Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The stories we tell: American Indian women's writing and the persistence of tradition
- 2 Women writers and war
- 3 American women's writing in the colonial period
- 4 Religion, sensibility, and sympathy
- 5 Women's writing of the Revolutionary era
- 6 Women writers and the early US novel
- 7 Women in literary culture during the long nineteenth century
- 8 Moral authority as literary property in mid-nineteenth-century print culture
- 9 The shape of Catharine Sedgwick's career
- 10 Writing, authorship, and genius: literary women and modes of literary production
- 11 Nineteenth-century American women's poetry: past and prospects
- 12 Transatlantic sympathies and nineteenth-century women's writing
- 13 Nineteenth-century African American women writers
- 14 Local knowledge and women's regional writing
- 15 Women and children first: female writers of American children's literature
- 16 US suffrage literature
- 17 American women playwrights
- 18 Turn-of-the-twentieth-century transitions: women on the edge of tomorrow
- 19 Accidents, agency, and American literary naturalism
- 20 The geography of ladyhood: racializing the novel of manners
- 21 Self-made women: novelists of the 1920s
- 22 Recovering the legacy of Zara Wright and the twentieth-century black woman writer
- 23 Jewish American women writers
- 24 Women on the breadlines
- 25 Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970
- 26 Lyric, gender, and subjectivity in modern and contemporary women's poetry
- 27 Contemporary American women's writing: women and violence
- 28 Asian American women's literature and the promise of committed art
- 29 Straight sex, queer text: American women novelists
- 30 Latina writers and the usable past
- 31 Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric
- 32 Reading women in America
- Index
- References
2 - Women writers and war
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The stories we tell: American Indian women's writing and the persistence of tradition
- 2 Women writers and war
- 3 American women's writing in the colonial period
- 4 Religion, sensibility, and sympathy
- 5 Women's writing of the Revolutionary era
- 6 Women writers and the early US novel
- 7 Women in literary culture during the long nineteenth century
- 8 Moral authority as literary property in mid-nineteenth-century print culture
- 9 The shape of Catharine Sedgwick's career
- 10 Writing, authorship, and genius: literary women and modes of literary production
- 11 Nineteenth-century American women's poetry: past and prospects
- 12 Transatlantic sympathies and nineteenth-century women's writing
- 13 Nineteenth-century African American women writers
- 14 Local knowledge and women's regional writing
- 15 Women and children first: female writers of American children's literature
- 16 US suffrage literature
- 17 American women playwrights
- 18 Turn-of-the-twentieth-century transitions: women on the edge of tomorrow
- 19 Accidents, agency, and American literary naturalism
- 20 The geography of ladyhood: racializing the novel of manners
- 21 Self-made women: novelists of the 1920s
- 22 Recovering the legacy of Zara Wright and the twentieth-century black woman writer
- 23 Jewish American women writers
- 24 Women on the breadlines
- 25 Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970
- 26 Lyric, gender, and subjectivity in modern and contemporary women's poetry
- 27 Contemporary American women's writing: women and violence
- 28 Asian American women's literature and the promise of committed art
- 29 Straight sex, queer text: American women novelists
- 30 Latina writers and the usable past
- 31 Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric
- 32 Reading women in America
- Index
- References
Summary
From its inception, feminism has not known whether to fight men or to join them;
whether to lament sex differences and deny their importance or to acknowledge
and even valorize such differences; whether to condemn all wars outright or to
extol women’s contributions to war efforts . . . The story of feminismandmale/
female identifications is . . . a tumult of ongoing encounterswith a long, grand
genealogy – from the prototypical maternal figure, the Madonna, to the exemplary
woman warrior, Joan. As discourse, feminism is not just a series of explicit
endorsements but a cluster of implicit presumptions guiding rhetorical choices and
controlling dominant tropes and metaphors.
Jean Elshtain, “Feminism’s War with War”
Exclusions: patria, patrimony, patriarchy
In February 1676, a band of Nipmuc, Narragansett, and Wampanoag Indians assaulted the village of Lancaster, Massachusetts. The raid was a local battle of Metacom's (or King Philip's) War, a bloody imbroglio raging across sectors of New England that would alter profoundly colonists' sense of New World sanctuary and divine commission. Although largely exacerbated by English expansion, and though the war's toll fell most adversely on indigenous Americans, the events at Lancaster that afternoon left numerous colonists dead and many houses in ashes. The assailants, as was customary, took hostages. Among the party of settlers abducted from the scene of that “dreadfull hour” was Mary Rowlandson, a pious pastor's wife, who would spend the next three fretful months traveling or encamped among her enemies: cryptic creatures her biblically filtered optic could regard only as “hell-hounds,” “ravenous beasts,” barbarous “Heathen” devils (The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 69- 71). Although she was eventually ransomed and returned home, her “affliction,” as she typically described the unwanted adventure, drank so deeply of the “Wine of astonishment” as to violate the bordered integrity of her self-comprehension (112). “I can remember the time when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts,” she reflects, “but now it is other wayes with me” (111).
Six years later, partly to restore that breached fortress of personhood, Rowlandson wrote and published The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), an account of her harrowing capture, bondage, and “redemption” for having survived such an ordeal of spiritual and cultural otherness.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 30 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012