The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States

by Wagner-Martin, Linda; Davidson, Cathy N.

• ISBN13: 9780195132458
• ISBN10: 0195132459
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-10-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Provocative and compulsively readable, lively, engaging, and brilliantly representative, The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States presents short stories, poems, essays, plays, speeches, performance pieces, erotica, diaries, correspondence, and even a few recipes from nearly one hundred of our best women writers. Reveling in the awareness that the best U.S. women's writing is, quite simply, some of the best in the world, editors Linda Wagner-Martin and Cathy N. Davidson have chosen selections spanning four centuries and reflecting the rich variety of American women's lives. The collection embraces the perspectives of age and youth, the traditional and the revolutionary, the public and the private. Here is Judith Sargent Murray's 1790 essay "On the Equality of the Sexes," journalist Martha Gellhorn's "Last Words on Vietnam, 1987," and Mary Gordon's homage to the ghosts of Ellis Island, "More Than Just a Shrine"; powerful short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Wharton, Cynthia Ozick, and Toni Morrison; letters from Abigail Adams, Sarah Moore Grimke[accent], Emma Goldman, and Georgia O'Keeffe; Alice B. Toklas's recipe "Bass for Picasso," and erotic offerings from Anais Nin and Rita Mae Brown. The moving autobiography of Zitkala- Sa[accent], whose mother was a Sioux, tells us more about "otherness" than any sociological treatise, while Janice Mirikitani's and Nellie Wong's poems about being young Asian-American women, like Alice Walker's meditation on the beauty of growing old, speak to all readers. A thought-provoking introduction and descriptive headnotes explore the history of women's writing in ways that help the reader to understand the American women who have used language to change their worlds and to remember the past, and as a means of etching their deepest, fondest dreams. A joy to read, The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States is filled with eye-opening and unexpected selections. It is the perfect book for anyone fascinated by women's writing and women's lives.

Author Biography

Linda Wagner-Martin and Cathy N. Davidson are the Editors in Chief of The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. Wagner-Martin is Hanes Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Davidson is Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

