Abstract: An zia Yezierskas 1923 novel Salome of the Tenements ends with a surprising scene of attempted rape. Sonya Vrunsky, the Russian Jewish protagonist, is assaulted in her apart ment one night by her ex-husband, the Protes tant philanthropist John Manning. She thwarts his attack and, in a disturbing concluding scene, forgives her would-be rapist, recognizing that she loves him: "'After all,' she thought,. . He will be to me always Romance. The madness, the daring, the deathless adventure of youth" (184). Sonya's closing words suggest that she sees her ex-husband's attack as a sign of love, but her tendency to harbor affectionate feelings for a man who almost violates her is at odds

Abstract: In 1867, a twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth Stuart Phelps compassionately devoted her first essay to the plight of American women burdened with unrewarding domestic labor or leisured idleness. "Next to ill-health," she argued in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, "the principal cause of women's unhappiness--for women are not happy--is the want of something to do.... Whether for self-support, or for the pure employment's sake, the search for work--for successful work, for congenial work--is at the bottom of half the feminine miseries of the world" ("What Shall They Do?" 522). Maintaining that "[i]f a girl, for any reason, wants a positive, outside object for her days ... it is her business to find one, and it is the business of her friends to help her," Phelps proposes a number of occupational suggestions to women: "[C]an you teach? Or can't you teach? Can you measure alpaca? trim bonnets? run a machine?... Then can you keep a ledger? write book notices for a busy editor? fill out insurance policies? Be a city missionary? Read to an old lady? Take care of an invalid? Go into the hospitals?" (522, 522-23). Her series of alternatives concludes, however, with an option to which Phelps would come to attach a singular and surpassing value during the first half of her career: "Be a doctor? and be sure that you could be few things more womanly or more noble. The brave pioneers--God bless them for it!--have broken the way for you. It is an easier way now than the path of the idle or the ill-paid" (523). In most circles in the country at this time, as Phelps's first biographer observes, "Women doctors were just beginning to be heard of--with shudders" (Bennett 25-26). Still, it was not altogether outlandish for Phelps to promote medicine as a field for women. In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to receive a medical diploma, followed by other "brave pioneers" like Dr. Marie Zakrzewska. During this period, women doctors founded hospitals for women and children in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and schools like the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania gradually prospered. By 1867, when Phelps's piece appeared in Harper's, several hundred women had evidently begun practicing medicine in the United States, despite widespread and frequently venomous opposition. Phelps came of age when the first generation of officially certified women in the American medical profession was emerging, and so she was ideally positioned to witness such a development and to grasp its significance for the lives and condition of women. As one scholar observes, "Phelps wished choices to be available for women and especially supported the entry of women into medical careers" (Masteller 137). Throughout the 1870s, Phelps returned to the topic in essays, columns, public letters, and short stories--an early advocacy that culminated in her novel Doctor Zay (1882), obviously Phelps's fullest treatment of the figure of the woman physician. Although Doctor Zay has dominated the critical discussion of her interest in women doctors, the novel has a long and spacious fore-ground in a wealth of little-known polemical, journalistic, and imaginative writings by Phelps. These writings underscore the achievements of already established women doctors, their special role in the domain of women's health, the imperative of medically educating and training women in the face of pernicious resistance, the necessity of coeducation in medicine, the model of independence and self-sufficiency presented by the woman physician, and the medical woman's symbolic value as an agent of healing between the North and South in post-Civil War America. Between 1867 and 1882, when the number of women doctors in the United States increased substantially, few writers proved more keenly or vocally responsive than Phelps to the advent of women in American medicine. An exploration of her largely overlooked early prose demonstrates that Phelps played an instrumental role in culturally, socially, and professionally legitimating the figure of the American medical woman during a crucial fifteen-year period when the woman doctor remained perhaps the most provocative and controversial new presence on the nation's occupational landscape. …

