Reviewing While White: A Tyranny of Petticoats

by Megan Schliesman

I like the concept of A Tyranny of Petticoats. This short story collection is subtitled “15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers & Other Badass Girls.” In her introduction, editor and contributor Jessica Spotswood writes: “I realized what I really wanted was to edit an anthology of stories about clever, interesting American girls throughout history written by clever, interesting (though not necessarily all American) women.” (p. x)

What’s not to love?

So yes, I like the concept, and in fact many of the stories, but I’m also struggling with how the theme is explored when it comes to racial and cultural diversity.

My first moment of unease came a bit later in the introduction. Spotswood states: “I suggested that we think diversely in terms of geography, historical eras, and our heroines’ races, sexualities, religions, and opinions on all manner of things.” So far so good. Then she goes on, “America is a melting pot. I hoped our fifteen stories could, in some small way, reflect that reality.” (p. xi)

The Tyranny of Metaphor

While there have been both critics and defenders of the term “melting pot” (and alternates, such as “salad bowl,” that have received some traction), reading it here was a disappointment. I understand the good intentions in using it, but  America—in present and in the past—is a place of vibrant diversity and complicated realities surrounding that diversity, and I think readers deserve explicit acknowledgment of this. “Melting pot” doesn’t begin to cover it.

But, ok. Melting pot.

There are fifteen stories in A Tyranny of Petticoats. Eight of the stories feature characters of color: five about African Americans, one about a Chinese American, one about Latinas, and one about a character referenced as “brown” with no development of this aspect of her identity. A ninth story is about a character who is Inuit. So, at first glance, promising when it comes to racial and ethnic diversity.

And yet, of the fifteen writers contributing to A Tyranny of Petticoats, only four of them, from what I’ve been able to determine, are women of color, and none of the contributors are from First/Native Nations. This is not nearly as diverse as I was hoping given the stated intent to reflect diversity. And while I don’t want to negate the diversity of voices that contributed to A Tyranny of Petticoats, the resulting diversity of stories across the collection was a strange, and at times unsettling mix.

Kekla Magoon, who is African American, wrote about an African American teen in “Pulse of the Panthers.” The other three contributors of color are of Asian Pacific heritage. Marie Lu wrote the story about the Inuit girl in Alaska. Caroline Tung Richmond and Y.S. Lee both wrote stories about White protagonists. The three remaining stories about the African Americans, the one story about the young woman who is “brown,” the one story about the Latinas, and the one story about the Chinese American, were all written by White authors. Of these, the story about the Latinas, the story about the Chinese American, and one of the stories about an African American (along with one story about a White character written by a White author) have supernatural/mystical elements. The story about the Native Alaskan has a spiritual element.

Let me be more specific:  The one representation of Latino culture in this anthology is a story about the three fates who are living out their current lives as three Mexican American sisters; the one representation of Chinese American culture is a girl who can see ghosts and commune with spirits; the opening story about an African American young woman who escaped enslavement with her father and is part of a pirate ship crew ends with her becoming a ghost of the sea; and the one representation of First/Native Nations cultures is an Inuit girl who saves herself from violent White traders with her own grit and some guidance from the Seal King.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

If I were reading an anthology of the extraordinary that goes beyond courage, grit, and fortitude—one in which mysticism, the supernatural, and perhaps spirituality were a clearly stated scope of the collection—I wouldn’t have been as unsettled, especially if that collection were broadly diverse in intent and specifically diverse in execution, and clarified its scope in terms of both spiritual beliefs and the fantastic (which are two very separate things). In such a collection, any representation of culture would, by nature of the overarching theme, be expected to include something supernatural or otherworldly and perhaps spiritual. I think of the marvelous collection Diverse Energies published by Tu Books/Lee & Low. It was intentionally diverse science fiction and fantasy and it felt (although I have no doubt it wasn’t) effortless.

