Humor.
Women's literary humor in the United States can be traced to Anne Bradstreet's witty challenge to those “carping tongues” who preferred a needle to a pen in the hands of seventeenth-century women. For three hundred years, a tradition of American women's humor as a direct response to women's cultural subordination has flourished, although until very recently that tradition was obscured by suppositions about women's passivity and sentimentality that are at odds with the creation of humor. Thus, while the classic (male) tradition of American humor originated in the broad political satires of the colonial period, was transformed by frontier experience into the hyperbole and bluster of the tall tale, and became in the twentieth century urbane and often absurd in the hands of writers such as S. J. Perelman and Woody Allen, women's humorous expression has typically measured the distance between public and private, power and powerlessness, the hearty laugh and the subversive giggle.... ...
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