Abstract: Meridel Le Sueur describes her proletarian novel The Girl (1939/1978) as a "memorial to the great and heroic women of the depression" and a record of the varied stories of women in bus stations, food lines, and warehouses (133). (1) Le Sueur's novel chronicles these lives to prevent their appearance as "defeated, trashed, defenseless" (133). According to Le Sueur's afterword to the novel, the writer should "urge and nourish ... social vision" and provide a historical narrative of those women "who keep us all alive" (133). Indeed, the novel closes with a birth scene celebrating the work of memory: "Memory is all we got, I cried, we got to remember. We got to remember everything.... We got to remember to be able to fight. Got to write down the names. Make a list. Nobody can be forgotten" (126). Le Sueur's text works to re-member proletarian female experience and her own position in literary history. As most people familiar with Le Sueur's biography know, although she was widely published in the 1920s and 1930s, her popularity dwindled until the Feminist Press and John Crawford of the West End Press rediscovered her work in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (2) Early on, she frequently published work in journals such as Kenyon Review and Prairie Schooner and in magazines like Mademoiselle and was able to support herself financially (Pratt 255). With the onset of the McCarthy years--in Le Sueur's words "the dark of the time"--her mainstream popularity declined until she was published almost exclusively in Communist Party journals and read only within Party circles (qtd. in Pratt 255). (3) But even during her peak period, her work was not always met with approval. One editor at Scribner's suggested Le Sueur write more like Hemingway (Coiner 108), and the Communist Party itself instructed Le Sueur to move away from lyricism as a mode of expression and write literature that "would organize" (Pratt 257). The literary left established genres, such as Malcolm Cowley's classic proletarian plot, that "codified masculine metaphors for the working-class struggle" (Rabinowitz, Labor 61); these genres kept women writers' modes of representation from being recognized as worthy forms of expression. (4) The terms "proletarian" and "manly" often were used interchangeably, and so a female proletarian writer like Le Sueur was criticized by the dominant bourgeois culture and the Communist leadership. Le Sueur had rural roots (she was born in Iowa and lived most of her life in Minnesota) and little formal education; she found herself marginalized on all fronts. Set in St. Paul during the Great Depression, The Girl is a bildungsroman about a working-class girl. The main plot of the novel centers on her sexual awakening, the subsequent loss of her lover, and the birth of her child. The Girl explores the larger landscape of union work and "scabbing," unemployment, and social welfare for both men and women. The novel focuses on working-class struggles against larger economic forces and women's struggles against the control of men; therefore, the novel contributes substantially to discussions of gender in both modernist and proletarian fiction. Le Sueur's novel charts female experience through the body in the knowledge of sexuality, abortion, physical abuse, and birth. As a writer, Le Sueur projects a cogent social vision, and through this novel, she makes particular demands on her readers, who must serve as capable interpreters of the historical record. In interpreting this work, both writer and readers participate in constituting the cultural currency of the proletarian female experience and in assigning value to the varied subjectivities women assume in the narrative. The Girl situates the body as a register for physical, social, and political struggles. The novel asks its characters and readers to read the body as a text and chart its various discourses. In the wake of the work of Michel Foucault, the assumption that one can attain a proper reading is problematic; indeed, as Foucault argues, every reading is a misreading in some ways. …

Abstract: Major (1883) is also a tale of voluntary amnesia stemming from a reluctance to face particular facts about the postbellum United States. Though the novella speaks only sparingly of the American Civil War, it addresses some of the scars left in its wake, particularly those involv ing women's social position, racial passing, and a fear of the postwar new order. The novella's Major and Madam Carroll are the figureheads of the North Carolina mountain town of Far Edgerley, where much of Marion Carroll's time and energy is spent helping her ailing husband keep up appearances by hiding the effects of his increasing dementia. While her efforts to spare the Major's feelings suggest love and devotion, the behavior simultaneously bespeaks a desire to maintain a life that is no longer true, a desire the entire town shares and that causes the rest

Abstract: Recent scholarship about the U.S. South sug gests that we are just beginning to grasp both its liminality and its centrality, not to American exceptionalism, but to a New World studies that can situate it as "a space simultaneously (or alter nately) center and margin, victor and defeated, empire and colony, essentialist and hybrid, north ern and southern (both in the global sense)" (Smith and Cohn 9). As the New Southern Stud ies goes about such remapping and demapping, scholarly attention necessarily comes to rest on the postbellum era when the United States was simultaneously reinventing itself in the wake of the Civil War and flexing its colonial muscle abroad. George B. Handley observes in Postslavery Literatures in the Americas that

