The Beat generation formed a literary boys' club that, starting in the late 1940s, tirelessly mythologized its own heroic quest for kicks and nirvana. But that collective self-portrait has begun to change over the last 20 years or so. Books by Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson, and other women chronicled the Beat experience not only "on the road" but "in the pad." Now the scholars contributing to Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (Rutgers University Press), edited by Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace, have unearthed more literary work by erstwhile hipster chicks. Ms. Johnson, a lecturer in English and American studies at Tufts University, discusses the underground of a cultural underground.

Q. Your title comes from Jack Kerouac's description of Beat women as "girls who say nothing and wear black." Is that the complete negation of the June Cleaver role of nurturing suburban housewife? Or just a "cool" variant of it?

A. Bohemia provided an antidote to the gender stereotypes for women, especially in the expression of sexuality -- but also in work, since middle-class white women weren't supposed to work. At the same time, there were limits to the iconoclasm of Beat men. They really wanted women to play traditional roles as girlfriends and wives. Or if they were going to be unconventional, it was by providing money to keep the pads floating while the men were busy being creative.

Q. Beat literature is usually synonymous with the "spontaneous bop prosody" that Kerouac advocated -- writing as the free-flowing stream of consciousness. You point out that women didn't necessarily follow the unofficial rules of Beat style.

A. A couple of them were interested in spontaneous composition. But the rest, no -- the rest edit their work. Joyce Johnson writes this very cool, elegant, quiet prose. She plays with the discourses and tempos of Beat writing, but her mentor is Henry James. Male Beat writers felt the burden of literary tradition; they had to find a way to distinguish themselves from that tradition. I don't think women felt the same kind of obligation, or competition. They weren't looking to reinvent literature. Their lives and the very fact of writing were radical enough.

Q. Will another wave of literature be rescued by scholars from the notebooks of Beat women now in the archives?

A. Actually, almost all of them are still alive, and very protective about what they wrote. And they're not always easy to interview, either. Many of them disavow the Beat generation. They say, "Well, yes, scholars like to categorize and make up names for periods, and we have to be in one or nobody will recognize us. But we don't like that." Literary historians are always trying to put writers in a context, but the writers themselves want to elude that context.