No Girls Allowed: Women of the Beat Generation

No Girls Allowed: Women of the Beat Generation:

"In Joyce Johnson's conclusion to her memoir, Minor Characters, this vision of herself as a young woman seeking her place among the writers and artists of the Beat Generation encapsulates the experience of a number of woman writers and poets during this highly male-centered literary era. The courage it took for these women to be there at all in the repressive and conservative 1950s and the excitement they experienced at having secured a 'seat at the table' coexisted with the knowledge that they remained set apart and were generally seen and heard less than their male contemporaries. Given the nature and history of both American culture at the time and Beat writing in general, such an outsider status should not be surprising. Alice Notley takes the argument even further in her discussion of Joanne Kyger's poetry and includes literary movements in general: 'Poetry movements are generally man-made; women seen in light of such movements always appear secondary' (95)."