Table of Contents

Introduction	3	(4)
PART I: Short Fiction	7	(266)
Tom's Husband	9	(12)
Sarah Orne Jewett
Tony's Wife	21	(6)
Alice Ruth Moore Dunba-Nelson
The Revolt of ``Mother''	27	(14)
Mary Wilkins Freeman
The Yellow Wall-Paper	41	(15)
Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
A male Magdalene from Samantha vs. Josiah	56	(7)
Maietta Holley
A Pair of Silk Stockings	63	(5)
Kate Chopin
The Other Two	68	(15)
Edith Wharton
Seventeen Syllables	83	(12)
Hisaye Yamamoto
Freedom	95	(5)
Nella Larsen
Sweat	100	(11)
Zora Neale
O Yes	111	(15)
Tillie Olsen
A late Encounter With the Enemy	126	(9)
Flannery O'Connor
A Worn Path	135	(8)
Eudora Walty
The Shawl	143	(5)
Cynthia Ozick
Extenuating Circumstances	148	(6)
Joyce Carol Oates
Miss Clairol	154	(5)
Helena Maria Viramontes
Recitatif	159	(17)
Toni Morrison
In the American Society	176	(14)
Gish Jen
May's Lion	190	(7)
Ursula K. Le Guin
Life in the Iron-Mills	197	(32)
Rebecca Harding Davis
Old Mrs. Harris	229	(44)
Willa Cather
PART II: Poetry	273	(38)
Poetry from the Beginning	274	(17)
To My Dear and Loving Husband	275	(1)
Anne Bradstreet
The Flesh and the Spirit	276	(3)
On Imagination	279	(1)
Phillis Wheatley
The Soul Selects Her Own Society	280	(1)
Emily Dickinson
This is My Letter to the World	281	(1)
My Life had Stood---A Loaded Gun	281	(1)
After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes	282	(1)
Decade	283	(1)
Amy Lowell
The Poem as Mask	283	(1)
Muriel Rukeyser
Lineage	284	(1)
Margaret Walker
Religion, from Ulysses	285	(1)
Gwendolyn Brooks
In an Iridescent Time	286	(1)
Ruth Stone
Woman Me	286	(1)
Maya Angelou
Lady Lazarus	287	(4)
Sylvia Plath
Contemporary Poetry	291	(20)
Diving into the Wreck	292	(2)
Adrienne Rich
When I was Growing Up	294	(2)
Nellie Wong
The Thirty Eighth Year	296	(2)
Lucille Clifton
Song for a Thin Sister	298	(1)
Audre Lorde
What the Gypsy Said to her Children	299	(1)
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Daystar	300	(1)
Rita Dove
A History of Costume	301	(4)
Michelle Cliff
Suicide Note	305	(2)
Janice Mirikitani
Remember	307	(1)
Joy Harjo
As Children Together	308	(3)
Carolyn Forche
PART III: Public Lives	311	(68)
Women and the Nation	312	(18)
On the Equality of the Sexes	313	(3)
Judith Sargent Murray
A Woman at Forty, from Women in the Nineteenth Century	316	(5)
Margaret Fuller
The Working-Girls of New York, from Folly As It Flies	321	(2)
Fanny Fern
The Case Stated	323	(7)
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
The Struggle for Understanding	330	(21)
The Higher Education of Women	331	(6)
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper
The Coyote-Spirit and the Weaving Woman	337	(5)
Mary Hunter Austin
Women are Hungry	342	(9)
Meridel Le Sueur
From the Personal to the Political	351	(28)
More than Just a Shrine: Paying Homage to the Ghosts of Ellis Island	352	(4)
Mary Gordon
Longing to Die of Old Age	356	(2)
Alice Walker
Last Words on Vietnam, 1987	358	(7)
Martha Gellhorn
Amazons in Appalachia	365	(7)
Marilou Awiakta
If Men Could Menstruate	372	(3)
Gloria Steinem
Why I Want a Wife	375	(2)
Judy Syfers
The Good Guys	377	(2)
Anna Quindlen
PART IV: Acting Out	379	(110)
Plays	380	(61)
Overtones	381	(12)
Alice Gerstenberg
Trifles: A Play in One Act	393	(14)
Susan Glaspell
Bitter Cane	407	(34)
Genny Lim
Speeches and Performance Pieces	441	(16)
Ain't I a Woman?	441	(2)
Sojourner Truth
Men in Your Life	443	(4)
Alice Childress
United States	447	(5)
Laurie Anderson
Roslyn Malamud: The Coup, from Fires in the Mirror	452	(5)
Anna Deavere Smith
Riuals and Ceremonies	457	(32)
Native American Ritual	458	(8)
Kopis'Taya (A Gathering of Sprits)	466	(2)
Paula Gunn Allen
Naming Power	468	(2)
Wendy Rose
The Foot-Washing	470	(1)
George Ella Lyon
from The Women of Brewster Place	471	(3)
Gloria Naylor
The Sixth Work: Rituals for the Extended Family, from Jambalaya	474	(5)
Luisah Teish
The Ceremonies of Community, from The Telling	479	(10)
E. M. Broner
PART V: Private Lives	489	(62)
The Republic of Women's Letters	490	(8)
To John Adams	491	(1)
Abigail Adams
Letter to the Editors of Freedom's Journal	492	(1)
Matilda
Letter XV: Man Equally Guilty with woman in the Fall	493	(5)
Sarah Moore Grimke
Women in the Nineteenth Century	498	(14)
Diary	499	(3)
Louisa May Alcott
Afternoon in the Woods, from Rural Hours	502	(2)
Susan Fenimore Cooper
The Trials of Girlhood, from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl	504	(3)
Harriet Ann Jacobs
To John Brown	507	(1)
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
To Louisa Picquet	508	(1)
Elizabeth Ramsey
Diary	509	(3)
Mary Boykin Chesnut
Turning the Century	512	(24)
To Liane de Pougy	513	(1)
Natalie Barney
To Ben Reitman	514	(1)
Emma Goldman
The School Days of an Indian Girl	514	(9)
Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin)
Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian	523	(10)
Sui Sin Far
One Farmer's Wife	533	(3)
Anonymous
Modern Voices	536	(15)
To Anita Pollitzer	537	(2)
Georgia O'Keeffe
Names, from Memories of a Catholic Girlhood	539	(7)
Mary McCathy
Storyteller	546	(1)
Leslie Marmon Silko
To Gabriela, A Young Writer	547	(4)
Pat Mora
PART VI: Bodily Pleasures	551	(32)
Recipes	552	(16)
The Last Return from the Sea, from The Captain's Lady's Cookbook	553	(1)
Bass for Picasso, from The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book	554	(2)
Alice B. Toklas
Sunday Revival Dinner, from the Taste of Country Cooking	556	(7)
Edna Lewis
Los Dias De Los Muertos, from Food From My Heart	563	(5)
Zarela Martinez
Erotica	568	(15)
Wild Nights---Wild Nights!	569	(1)
Emily Dickinson
Come Slowly---Eden!	569	(1)
Volcanoes Be in Sicily	570	(1)
The Storm, A Sequal to ``The 'Cadian Ball''	570	(5)
Kate Chopin
Lifting Belly	575	(2)
Gertrude Stein
I Want to Die While You Love Me	577	(1)
Georgia Douglas Johnson
Sea Rose	577	(1)
H. D.
Mandra, II, from Little Birds	578	(2)
Anais Nin
Sappho's Reply	580	(1)
Rita Mae Brown
She Didn't Think We Were Married	581	(1)
Olga Broumas
Jane Miller
Fifteen, from Autumn Sequence	581	(2)
Jan Freeman
Acknowledgments	583	(8)
Topical Listing of Contents	591	(4)
Index	595