Published in 1918, “I Sit and Sew” portrays a frustrated speaker who is prevented from taking action and cut off in her desire to do good in the world. In other pieces, writer, activist, and educator Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson wrote more specifically than she does in this poem about the way Black women were excluded from World War I service opportunities. Often marginally mentioned as the former wife of Paul Laurence Dunbar—one of the forerunners of the Harlem Renaissance—Dunbar-Nelson was already published and engaged in civic activity when she met and briefly married Dunbar.

Dunbar-Nelson advocated for women and people of color throughout her life through teaching, founding missions to house and educate young people, hosting literary salons for the Black writers of her day, and by starting her own newspaper to address civil and women’s rights. “I Sit and Sew” may seem to depict a helpless speaker, but Dunbar-Nelson was not helpless, and fearlessly worked to ensure as many people as possible also managed to find agency and meaning in their lives.

Poet Biography

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson lived through, witnessed, influenced, and at times even drove forward the widespread shifts in literature and in society forged from changing ideas about race, gender, and the role of the artist. Dunbar-Nelson embodied what is now, as of 2021, called intersectionality: Born into New Orleans Creole culture, Dunbar-Nelson resisted racial categorization, only identifying as not Caucasian. Her mother was born enslaved; like many Creole daughters, Dunbar-Nelson was encouraged in her academic and social education. She played the cello and the piano, began writing when she was a young girl, and started publishing by the age of 20.

One of her poems—along with her striking features in the accompanying author photo—caught the eye of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who began to court her through elaborate correspondence. Their eventual marriage represents a brief alliance between two figures foundational to American literature and the soon-to-emerge Harlem Renaissance movement. Unfortunately, Dunbar’s brutality and alcoholism soon alienated Dunbar-Nelson. After one of his beatings hospitalized and nearly ended her life, Dunbar-Nelson left the marriage. Despite his many attempts, they did not reconcile. When Dunbar died a few years later, Dunbar-Nelson found out by way of a newspaper report.

When Dunbar-Nelson’s first book appeared, 1895’s Violets and Other Tales, she established a reputation as a kind of local-color Impressionist alongside other observers of Creole culture like Kate Chopin. She moved to New York City not only to expand her writing career, but to work on behalf of civil rights and women’s suffrage. At the White Rose Mission, a home for single Black women that also offered job training and intellectual activities, Dunbar-Nelson worked with founder and activist Victoria Earle Matthews. Dunbar-Nelson wrote reviews for The Crisis and became friends with W.E.B. DuBois.

Dunbar-Nelson’s marriage to Dunbar didn’t slow her literary growth. She became a member of the Saturday Nighters Club—a literary salon frequented by writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. After her divorce from Dunbar, she moved again; this time, she relocated to Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught for many years. In Wilmington, Dunbar-Nelson became consistently active in War Relief, continued working on behalf of women’s suffrage, founded another school for young Black women, helped organize the Wilmington chapter of the NAACP, and passionately campaigned for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. She edited the AME Church Review, wrote a syndicated column for the Pittsburgh Courier, and started the newspaper The Wilmington Advocate with her third husband, Robert Nelson. The couple housed the paper’s printing press in their home.

Dunbar-Nelson was bisexual, maintaining relationships with both men and women for most of her life. Few writings about her relationships with women were published; reportedly, Dunbar-Nelson burned an entire body of poems documenting her private life. Through her diaries and those of her contemporaries like Ida B. Wells and Angelina Weld Grimké, historians have come to know a social world of early 20th century intellectual women who lived semi-closeted but had active lives as bisexual or lesbian women. These women paved the way for the movements of the 1960s that included Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and others.

Dunbar-Nelson embraced her multi-faceted identity, though it sometimes kept her on the margins of society and literature. What acclaim and renown she achieved helped her to, lift up the voices of other marginalized people. Her legacy can be seen in the histories of civil rights, women’s rights, and American literary activism.

Poem Text

Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore, “I Sit and Sew”. 1918. Poetry foundation.

Summary

Although “I Sit and Sew” voices one woman’s plea to be included in the war effort, the poem gives voice to other kinds of dissent, as well. The speaker repeats throughout the poem— with increased dissatisfaction—the role to which she has been assigned: sewing. The poem’s immediate setting is 1918; the speaker knows men struggle and are dying on the battlefield during the enduring world war. Her efforts alongside theirs seem silly and pointless to her. While the speaker wants to join the men on the field of battle, either to soothe or to join in the fight, she also petitions implicitly for an indictment of social conventions that consign women, especially women of color, to lesser roles.

In the first stanza, the speaker dreams of the faraway war, considering herself a “lesser soul” (Line 5) who hasn’t experienced battle firsthand. By the second stanza, her sympathy for the fighting men carries her to garish scenes of battle; her agonized cries and sympathy for the men both rise, though she is in protest that she is not personally allowed to go to the field of combat. The dream dissipates in the last stanza as the speaker affirms that what she imagines is real and that her help is needed beyond this mundane domestic task. The poem ends with a plea to God for release from social and cultural bonds—a protest against the confinement she feels as she fulfills a duty defined by external forces.