African Americans have fought in every U.S. war since the creation of the country, but in many instances, they experienced racism while serving. Learning about the Civil Rights Movement that took place after World War II has become common, but even before the Second World War, African Americans were attempting to use their military service as a platform for gaining equal rights. During World War I, many African Americans in the U.S. military were placed under the leadership of the French military and were treated with more respect than they had experienced at home. After receiving better treatment from the French, African American soldiers returned to the U.S. radicalized and more willing to use violence to fight racism at home. Through the use of works by W.E.B. DuBois, William Colson, Marcus Garvey, and theNAACP, it is apparent that the war ushered in a new era known as the New Negro Movement. These men’swork reveal that the treatment African American soldiers received abroad under the French vs. American leadership resulted in the radicalization of the soldiers and African American leaders such as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B DuBois, and William Colson capitalized on the new radicalization to promote their ideas. This movement exposes how war can radicalize minority groups and sometimes result in further equality and respectfor one another. It also demonstrates the fact that the Civil Rights Movement was not African Americans’ firstattempt using violence to gain equality. This project outlines the violence used against African Americans that protested Jim Crow laws and segregation and the purpose of this essay was to inform the public about the longhistory of African Americans’ fight for equality, but through the use of military service and radicalization abroad, as well as at home over the works of African American leaders.

María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1591 – 1661?) was the best-selling woman author of two extant collections of novellas, translated as Exemplary Tales of Love (1637) and The Disenchantments of Love (1647), that consist of stories of love, marriage, and gendered violence between aristocratic men and women. These 17^th-century Spanish books, as popular as Cervantes’, were explicitly and unapologetically pro-woman. Indeed, Zayas has retroactively been placed as an early modern feminist for her condemnation of systematic misogyny and her call for gender equality. Despite her depictions of violence against women and her denunciation of patriarchal institutions that neither include nor protect women, Zayas does not advocate for a radical restructuring of society. In fact, many of Zayas’s novellas perpetuate racism, classism, and sexism. Without condemning hierarchical race, class, and gender structures, Zayas’s feminism can only go so far.

Zayas, writing in the baroque style and notably drawing from works such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, sets up her collections in the tradition of the frame narrative, which complicates any analysis of Zayas’s feminism. Not only do we have Zayas and a narrator, but we have characters, both women and men, narrating tales within. These female and male narrators provide insight into different perceptions of gender and gendered violence. It is not, however, only male-narrated tales that are guilty of misogyny. In both male- and female-narrated stories, hegemonic racism, classism, and sexism bleed through. Though many have noted Zayas’s classism, few have deeply analyzed it—or her racism and sexism. By deconstructing Zayas’s discourse, we can see the gaps in and limitations of Zayas’s feminism.