| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Elizabeth Francis. The Secret Treachery of Words: Feminism and Modernism in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2002. Pp. xxx, 197. Cloth $52.95, paper $18.95.
Elizabeth Francis presents complex and nuanced portrayals of dancer Isadora Duncan and three American writers: Margaret Anderson, Floyd Dell, and Josephine Herbst. The title of the book implies that, despite their faith in the power of speech to enunciate new feminist visions of social change, each of these intellectuals' celebrated words "contained a hidden dimension that limited such transgressions" (p. xxi).	1
In the introduction, Francis challenges the reader as she darts between questions about how to name feminist modernists, modern feminism, the relationship between modernism and mass culture, and the debates on the nature, purpose, and implications of modernism. Still, the intellectual portraits she paints mostly achieve her main goal: to demonstrate that "efforts to change the representation and lived conditions of gender were embedded in the power dynamics of dominance and marginality. Feminist modernism was both marginalized in history and complicit with the dynamic itself" (p. xxiii). Francis provides a fascinating account on how "modernism" writ large betrayed and obscured both feminism and feminism's contributions to modernism. For decades the contributions of Duncan, Anderson, Dell, and Herbst have gone largely unrecognized. Because of the alternative lifestyles and socialist communities, Anderson, Dell, and Herbst remain overshadowed by authors considered more "acceptable," such as Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Edith Wharton.	. . .

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