Abstract: Although she positioned herself playfully as an "admiring aunt" in late nineteenth-century literary society, Constance Fenimore Woolson was a deeply involved member of that society, interacting with and openly critiquing the writing of her male and female peers. (1) Of Woolson's relationship to her male literary counterparts, Joan Myers Weimer observes, "Her response to Cooper, James, and other male literary giants was as critical and analytical as it was admiring; by appropriating and transforming some of their key images and themes, she critiqued and revised their work" (x). Woolson's relationship to James, however, draws the most interest and has been the most difficult to characterize adequately. While Cheryl B. Torsney recognizes the unfortunate fact that "Woolson's works have been read, even by her champions, as the ash from which the Jamesian phoenix rises" (20), she corrects this appraisal of James's female peer, suggesting that Woolson and James should be regarded instead as "part of the same textual fabric" (35). Regarding one's ability to inspire the other, a more reciprocal relationship seems to have existed between Woolson and James than was once supposed. In terms of the former's writing, perhaps the most important aspect of the relationship they maintained at the end of the nineteenth century was Woolson's incorporation of her critiques and revisions of James's fiction into her own. Joanne F. Vickers, for instance, has located in Woolson's "The Street of the Hyacinth" a vindication of the American heroine whom she finds indicted in James's Daisy Miller. Similarly, Torsney reads Woolson's Anne for its relation to James's The Portrait of a Lady, discovering that "they focus on similar themes yet produce gender-inflected results" (35). Published concurrently, Anne and Portrait may be examined for evidence of concerns that were common to two writers composing at about the same time. In 1886, five years after Portrait appeared, though, Woolson published East Angels, a novel that also bears several similarities to James's masterpiece. My purpose here is to examine these similarities in order to discover the retrospective critique of James's Portrait that underlies Woolson's text. One might argue that the two novels portray late-century women in essentially identical predicaments; a reader cannot miss the similarities between the marriages of James's Isabel Archer and Woolson's Margaret Harold. I would suggest, however, that East Angels embodies Woolson's efforts to critique James's portrayal of his heroine's struggle to cope with a patriarchal social order. Specifically, Woolson creates a female character who demonstrates a femininity that includes power, self-control, and the ability to exercise authority when faced with a dilemma to which James's corresponding character seems to succumb. Further, I argue that Woolson purposefully spells out particulars that James left untreated concerning women's perplexed position in society, thereby amending to some degree James's portrayal of an American heroine. Admittedly, Portrait and East Angels arise from very different milieus: James's novel is set in the comparatively stable social fabric of the Old World; Woolson's in a declining, postbellum society in Florida. Additionally, Woolson's development of several ethnically "other" characters contrasts markedly with James's concentration on Anglo-Saxon nobles and the near-noble bourgeoisie. Still, similarities abound. Both novels portray an encounter between two ideologically different cultures. James sends his representative American heroine to the Old World on an Emersonian quest for a direct experience (45); Woolson transplants her post-Puritan New Englanders Evert Winthrop and Margaret Harold into a Spanish-inflected remnant of the Old South. Both novels reveal a preoccupation with marriage bonds that is typical of the late-century genre. Both portray a woman vexed by an unhappy marriage, and both concentrate on her responses to her unfortunate situation. …