But this is framed and clearly stated as historical fiction, and the inclusion of stories with supernatural, if not spiritual, elements was a strange choice to me. Surely there are plenty of “badass girls” who can be imagined throughout and across U.S. history and authentically grounded in a variety of cultures without resorting to the fantastic. What am I to make of these stories? Are they grounded in any authentic cultural beliefs, or simply spun from their authors’ imaginations?  The same is true of the spiritual element in the Inuit story—is this drawn from cultural beliefs, or the author’s imagination? If it is “authentic,” there is also the question, as Debbie Reese recently noted, of whether it is in fact religious and whether including it might be considered sacrilegious.

There is an author’s note following each story and as a general rule they reveal the thought and inspiration that went into the tales. Following “El Destinos” [sic] Lesley Walton writes, “”I always found mythology to be a delicious combination of magic and humanity….I thought of all those times when one’s cultural and national identity seemed at odds, and I wondered what might it be like to be divine and yet, at the same time utterly human….suddenly I had Valeria, Rosa, and Maria Elana, three immortals sent down to live as Mexican American sisters during the years after the Texas annexation” (p. 83).  Marissa Meyer’s note for “Gold in the Roots of Grass” talks about her fascination with western history and the gold rush, and her joy in doing research, but gives no mention to the Chinese American content of the story (p. 185). In her note following “The Journey” Marie Lu writes of loving Julie of the Wolves and of researching Alaska, loving “the blurred line between history and Inuit folklore….the facts already feel magical” (p. 41). J. Anderson Coats writes of the Mother Carey legend that is part of the opening story, “Mother Carey’s Table,” and of the fact that “about 25 percent of sailors on pirate or privateer vessels were people of color” (p. 19).

One of the first things I pay attention to in any anthology is the diversity of contributors, whether or not diversity is in any way the point of the collection. If it lacks racial diversity, I’m more than just disappointed. I’m angry. Because to my mind, from where I’m standing in the twenty-first century, the creators of that anthology failed a major requirement in executing their vision, whatever that vision was. They have failed their vision and they have failed readers. I say this even if I read and like the stories or poems included.

The failure for me in A Tyranny of Petticoats is less clear-cut. There are marvelous stories in this collection, including Magoon’s “Pulse of the Panthers,” about an African American teen living in rural California whose view of the world expands when her family hosts a group of Black Panthers from Oakland in 1967; Y.S. Lee’s “The Legendary Garrett Girls,” about two White sisters tending bar and taking no crap on the Alaskan frontier in 1898; and “Pearls” by Beth Revis, in which a young White woman escapes Chicago and an unwanted marriage, finding independence and community both on the Wyoming frontier in 1876.  Two stories, “City of Angels” by Lindsay Smith, set in 1945 Los Angeles (featuring the character with “brown” skin), and “The Whole World Is Watching” by Robin Talley, set in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention and featuring an African American woman, have main characters who are lesbian.

Again, I don’t want to negate the diversity that exists in this collection. And I’m not suggesting that the answer to “Who can write what?” is to simply “Write what you know” because what a writer knows is not necessarily so easily defined nor is it static. But this anthology definitely fell short for me by not ensuring a broader range of diversity among the contributors. I think this contributed to serious gaps between idea and execution, particularly when it comes to the inclusion of the supernatural in half of the stories that are racially diverse. This is true regardless of the fact that I enjoyed many of the individual stories as pieces of fiction. This misplaced, mistaken exoticism in an anthology of historical fiction feeds into broader cultural stereotypes, and that is something I’m sure was never the intent of this anthology, or of the individual writers. But the “magical” person of color and the “spiritual” Native are, indeed, the dominant representation of racial and cultural diversity here.

There is a a second volume in the works, The Radical Element: A Tyranny of Petticoats 2. There are some wonderful authors already contributing--I hope even more diverse voices will be included. It is stated as being a mix of fact, fiction, and fantasy. I’ll also be curious to see how well those combined elements and the writers serve the stated theme of "young woman throughout history whose voices have been ignored too long."