Women Writers in the United States is a celebration of the many forms of work--written and social, tangible and intangible--produced by American women. Davis and West document the variety and volume of women's work in the U.S. in a clear and accessible timeline format. They present information on the full spectrum of women's writing--including fiction, poetry, biography, political manifestos, essays, advice columns, and cookbooks, alongside a chronology of developments in social and cultural history that are especially pertinent to women's lives. This extensive chronology illustrates...

During the period of the professionalization of American medicine, many authors were concerned with a concurrent tendency to define identity in biological terms. Most of them doctors or patients themselves, they used literature polemically to convey their views about the meaning of the body and the origin and cure of disease. This book demonstrates that emergent medical beliefs about bodily functions and malfunctions surface in the writings of these authors not simply as thematic concerns but as problems for narrative form. Through a series of careful, historicized readings of works by a...

"Charlotte Perkins Gilman" offers the definitive account of this controversial writer and activist's long and eventful life. Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman (18601935) launched her career as a lecturer, author, and reformer with the story for which she is best-known today, "The Yellow Wallpaper." She was hailed as the "brains" of the US women's movement, whose focus she sought to broaden from suffrage to economics. Her most influential sociological work criticized the competitive individualism of capitalists and Social Darwinists, and touted altruistic service as the prerequisite to...

A biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935): Beecher-descendent, zealous reformer, exhilarating lecturer, prolific writer, scandalous divorcee, -unnatural mother, - international celebrity, and life-long controversialist.