeding each other’s creativity, as Joanna McClure and her husband, Michael, did.
Many women relegated themselves to helping publish the works of others, particularly their lovers and husbands. As cofounder of Totem Press and Yugen (a highly influential magazine as it helped many up-and-coming writers receive recognition), Hettie Jones exemplifies this role; she worked on all fronts, typing, promoting, and distributing Yugen. Without her publishing connections, Yugen could not have existed. In “Babes in Boyland,” she writes:
Without the typist, there’d have been no magazine at all, since the early issues of Yugen, as well as some of our Totem Press books, were, well, hand jobs. Put together on the kitchen table. And indeed, I did the typing. In those pre-computer days, on a rickety, erratic IBM with “proportional spacing” --which meant typing a piece repeatedly until it approximated print. Centering Michael McClure’s capitalized verses, organizing Hubert Selby’s dense prose into justified lines. Besides typing, I also handled the “press type” –peel off display lettering you could buy on a sheet and then lay onto an original for photo offset…Why was I willing to do all this work after eight hours on my day job? Why was I willing to buy paper, pay the offset printer and the rent on the typewriter? Arrange for distribution, fill orders, solicit ads, and then throw a party for the people who came to do the collating? (51).
Many of the women in the movement were the economic backbones of their families. By reversing traditional economic gender roles, these women supported male Beats, sacrificing time they could have spend creating so that their male counterparts could focus on their own projects. These women also raised children—some more traditionally like Jones and Carolyn Cassady, and other more peculiarly like Di Prima and Frazer.
Indeed, these women were the original superwomen—pursuing careers, raising families, and exploring their creativity simultaneously. While less prolific and influential than Beat figures like Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg, these women balanced the fine line between adult responsibility and expressive freedom while other Beats gravitated towards the excessive and neglected responsibility for fear of it being too conventional.
Works Cited
Grace, Nancy. “Women of the Beat Generation: Conversation with Joyce Johnson and Hettie Jones.” Artful Dodge.com. Editors Daniel Bourne, et al. Online Journal. 14 Mar 2005. <http://www.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/ johnsonjones.htm>
Jones, Hettie. “Babes in Boyland.” The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and American Culture. Ed. Holly George-Warren. New York: Hyperion, 1999.
Knight, Brenda. “Women of the Beat Generation
: the Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution.
Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 1996.