A Deep Dive with Sabrina Fuchs-Abrams, Professor of English and Author

Professor Sabrina Fuchs-Abrams has expertly triangulated women’s studies, humor studies, and literary studies to examine how women challenged the status quo in the 19^th and 20^th centuries—and has shared that expertise with Empire State University’s MA in Liberal Studies program for the past 20 years. The New Jersey native has serious New York expertise; much of her research focuses on New York intellectuals and literature, including her published book, “New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century.” Ahead, Fuchs-Abrams shares some of her literary and women’s studies acumen in honor of Women’s History Month.

When the video call connects, the rectangle enclosing a black-and-white-clad Fuchs-Abrams floods with brightness. The room is stark white, made even more luminous by the large windows on either side of the professor. A couple pieces of furniture are visible: two white sofas and a wooden dining table.

Was there a particular book, writer, or teacher that sparked your love of literature?

Fuchs-Abrams: My parents were both English professors, which was part of it. In high school, I remember writing my senior thesis on the figure of the American girl in the works of Henry James. That was probably my first deep research experience—again, looking at female figures, even though it was a male writer.

I’ve always been interested in strong female figures—intellectual women in predominantly male-dominated areas. I think that oftentimes, women who stood out in predominantly male contexts often had to mask their intellect, because it was perceived as threatening. One of the ways to do that was through humor, and that shaped part of my interest in women’s humor later.

In college, I worked with Sacvan Bercovitch, who was one of the founders of New Historicism. I was very interested in the American tradition, starting with Puritanism, and then looking at 19^th century figures who were all a presence at that time, like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville… I would say that experience steeped me in the American tradition.

I became interested in American studies, in the history and literature of America, and when I went on do to graduate work at Columbia, I moved more towards New York writers and tradition.

What drew you to a career in academia, and what brought you to Empire State University?

Fuchs-Abrams: As I mentioned, both my parents were academics, and it seemed like a great life. Every seven years, my father would go on sabbatical, and we would live in a different country. We lived in Paris, Vienna, Berlin… It seemed like a wonderful opportunity to learn and share your learning with others. That was part of it, as well as having an ability to write and being interested in teaching.

I did my graduate work at Columbia, and part of the teaching I did there was in the School for General Studies. I taught an American Studies course for adult learners, who were returning students, and I found that to be incredibly rewarding. I found that the adult learners who had chosen to return there, not going on a conventional trajectory, were so highly motivated and accomplished.

In many ways, since it was New York City, you would get dancers who had 20-year careers, musicians, artists, all sorts of people returning. Maybe that opened my mind to SUNY Empire, with its mission of working with nontraditional learners.

How do you approach teaching literature and writing at the master’s level, and what do you find most gratifying about that?

Fuchs-Abrams: The MA in Liberal Studies program is somewhat unique and an amazing opportunity, both as a professor and for students, for creative individuals to go in-depth in an area of interest. I would also say the interdisciplinarity of SUNY Empire is very appealing to me, and of course the liberal studies program.

What does your research focus on?

Fuchs-Abrams: Currently, I work on women’s humor, which stands at the intersection of women’s studies, literary study, urban studies, and humor studies. I’m particularly interested in 20^th century American women writers and women intellectuals and the way they used humor as an indirect form of social protest.

What first interested you about this topic?

Fuchs-Abrams: My first book, which was an elaboration of my dissertation, was on Mary McCarthy. She is one of the foremost female intellectuals among a predominantly male group of New York intellectuals in the 1930s and 40s. She was part of the “Partisan Review” crowd of that period, and she was a satirist. From my interest in her, I became interested in women’s humor more generally. She’s one of the figures that I deal with in my most recent book.

Perfect segue—what can you share about your most recent publication, “New York Women of Wit of the 20^th Century”?

Fuchs-Abrams: I’m interested in looking at how women writers use humor as a masked form of social critique, because oftentimes, women were constrained by historical conceptions of appropriate gender behavior, right? The Victorian ideal of the submissive, subordinate woman.

Some of the early humorists like Marietta Holly, or Sara Willis Parton, also known as Fanny Fern, and Frances Miriam Whitcher, dealt with domestic subjects, but they were able to say things that would have been prohibited without the mask of humor.

