It has been noted that the great first wave of feminist fiction and plays appeared in the final decade of the nineteenth century. But because the writers of this fiction were women and feminists, they were not, on the whole, well received. In 1914, for example, G. G. Wyant complained that “indeed novel after novel has appeared dealing with the feminist question, some purely emotional in their appeal, some written obviously as propaganda.” The popular and conservative Ladies Home Journal associated feminist literature with communist propaganda:
The Red element, the Bolshevist party, as it may well be called, in the woman's movement, is sparring to-day as openly for the destruction of womanhood as the Soviet element in industry is shaking the pillars of organized economics.