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Women heroes of the US Army : remarkable soldiers from the American Revolution to today
\"The story of women serving in the United States military begins before the founding of the country. Though early laws prohibited women from becoming soldiers, they still found ways to serve, even disguising themselves as men in order to participate in active battle. Women Heroes of the US Army chronicles the critical role women have played in strengthening the US Army from the birth of the nation to today. These smart, brave, and determined women led the way for their sisters to enter, grow and prosper in the forces defending the United States. Through the profiles highlighting the achievements of these trailblazers throughout history, young women today can envision an equitable future\"-- Provided by publisher.
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First Lady of Letters
Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), poet, essayist, playwright, and one of the most thoroughgoing advocates of women's rights in early America, was as well known in her own day as Abigail Adams or Martha Washington. Her name, though, has virtually disappeared from the public consciousness. Thanks to the recent discovery of Murray's papers-including some 2,500 personal letters-historian Sheila L. Skemp has documented the compelling story of this talented and most unusual eighteenth-century woman. Born in Gloucester, Massachussetts, Murray moved to Boston in 1793 with her second husband, Universalist minister John Murray. There she became part of the city's literary scene. Two of her plays were performed at Federal Street Theater, making her the first American woman to have a play produced in Boston. There as well she wrote and published her magnum opus,The Gleaner, a three-volume \"miscellany\" that included poems, essays, and the novel-like story \"Margaretta.\" After 1800, Murray's output diminished and her hopes for literary renown faded. Suffering from the backlash against women's rights that had begun to permeate American society, struggling with economic difficulties, and concerned about providing the best possible education for her daughter, she devoted little time to writing. But while her efforts diminished, they never ceased. Murray was determined to transcend the boundaries that limited women of her era and worked tirelessly to have women granted the same right to the \"pursuit of happiness\" immortalized in the Declaration of Independence. She questioned the meaning of gender itself, emphasizing the human qualities men and women shared, arguing that the apparent distinctions were the consequence of nurture, not nature. Although she was disappointed in the results of her efforts, Murray nevertheless left a rich intellectual and literary legacy, in which she challenged the new nation to fulfill its promise of equality to all citizens.
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Panic Fiction
Panic Fiction explores a unique body of antebellum American women’s writing that illuminates women’s relationships to the marketplace and the links between developing ideologies of domesticity and the formation of an American middle class. Between the mid-1830s and the late 1850s, authors such as Hannah Lee, Catharine Sedgwick, Eliza Follen, Maria McIntosh, and Maria Cummins wrote dozens of novels and stories depicting the effects of financial panic on the home and proposing solutions to economic instability. This unique body of antebellum American women’s writing, which integrated economic discourse with the language and conventions of domestic fiction, is what critic Mary Templin terms “panic fiction.” In Panic Fiction: Antebellum Women Writers and Economic Crisis , Templin draws in part from the methods of New Historicism and cultural studies, situating these authors and their texts within the historical and cultural contexts of their time. She explores events surrounding the panics of 1837 and 1857, prevalent attitudes toward speculation and failure as seen in newspapers and other contemporaneous texts, women’s relationships to the marketplace, and the connections between domestic ideology and middle-class formation. Although largely unknown today, the phenomena of “panic fiction” was extremely popular in its time and had an enormous influence on nineteenth-century popular conceptions of speculation, failure, and the need for marketplace reform, providing a distinct counterpoint to the analysis of panic found in newspapers, public speeches, and male-authored literary texts of the time.
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A jury of her peers : American women writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
A narrative spanning nearly 400 years introduces more than 250 female writers, both famous and little known.
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Activism and the American Novel
Since the 1980s, many activists and writers have turned from identity politics toward ethnic religious traditions to rediscover and reinvigorate their historic role in resistance to colonialism and oppression. In her examination of contemporary fiction by women of color-including Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, Toni Cade Bambara, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko-Channette Romero considers the way these novels newly engage with Vodun, Santería, Candomblé, and American Indian traditions. Critical of a widespread disengagement from civic participation and of the contemporary novel's disconnection from politics, this fiction attempts to transform the novel and the practice of reading into a means of political engagement and an inspiration for social change.
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Risking difference : identification, race, and community in contemporary fiction and feminism
Risking Difference revisions the dynamics of multicultural feminist community by exploring the ways that identification creates misrecognitions and misunderstandings between individuals and within communities. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jean Wyatt argues not only that individual psychic processes of identification influence social dynamics, but also that social discourses of race, class, and culture shape individual identifications. In addition to examining fictional narratives by Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, and others, Wyatt also looks at nonfictional accounts of cross-race relations by white feminists and feminists of color.
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A history of twentieth-century American women's poetry
\"A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry explores the genealogy of modern American verse by women from the early twentieth century to the millennium. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes wide-ranging essays that illuminate the legacy of American women poets. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse of such diverse poets as Edna St Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of feminist literary criticism. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of women's poetry in America and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Domesticity and Design in American Women's Lives and Literature
Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature explores the ways in which four American women writers from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century inhabited domestic space and portrayed it in their work. Hellman explores independent female authors who had intriguing and autonomous relationships with home, relocating frequently either to begin the creative processes of designing and decorating anew or to avoid domestic obligation altogether by remaining in transit. She also looks at how women authors wrote female characters into existence who had strikingly different relationships with home, and contended with profound burdens of housekeeping in an oppressive domestic sphere. The disjunction between the authors' individual existences and the characters to whom they gave life reveals multiple narratives about women at home in nineteenth- and twentieth- century America. This interdisciplinary inquiry undertakes a dual treatment of domesticity in an effort to synthesize a more complete understanding of the relationships between social history and literary accomplishment. Syncretising domestic literature with domestic practice, Hellman appraises the ways in which the authors appropriate domestic rhetoric to address issues of political import: economy, health, and social welfare in the case of Stowe, material feminism for Alcott, the landscape for Cather, and World War I for Wharton.
Caroline Hellman is an Assistant Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, where she teaches writing and literature. She is the recipient of a 2010-2011 Fulbright Award in American Literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.
Introduction 1. Frocks and Aprons or Geographies: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Reconception of Domesticity 2. A House Multiplied: Louisa May Alcott's Material Feminism 3. Mad [persons] in [Assorted] Attic[s]: Willa Cather's Domestication of Discontent 4. War on the Interior: Edith Wharton's Cabinet War Rooms in the House of the Homeless 5. Conclusion
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