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Great Events from History: Women’s History

The Woman Warrior Published

by Suzanne Araas Vesely

Uniting American individualism with a Chinese urge toward cultural identity, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts was embraced by feminist writers of the 1970s as an unprecedented attempt at creating a way of reading and writing by a Chinese American woman.

Date: 1976

KEY FIGURES

Maxine Hong Kingston

SUMMARY OF EVENT

In The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston’s personal issue of identity informs her imaginative accounts of her immigrant parents’ culture. Kingston also struggles with her family’s habit of not telling the whole story. In piecing together her history, Kingston is an adventurous—some would say distorting— reteller both of Chinese myths and of family history because her cultural and familial mythology challenges Chinese traditions of male dominance as well as Western stereotypes.

From the time of its publication and culminating in a series of articles in the 1990s, The Woman Warrior has been denounced by some critics, most notably playwright Frank Chin. Chin and others complain that the novel does not meet the expectations of its autobiographical genre, that it does not present a positive image of the Chinese and Chinese American communities, particularly males, and that it distorts Chinese sources, especially the ballad of Fa Mulan, an ancient woman warrior legend that Kingston imaginatively rewrote. These critics dismissed Kingston’s novel as being aligned with Western tastes that have an Orientalist agenda in the dominant American culture.

Other 1970s critics regarded the novel as a watershed work of ethnic feminist writing that challenges conventions and standards of ethnic representation. They also suggested that the Kingston denigrators wrote out of the same misogynist loyalty to patriarchal systems that has moved any critic in any age to dismiss an innovative work by a woman. Kingston maintains that her novel is not intended to be a textbook for educating white readers, but rather as a personal search for integrity by a woman of two cultures.

SIGNIFICANCE

Although The Woman Warrior became one of the most controversial novels in twentieth century literature, it also remains one of the most frequently taught books in higher education by a living writer, and it continues to be a central focus of Asian and feminist studies. Proponents of the book take a feminist postmodern view, suggesting that writing need not be restricted rigidly to the set of genre conventions created by a Western system. Opposing views show ways in which Kingston’s work may lead to misunderstanding Chinese culture, some drawing on the critical stance of widely known theorist Michel Foucault, who demands that evaluation of literature be deeply situated in the cultural setting.

Maxine Hong Kingston c. 1976, via Wikimedia Commons. [Public domain.]

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Further Reading

1 

Chin, Frank. “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake.” In The Big Aiiieee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, edited by Jeffrey Paul Chan, et. al. New York: Meridian, 1974.

2 

Huntley, E.D. Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing, 2001.

3 

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage, 1976.

4 

Lim, Shirley G. Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior.” New York: Brodart, 1991.

5 

Madison, Deborah L. “Chinese American Writers of the Real and the Fake: Authenticity and the Twin Traditions of Life Writing.” Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 36, no. 3 (2006), pp. 257-271.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Vesely, Suzanne Araas. "The Woman Warrior Published." Great Events from History: Women’s History, edited by Michael J. O’Neal, Salem Press, 2022. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GEWomen_0096.
APA 7th
Vesely, S. A. (2022). The Woman Warrior Published. In M. J. O’Neal (Ed.), Great Events from History: Women’s History. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Vesely, Suzanne Araas. "The Woman Warrior Published." Edited by Michael J. O’Neal. Great Events from History: Women’s History. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2022. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.