Moving into the 20^th century with the passage of the 19^th Amendment giving women the right to vote, and with prohibition and the rise of the new woman, I’m particularly interested in this interwar period where women were able to voice their critique a little more overtly. They were able to assume a more independent role. A lot of these figures were centered around New York, which was particularly interesting to me as well.

Like Jessie Redmon Fauset, who was part of the Harlem Renaissance. She had a salon along with her sister that helped foster some of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes and Dawn Powell, who was part of the Lafayette Circle in Greenwich Village. This was a more urban and urbane, sophisticated form of humor. It moved away from the domestic satire of some of the earlier figures towards a more modern sensibility.

How did humor and satire allow them to challenge traditional spaces? Can you share an example?

Fuchs-Abrams: There’s a short story by Dorothy Parker called “The Waltz.” There’s a female figure who is highly intellectual—really, a stand-in for Parker herself—but she has to wait to be asked to dance because that’s the social protocol. And there’s this buffoon, awkward male figure who’s stepping on her toes when dancing. The story is told in a double voice, so you hear what she says to him, being obsequious the way appropriate feminine behavior would be. And then, you hear the underlying monologue that she has. All sorts of witticisms, making references to Shakespeare, literary figures, historical figures, and talking about how he’s sort of ridiculous. With satire, it’s using exaggeration and ridicule to expose the absurdities of certain social customs or prominent figures.

Satire is particularly suited to women and other marginalized populations in that it’s often directed by outsiders—those excluded by race, gender, ethnicity, religion—against those in positions of power in the hope of reforming society or at least exposing its moral weakness. While traditional humor might be seen as “punching down” in keeping with the superiority theory of humor—the ridiculing of marginalized populations by those in positions of power—women’s humor, and humor by other marginalized communities, is often “punching up” in the interest of social change.

Women’s humor also often engages in double-voiced irony, meaning to say one thing and mean another, and the incongruity theory of humor, which is based on the subversion of expectations. This verbal form of humor allows women and those in subordinate positions to mask their social critique through the indirection and socially acceptable form of irony and satire. 

What is the most surprising thing that you encountered in your research?

Fuchs-Abrams: It’s surprising to me how the focus has really shifted to stand-up comedy, media studies, and other forms of humor, and away from literary humor. Maybe surprise isn’t the right word, but it’s a little unexpected to me. You could say pioneering women of wit set the stage for later, more contemporary comedians, some of whom do talk about Dorothy Parker, or Edna St. Vincent Millay.

I know it’s Women’s History Month, and part of the feminist project is to revive lesser-known female authors and figures, which is part of what I do in my book. You do get figures like Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, Ali Wong, Hannah Gadsby—a lot of these feminist comedians do hark back to this use of humor as a way of partly sublimating and partly indirectly voicing social critique.

What are some of your favorite women-made pieces of media?

Fuchs-Abrams: Allegra Goodman is a Jewish-American novelist and short story writer who is very interested in family dynamics and psychology. The book I want to mention of hers is “Isola,” a historical fiction book which is a sort of female Robinson Crusoe set in medieval French times. There is also a book by Kirsten Lange, which is “Pleasure, Play, and Politics: A History of Humor in U.S. Feminism.”

I recently watched a show that was recommended to me and is based on a book, “Lessons in Chemistry.” The common theme here—it’s about a female scientist, a chemist in the 1950s in a male-dominated field. Through cooking, she ends up using her skills as a chemist and making a name for herself.

I admire Cher as a pioneering female singer and strong feminist figure. She was also known for her wit: when told by her mother that she should settle down and marry a rich man, she famously replied, ‘Mom, I am a rich man!’”

How do you fuel your literary curiosity?

Fuchs-Abrams: Working with students is really inspiring. Many of the classes I teach are based on my research, so I teach courses on women and humor, literature of New York… So working with graduate and undergraduate students, when you use the word curiosity, their questions and interests are not always directly aligned with some of the questions I would have thought to ask. It pushes me in other directions and interdisciplinary ways of thinking.

Being at SUNY Empire, there’s no doubt that I’ve become more interdisciplinary in my research and interests because of the nature of the teaching that we do. Here, particularly in the MALS program, learning is more expansive, and that has really fueled my curiosity.