SOURCE: Lichtenstein, Diane. “Words and Worlds: Emma Lazarus's Conflicting Citizenships.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 6, no. 2 (fall 1987): 247-63.

In the following essay, Lichtenstein considers Lazarus's identities as a marginalized Jewish-American and female writer.

Unlike Virginia Woolf who proclaimed that as a woman she had no country and wanted no country,¹ Emma Lazarus believed passionately in her rightful place within the Jewish and American nations; even more passionately, she wanted to be counted among the citizens of the American literary nation. Despite her beliefs and wishes, however, Lazarus was an alien in the nations she fervently defended. As a woman in Victorian America, for example, she could not vote. As a Jew, she was vulnerable to anti-Semitism. And as a Jewish woman, she was not entitled to the privileges of men, according to Orthodox Jewish law. In spite of these actual and potential limitations on her freedom, Lazarus wrote...