As early twentieth-century Anglo-American women writers such as Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Zona Gale used their writing to create new audiences and explore how the figure of the New Woman was changing American perceptions of gender roles, several African American women novelists worked to revamp the contested image of the New Woman into the New Negro woman. Their artistic activism linked the ideology of racial uplift with the recuperation of the image of African American woman from the dehumanizing and degrading stereotypes that went hand in hand with slavery and its aftermath. As black women writers struggled to fuse their political and aesthetic aims, they often felt frustrated by the claims of both. The proto-feminist journalist Mary Church Terrell, who is far better known for her political writings than her fiction, believed that “the Race Problem could be solved more swiftly and more surely through the instrumentality of the short story or novel than in any other way” (Terrell as quoted in McHenry, “Towards a History of Access,” 234).

Terrell's frustration with her inability to place her fiction in mainstream venues such as Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, or Scribner's Magazine may have prompted writers like Pauline Hopkins to persist in serializing her novels in African American periodicals, like the Colored American Magazine, a publication that ensured her an audience. Despite discouraging odds, several early twentieth-century African American woman writers pioneered major literary innovations.