Abstract: "The wild cow is a female. She has healthy calves, and milk enough for them; and that is all the femininity she needs. Otherwise than that she is bovine rather than feminine." Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898) "Woe to those who refuse to pay their toll; they would be rounded up like cattle...." Emma Goldman, "The Traffic in Women" (1911) The gun-slinging superwoman may be the most familiar way popular western conventions recently have been put to an arguably feminist use. However, this discourse is not characteristic of the earliest popular westerns written by women, which show remarkably little interest in reinventing women in the cowboy-hero's image. A much more prevalent convention, but one virtually unknown to current scholarship, is exemplified in Frances McElrath's The Rustler (1902), published in the same year as Owen Wister's classic The Virginian. McElrath's text concerns a square dance attended by an orphaned teenager named Mavvy (short for Maverick, a name for an unbranded, orphaned calf). She has been dragged to the dance by her adoptive father, a notorious cattle rustler, who forces her to accept the sexual advances of another rustler. To Mavvy's rescue comes Horace Carew, who will soon become the leader of a group of gentleman vigilantes, organized to stop cattle rustling. Horace has just been rejected by his beloved, the genteel easterner Hazel Clifford. As these courtship dramas play out, the square dance caller instructs the male dancers to "lock horns with your own heifers, and rassle 'em to their places" and to "corral the fillies, rope your own, and back to your claim with her!" (McElrath 63-64). The square dance call aptly summarizes one of the novel's central themes. Set in Wyoming during the 1892 Johnson County Rustler Wars, The Rustler is a story of two women's encounters with the "marriage roundup." In this and other women's westerns of the early twentieth century, analogies between cattle roundups and marriage markets mark a crucial shift in Anglo-American feminist discourse: they both resonate with analogies between patriarchy and slavery in feminist abolitionism and anticipate the argument of later feminist thinkers from Emma Goldman to Gayle Rubin that marriage enslaves, objectifies, and commodifies women. The more familiar pattern of feminist intervention in early twentieth-century popular western discourse is the female individualism of figures such as Annie Oakley, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, and the rodeo cowgirl. All are feminized versions of the western male hero. For example, Oakley earned celebrity status as a sharpshooter with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, while taking great care to preserve her reputation as a respectable lady. (1) Stewart, who was renowned for the letters she published in the Atlantic Monthly detailing her experience, represented herself as the female version of the independent homesteader. Early twentieth-century rodeo cowgirls competed in the same events as men--although not against them--and were "the first significant group of professional women athletes in North America" (Savage 80). (2) Today, the tradition continues with action-adventure heroines including the protagonist of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Sarah Connor of the Terminator series. The westerns discussed in this essay--McElrath's The Rustler (1902), B. M. Bower's Lonesome Land (1912), and Katharine Newlin Burt's The Branding Iron (1919)--change our current understanding of the importance of western mythology in women's literary history, for they show that it was more than the repository of a conservative and limiting feminist individualism or an exclusively patriarchal discourse that women write against. (3) The decline of feminist abolitionism and the rise of social-Darwinian and eugenic feminisms left a rhetorical void in feminist discourse that the popular western could partially fill. Louise Michele Newman has pointed out that aligning feminism with social-evolutionary progress made it problematic for white feminists to criticize patriarchy within their own culture. …

Abstract: When Nan Prince, the protagonist of Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor (1884), travels to Dunport for a stay with Anna Prince, her only aunt, from whom she was estranged at birth, she befriends Eunice Fraley and comes into conflict with Eunice's mother, Mrs. Fraley. At this point, Nan has nearly completed her medical studies and plans to become a physi cian. Eunice, who is almost sixty years old, sympathizes with and admires Nan's approach to life. Mrs. Fraley, however, takes it upon her self to confront Nan publicly concerning her impious and unnatural choice of a profession. Eunice places herself between these two power ful models of feminine life. In an odd but telling fragment, followed by a sentence, she confides to Nan, "Though I believe every word you said about a girl's having an independence of her own. It is a great blessing to have always had such a person as my mother to lean upon" (338). Eunice is attracted by Nan's independence, but she feels gratitude and duty toward her mother, who has taken care of her in exchange for a life of service. Eunice's syntax underlines her sense that these two attitudes cannot be reconciled.

Abstract: began when she was only twenty-one with the publication of an essay titled “Gargoyles,” written during her senior year at Wells College, and would eventually culminate with the publication of thirteen novels. Walker entered Wells, a private women’s college in New York, under a tuition waiver granted for ministers’ daughters in 1922; she was very enthusiastic about this opportunity because she had had ambitions to become a writer since the age of seven. From Wells, she continued her education and literary career at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, receiving her Master’s degree in English in 1933, along with the Avery Hopwood Award for her novel Fireweed. The success of this novel and its publication that year by Harcourt Brace initiated a partnership that Walker maintained for nearly half a century and eleven more novels, ending with the 1970 publication of If a Lion Could Talk. Walker married Ferdinand Schemm in 1927, and the success of Fireweed helped finance the young family’s move from the Midwest to Montana. The subsequent success of Winter Wheat enabled the family to move from their bungalow in Great Falls to their acreage on the banks of the Missouri river. Winter Wheat, published L E G A C Y P R O F I L E

Abstract: pated in the “structural inequality” of modern professionalism, claiming the authority of privileged experts, while others, particularly marginalized women, “successfully challenged that inequality” and sought to expand the borders of authority (144). Benedict and Hurston, for example, avoided the trap of defining themselves against a racialized or feminized other by “highlight[ing] a historical connection between the modernist professional work they were engaging in and the supposedly feminine forms of subjective analysis of the past” (115). Sawaya’s reading of Norris and Santayana, in which she forces an argument about the submerged links between sentimentalism and naturalism, provides the most negative instance of how gender politics could be used to exclude women and the feminine from professional discourse. In the end, Sawaya attempts to achieve some larger relevance for her study by concluding with a moral lesson for today’s feminist scholars, whose “ambivalence . . . about professionalism” she would like to encourage (145). However, this book’s heavy use of jargon and its arcane analysis would seem to limit its prospective audience and preclude it from contributing much to the ongoing discussions about what women want and need from the world of work. For literary and cultural scholars, its use could also be limited by its reluctance to interrogate the very concepts that modern professionals defined themselves against.

