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 Gen ... continue reading >

Every few years, someone counts up the titles covered in the New York Times Book Review and the short fiction published in the New Yorker, as well as the bylines and literary works reviewed in such highbrow journals as Harper's and the New York Review of Books, and observes that the male names outnumber the female by about 2 to 1. This situation is lamentable, as everyone but a handful of embittered cranks seems to agree, but it's not clear that anyone ever does anything about it. The bestseller lists, though less intellectually exalted, tend to break down more evenly along gender lines; between J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer alone, the distaff side is more than holding its own in terms of revenue. But when it comes to respect, are women writers getting short shrift?

The question is horribly fraught, and has been since the 1970s. Ten years ago, in a much-argued-about essay for Harper's, the novelist and critic Francine Prose accused the literary establishment—dispensers of prestigious prizes and reviews—of continuing to read women's fiction with "the usual prejudices and preconceptions," even if most of them have learned not to admit as much publicly. Two years before that, Jane Smiley, also writing in Harper's, alleged that Huckleberry Finn is overvalued as a cultural monument while Uncle Tom's Cabin is undervalued, largely because of the genders of the novels' respective authors; the claim triggered a deluge of letters in protest. Alongside the idea that women writers have been unjustly neglected, there has blossomed the suspicion that some of them have recently become unduly celebrated—an aesthetic variation on the conservative shibboleth of affirmative action run amok.

Onto this mine-studded terrain and with impressive aplomb, strides Elaine Showalter, literary scholar and professor emerita at Princeton. Showalter has fought in the trenches of this particular war for ov ... continue reading >

The title of this, the "first literary history of American women writers ever written," explains Elaine Showalter, comes from a 1917 short story of the same name by a young journalist, Susan Glaspell. The story is based on the murder trial of an Iowa farmwife who strangled her husband after enduring years of his cruelty and abuse. When two of her peers located potentially incriminating evidence, they concealed it to protect the abused woman from "the patriarchal system of the law."

Glaspell died in 1948, all but disappearing from literary history. Her story and its back story have a particular resonance for Showalter. Showalter doesn't much like it when really good writers like Glaspell fall off of the literary map. This means that while much of the book conjures names good readers know, it is happily punctuated by names we've never seen, stories we never knew existed.

Showalter has organized the book by decades, beginning in 1650, when Anne Bradstreet, a settler from England in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote the first book by a woman living in America. Bradstreet's “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America” is a collection of poems describing the difficulties and joys of being a settler, wife and mother. It was published in London and required no fewer than 11 testimonials by male friends, family and critics to convince the publisher that it was indeed written by a woman and worthy of publication. It was followed by Mary Rowlandson's 1682 memoir of her abduction by Narragansett Indians, "A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson." It was in this genre, "captivity narratives," that American women first distinguished themselves as writers. ... (Read the full review)