A Jury of Her Peers Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx

by Showalter, Elaine

• ISBN13: 9781400034420
• ISBN10: 1400034426
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-12
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

In a narrative of immense scope and fascination--spanning nearly 400 years and brimming with Showalter's characteristic wit and incisive opinions--readers are introduced to more than 250 female writers, both famous and little known.

Author Biography

Elaine Showalter, a professor emerita at Princeton University, is the author of numerous books, including the groundbreaking A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. A frequent radio and TV commentator in the United Kingdom, she has chaired the Man Booker International prize jury and judged the National Book Awards and the Orange Prize. She divides her time between Washington, D.C., and London.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. ix
A New Literature Springs Up in the New World
American literature begins	p. 3
Revolution: Women's Rights and Women's Writing
Revolutionary mothers of American literature	p. 15
Their Native Land
National glories	p. 32
Finding a Form
Poetry, prose, and plays	p. 53
Masterpieces and Mass Markets
Great bards and best-sellers	p. 70
Slavery, Race, and Women's Writing
Harriet Beecher Stowe and the first African-American Women Writers	p. 107
The Civil War
Women and the war	p. 129
The Coming Woman
Heralds of emancipated women	p. 164
American Sibyls
Regionalists and visionaries	p. 182
New Women
Feminist Utopias and nightmares	p. 210
The Golden Morrow
Modernism and feminism	p. 241
Against Women's Writing: Wharton and Cather
Seeking art beyond gender	p. 270
You Might as Well Live
Breaking new ground in the 1920s	p. 296
The Great Depression
Women writers in a dark decade	p. 331
The 1940s: World War II and After
Women's stories	p. 362
The 1950s: Three Faces of Eve
Trapped housewives, intellectuals, rebels	p. 390
The 1960s: Live or Die
Breaking away	p. 422
The 1970s: The Will to Change
A decade of awakening	p. 441
The 1980s: On the Jury
Claiming the tradition and changing the laws	p. 467
The 1990s: Anything She Wants
Women writers free	p. 494
Acknowledgments	p. 513
Notes	p. 515
Index	p. 563
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

I

A New Literature Springs Up in the New World

From the very beginning, women were creating the new words of the New World. The first women writers in America, Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) and Mary Rowlandson (1637–1711), were born in England and endured the harrowing three-month voyage of storm, seasickness, and starvation across the North Atlantic. In Massachusetts, where they settled, they led lives of extraordinary danger and deprivation. Both married and had children; they thought of themselves primarily as good wives and mothers. Both made the glory of God their justification for writing, but they prefigured themes and concerns that would preoccupy American women writers for the next 150 years and more—Bradstreet, the poet, writing about the intimacies and agonies of domestic life, including pregnancy and maternity, the death of three of her grandchildren, and the destruction of her home by fire; and Rowlandson, writing a narrative of her captivity by Narragansett Indians, and pioneering the great American theme of interracial experience in the encounter with Native American culture.

Both Bradstreet and Rowlandson entered print shielded by the authorization, legitimization, and testimony of men. In Bradstreet’s case, no fewer than eleven men wrote testimonials and poems praising her piety and industry, prefatory materials almost as long as the thirteen poems in the book. In his introductory letter, John Woodbridge, her brother-in-law, stood guarantee that Bradstreet herself had written the poems, that she had not initiated their publication, and that she had neglected no housekeeping chore in their making: “these Poems are the fruit but of some few houres, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments.” Rowlandson’s narrative too came with “a preface to the reader” signed “Per Amicum” (“By a Friend”), probably the minister Increase Mather, which explained that although the work had been “penned by this Gentlewoman,” she had written it as a “Memorandum of Gods dealing with her,” and it was a “pious scope, which deserves both commendation and imitation.” The author had not sought publication of her narrative out of vanity; rather,

some Friends having obtained a sight of it, could not but be so much affected with the many passages of working providence discovered therein, as to judge it worthy of publick view, and altogether unmeet that such works of God should be hid from present and future Generation: and therefore though this Gentlewoman’s modesty would not thrust it into the Press, yet her gratitude to God, made her not hardly perswadable to let it pass, that God might have his due glory, and others benefit by it as well as her selfe.

Having given a lengthy defense of the virtues of the book, the Friend concluded with the hope that “none will cast any reflection upon this Gentlewoman, on the score of this publication,” and warned that any who did “may be reckoned with the nine Lepers,” symbols of ingratitude. Apparently no one dared come forward to complain about Rowlandson after this endorsement.

We know that New England Puritans in the seventeenth century believed that men were intellectually superior to women, and that God had designed it so. They were notoriously unsympathetic to women who defied God’s plan for the sexes by conspicuous learning or reading, and they could be hostile to women who went outside their sphere by preaching or writing. The most official expression of this hostility was the trial of Anne Hutchinson in 1637. Hutchinson belonged to a dissident sect, but she had also been leading her own discussion groups for women. Tried for “traducing the ministers” and for blasphemy while she was pregnant with her fifteenth child, Hutchinson was excommunicated and forced to leave the Massachusetts Ba

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Excerpted from A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter
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