The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States

Plot

Reveling in the awareness that the best U.S. women's writing is, quite simply, some of the best in the world, editors Linda Wagner-Martin and Cathy N. Davidson have chosen selections spanning four centuries and reflecting the rich variety of American women's lives. The collection embraces the perspectives of age and youth, the traditional and the revolutionary, the public and the private. Here is Judith Sargent Murray's 1790 essay "On the Equality of the Sexes," journalist Martha Gellhorn's "Last Words on Vietnam, 1987," and Mary Gordon's homage to the ghosts of Ellis Island, "More Than Just a Shrine"; powerful short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Wharton, Cynthia Ozick, and Toni Morrison; letters from Abigail Adams, Sarah Moore Grimke, Emma Goldman, and Georgia O'Keeffe; Alice B. Toklas's recipe "Bass for Picasso," and erotic offerings from Anais Nin and Rita Mae Brown

Tom's husband / Sarah Orne Jewett
Tony's wife
Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson
The revolt of "Mother" / Mary Wilkins Freeman
The yellow wall-paper / Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
A male Magdalene from Samantha vs. Josiah / Marietta Holley
A pair of silk stockings / Kate Chopin
The other two / Edith Wharton
Seventeen syllables / Hisaye Yamamoto
Freedom / Nella Larsen
Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston
O yes / Tillie Olsen
A late encounter with the enemy / Flannery O'Connor
A worn path / Eudora Welty
The shawl / Cynthia Ozick
Extenuating circumstances / Joyce Carol Oates
Miss Clairol / Helena Maria Viramontes
Recitatif / Toni Morrison
In the American society / Gish Jen
May's lion / Ursula K. Le Guin
Life in the iron-mills / Rebecca Harding Davis
Old Mrs. Harris / Willa Cather
To my dear and loving husband ; The flesh and the spirit / Anne Bradstreet
On imagination / Phillis Wheatley
The soul selects her own society ; This is my letter to the world ; My life had stood
a loaded gun ; After great pain, a formal feeling comes / Emily Dickinson
Decade / Amy Lowell
The poem as mask / Muriel Rukeyser
Lineage / Margaret Walker
Religion, from Ulysses / Gwendolyn Brooks
In an iridescent time / Ruth Stone
Woman me / Maya Angelou
Lady Lazarus / Sylvia Plath
Diving into the wreck / Adrienne Rich
When I was growing up / Nellie Wong
The thirty eighth year / Lucille Clifton
Song for a thin sister / Audre Lorde
What the gypsy said to her children / Judith Ortiz Cofer
Daystar / Rita Dove
A history of costume / Michelle Cliff
Suicide note / Janice Mirikitani
Remember / Joy Harjo
As children together / Carolyn Forche
from On the equality of the sexes / Judith Sargent Murray
A woman at forty, from Woman in the nineteenth century / Margaret Fuller
The working-girls of New York, from Folly as it flies / Fanny Fern
The case stated / Ida B. Wells-Barnett
from The higher education of women / Anna Julia Haywood Cooper
The coyote-spirit and the weaving woman / Mary Hunter Austin
Women are hungry / Meridel Le Sueur
More than just a shrine: paying homage to the ghosts of Ellis Island / Mary Gordon
Longing to die of old age / Alice Walker
Last words on Vietnam, 1987 / Martha Gellhorn
Amazons in Appalachia / Marilou Awiakta
If men could menstruate / Gloria Steinem
Why I want a wife / Judy Syfers
The good guys / Anna Quindlen
Overtones / Alice Gerstenberg
Trifles: a play in one act / Susan Glaspell
Bitter cane / Genny Lim
Ain't I a woman? / Sojourner Truth
Men in your life / Alice Childress
from United States / Laurie Anderson
Roslyn Malamud: the coup, from Fires in the mirror / Anna Deavere Smith
Native American ritual
Kopis'taya (a gathering of spirits) / Paula Gunn Allen
Naming power / Wendy Rose
The foot-washing / George Ella Lyon
from The women of Brewster Place / Gloria Naylor
The sixth work: rituals for the extended family, from Jambalaya / Luisah Teish
The ceremonies of community, from The telling / E.M. Broner
To John Adams / Abigail Adams
Letter to the editors of Freedom's Journal / Matilda
Letter XV: man equally guilty with woman in the fall / Sarah Moore Grimke
Diary / Louisa May Alcott
Afternoon in the woods, from Rural hours / Susan Fenimore Cooper
The trials of girlhood, from Incidents in the life of a slave girl / Harriet Ann Jacobs
To John Brown / Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
To Louisa Picquet / Elizabeth Ramsey
Diary / Mary Boykin Chesnut
To Liane De Pougy / Natalie Barney
To Ben Reitman / Emma Goldman
from The school days of an Indian girl / Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin)
from, Leaves from the mental portfolio of an Eurasian / Sui Sin Far
One farmer's wife / Anonymous
To Anita Pollitzer / Georgia O'Keeffe
Names, from Memories of a Catholic girlhood / Mary McCarthy
from Storyteller / Leslie Marmon Silko
To Gabriela, a young writer / Pat Mora
The last return from the sea, from The captain's lady's cookbook
Bass for Picasso, from The Alice B. Toklas cook book / Alice B. Toklas
Sunday revival dinner, from The taste of country cooking / Edna Lewis
Los dias de los muertos, from Food from my heart / Zarela Martinez
Wild nights
wild nights! ; Come slowly
Eden! ; Volcanoes be in Sicily / Emily Dickinson
The storm, A sequel to "The 'Cadian ball" / Kate Chopin
from, Lifting belly / Gertrude Stein
I want to die while you love me / Georgia Douglas Johnson
Sea rose / H.D
Mandra, II, from Little birds / Anais Nin
Sappho's reply / Rita May Brown
She didn't think we were married / Olga Broumas and Jane Miller
Fifteen, from Autumn sequence / Jan Freeman