Abstract: versities and university presses, we must consider ourselves fortunate to have access to a number of recently reprinted texts written by American women authors. The commitment of scholars and presses to the process of recovery and the publication of scholarly editions is crucial to the continued survival and expansion of our field. Recovery work allows us—indeed, forces us—continually to reevaluate the field of American women’s writing as we know it, rethinking our own canonization of particular authors, methods of periodization, and aesthetic and political standards of judgment. In this review, I focus on the reprinting of fiction originally written and published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The names of some of these writers will be easily recognizable, while others—and their work— will come as a satisfying and even delightful surprise. Each one of these texts facilitates the developing dialogue regarding American I N S H O R T : R E C E N T R E P R I N T S

Abstract: For much of the twentieth century, Westerns were considered a male genre. Their heroes, authors, and themes were masculine. Recently, the study of gender issues in western novels has become a fruitful academic discipline, and discussions of the genre have begun to include female authors of Westerns, especially those from the early days of the genre's development. During that time, writers such as Mary Hallock Foote, Frances McElrath, and B. M. Bower (Bertha Muzzy Sinclair) created their own visions of frontier society. Today, scholars rightly examine how these women structured the cowboy myth. One such author who met with a surprising amount of success in her time was Caroline Lockhart (1871-1962). Lockhart, whom H. L. Mencken called "one of the best humorists in the country" (Dominick 49), wrote seven western novels between 1911 and 1933; three of these were made into films. While all of Lockhart's books were seen as "western" stories, they differed considerably from the genre's masculine template: they feature wit, a strong sense of place, and meaningful female characters. Additionally, her novels describe occupations such as cattle and sheep ranching, placer mining, and dude wrangling (perhaps the first literary portrayal of this new industry). Necah Stewart Furman notes that Lockhart's first novel, Me-Smith (1911), was a bestseller that the New York Times compared favorably to The Virginian (49). The Lady Doc (1912), her second, includes what Norris Yates labels the "first unambiguous portrayal of a lesbian--and perhaps the first unambiguous indication of an abortion--in American hardcover fiction" (Gender and Genre 44-46). Old West--and New (1933), her last, brought old-time cowboys into the twentieth century. As the genre evolved into the heavily symbolic gunfight scenario and Lockhart's books fell out of print, she focused less of her attention on fiction and more on her considerable outside interests. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Caroline Lockhart was born in Eagle Point, Illinois, on February 24, 1871, the oldest daughter of Sarah and Joseph Lockhart. Joseph was a farmer, real estate developer, and cattle dealer who soon moved the family to a homestead in eastern Kansas. By the turn of the century, he would become one of the largest landowners in that state, but during Lockhart's childhood, the family alternately lived between Kansas and Illinois, where her mother's family lived and where the Lockharts owned a house. Later in her life, Lockhart would claim that her legitimacy as a writer of western stories arose in part from being raised on a Kansas ranch, which was perhaps a slight exaggeration. After her mother's death in 1888, Lockhart was sent to boarding schools. She eventually ended up in Boston, where she flirted with a career on the stage. Soon, however, she got a job as a stunt girl writing feature stories for the Boston Post. Nellie Bly had recently created a sensation by going on adventures and writing about them, and papers around the country were scrambling to find engaging young women to follow her lead. Lockhart fit the bill: young, brash, beautiful, and self-confident. She went to the bottom of Boston Harbor in a diving suit, played baseball with the local professional team, jumped off an apartment building into a fire-safety net, and got herself committed to a Home for Intemperate Women to investigate conditions there. Lockhart loved the limelight, and she wrote with a charmingly self-absorbed style that brought her local fame. In 1897, she quit her newspaper job to travel, spending several months in New Mexico, but by 1900, she had resurfaced in a similar role at the Philadelphia Bulletin, where she wrote under the pen name Suzette. At this time, Lockhart started nurturing greater literary ambitions. She published short stories in popular magazines, including Lippincott's and McBride's, and started working on a novel based on her experiences in New Mexico. …