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of Colored People (NAACP) and married to the Harlem poet, James Weldon Johnson.

      While male styles could denote a seriousness of purpose above feminine frivolity, by the 1920s they had transmuted into high fashion. Women added small signs of femininity to distinguish modishness from cross-dressing. The lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall, for example, posed in male evening dress, Spanish hat, pearl earrings and a kiss-curl in 1926. The Radclyffe Hall ‘look’ did not indicate sexual orientation. Instead it was part of the image of belonging to a fashionable avant-garde. When Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was first published in 1928, a reviewer in the Newcastle Daily Journal remarked on her ‘aura’ of ‘highbrow modernism’.³⁰ However, the novel was quickly to be redefined as obscene and its author’s dress recoded as the mark of a lesbian subculture. By 1929 the boyish styles were no longer modish, and short hair, monocles and tailored clothing came to assume a chosen lesbian identity.

      The fluidity of style evident during the 1920s was personified in the insouciant flapper dancers. Yet while they appeared as the essence of ultra-modern immediacy and flux, they were shadowed by a motley crew of image-breakers who had defied the conventions before World War One. Masculine styles had been the badge of serious new women seeking sexual autonomy, but they also invoked Victorian and Edwardian erotica in which cross-dressing had been a motif. A model on a sexy postcard, dressed as Napoleon with enhanced crotch, titillated gender taboos. When, in 1910, the French writer Colette posed in men’s clothes with a daring cigarette, she symbolically crashed through into the cultural space reserved for pornography and prostitution. As a ‘vagabond’ woman without roots, Colette pirouetted gleefully into forbidden fantasies by adopting their trappings – diaphanous nymphs, Grecian nudity, ‘Oriental’ slave girls, the dominatrix – and sending them up. The borderlines of feminine identity were being breached. Elsie Clews Parsons, influenced by the contemporary European thinking of Gabriel de Tarde, Ernst Mach and Henri Bergson, theorized this vagabonding before the War. In 1914 she wrote in her Journal of a Feminist:

      The day will come when the individual . . . [will not] have to pretend to be possessed of a given quota of femaleness and maleness. This morning perhaps I feel like a male; let me act like one. This afternoon I may feel like a female; let me act like one. At midday or at midnight I may feel sexless; let me therefore act sexlessly. . . . It is such a confounded bore to have to act one part endlessly.³¹

      Instead of willing a new self through reason or seeking to uncover an innate natural self, the bohemian avant-garde had begun to play with being different selves. Women as well as men, it seemed, could be and do as the mood might take them. Crystal Eastman’s brother, the writer Max Eastman, poked fun at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s ‘perpetual war on habit’ in his 1927 novel, Venture. The fictional character he based on her, Mary Kittredge, ‘was always just entering upon some new spiritual experiment that involved a complete break with everything that had gone before’. This restless quest made it impossible for her to settle, to be constant or still:

      Either she was getting married, or she was getting divorced, or she was testing out unmarried love . . . or snake-dancing, or Hindu philosophy, or Hindu turbans, or female farming, or opium-eating, or flute-playing. There was nothing in the world that Mary could not want to do, and there was very little that she could not, in a surprisingly short space of time, do.³²

      Mabel Dodge Luhan’s mercurial crazes signified a wider restlessness. The modern woman did not want to be pinned down. Elsie Clews Parsons contended in 1916 that the key objective of feminism was not political or even social rights, but the declassification of women. ‘The new woman means the woman not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable.’³³

      In the 1920s the taboos breached by advanced thinkers and vagabond bohemians were being flouted openly by modern women who articulated a new common sense. In the symposium edited by feminist Freda Kirchwey, Our Changing Morality (1924), Isobel Leavenworth, an academic at Barnard, asserted women’s right to experience, including sexual experience:

      Because she must first of all conform to an unpolluted archetype, and because society must be secure in the knowledge that she is indeed so conforming, she has never been able to meet life freely, to make what experience she could out of circumstances, to poke about here and there in the nooks and crannies of her surroundings [the] better to understand the world in which she lives.³⁴

      Though 1920s American culture fostered this kind of faith in infinitely expanding opportunities, the possibilities of opting for a plurality of identities were never equally stacked. In the Harlem Renaissance, African-American women writers briefly reached out towards dynamic self-definition, yet despite belonging to Du Bois’s elite, they were constrained within a racist culture. The freedoms of the 1920s contained a catch; the radical enthusiasm for nature initiated by the Romanticism of Greenwich Village and the fashionable discovery of outsider cultures endowed black women with a spontaneous animality. This rebranding of racial difference meant that black women were being given an ascribed identity in the very era in which white women were attempting to declassify themselves. In response, some rejected sensuality outright; others grabbed the ‘primitive’ tag and ran with it. ‘People have done me the honor of believing I’m an animal,’ announced the 1920s comedian and dancer Josephine Baker. ‘I love the animals, they are the sincerest of creatures.’³⁵ She kept dogs, cats, monkeys, rabbits, a pig, a goat and a leopard as pets.

      Others tried to ‘be’ on their own terms. Among the American escapees to the Parisian left bank was the black novelist Jessie Fauset, who stated in 1925: ‘It is simplest of all to say that I like to live among people and surroundings where I am not always conscious of “thou shalt not”. I am colored and wish to be known as colored, but sometimes I have felt that my growth as a writer has been hampered in my own country.’³⁶ For African-American women of all classes there were manifold difficulties in being purely an individual. In Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand (1928), the heroine Helga Crane, who is of mixed race, recoils from the conformity of racial uplift but finds her European relatives regard her as an exotic symbol of primitive sensuality. Physically attracted to a black preacher from the South, she becomes his wife. But her resolve to improve the lives of the local women is thwarted when her own health and spirit are broken by repeated pregnancies. Hazel Carby reflects:

      As readers, we are left meditating on the problematic nature of alternative possibilities of a social self. Consider the metaphor of quicksand; it is a condition where individual struggle and isolated effort are doomed to failure. Helga’s search led to the burial, not the discovery, of the self. The only way out of quicksand is with external help; isolated individual struggle ensured only that she would sink deeper into the quagmire.³⁷

      Whether the quest for an autonomous self was consciously willed, seen as a hidden true nature to be released or as a quicksilver of shifting selves, the yearning for a separate, distinct individuality constituted a passionate and powerful motive force in leading women to break with conformity. But there was, as Carby indicates, something more – the social self. New women not only required new ways of being individuals; they needed differing kinds of relationships with others. Charlotte Perkins Gilman recognized that self-expression required sociability, that ‘our specialized knowledge, power, and skill are developed through the organic relationships of the social group’.³⁸

      Nella Larsen (Beinecke Rare Book Collection, Yale University)

      Organic social relating proved problematic for many fierce rebels who had been compelled to hone their new selves against the opinion of the world. And, of course, they discovered that in practice radical countercultures could evince competition, malice and prejudice just like the bad old world of conformity and reaction. Nonetheless their experiences of interconnection opened precious spaces for imagining, quarries for mining visionary possibilities from the known and moments when the future seemed immanent within the present. Once glimpsed these glimmered like lodestars through their lives. Mabel Dodge Luhan recalled her Greenwich Village days in terms of a fluid communalism: ‘barriers went down and people reached each other who had never been

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