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
Edited by
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
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 30 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012
References
. The White Morning: A Novel of the Power of the German Women in Wartime. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1918.Google Scholar
. American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.Google Scholar
. “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life.” In Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. . New York: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
. “A Quarrel Forgotten or a Revolution Remembered? Reunion and Race in the Memory of the Civil War, 1875–1913.” In Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.Google Scholar
and , eds. Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq. Tucson: Kore Press, 2008.Google Scholar
. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
. Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements. Ed. . Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1966.Google Scholar
and , eds. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
“Resexing Militarism for the Globe.” In Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism. Ed. , , and . New York: Zed Books, 2008.Google Scholar
. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Knopf, 2010.Google Scholar
. Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. 1867. Ed. . San Francisco: Rinehart, 1955.Google Scholar
. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1997.Google Scholar
. The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
. Where My Heart is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992.Google Scholar
, ed. Women and War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted with or without Consent. New York: Garland Press, 1999.Google Scholar
. “The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and the Memory of the War.” Journal of American History 85.4 (March 1999):.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. The Imagined Civil War. Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.Google Scholar
. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.Google Scholar
. “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War.” Journal of American History 76.4 (March 1990):.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.Google Scholar
. Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.Google Scholar
. Point of No Return [Wine of Astonishment]. 1948. Markum, Ontario: Plume/New American Library, 1989.Google Scholar
. “Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War.” In Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars. Ed. , , , and . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
. “Introduction.” In The Battle-Ground. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2000.Google Scholar
. The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.Google Scholar
. The Body Politic: Foundings, Citizenship, and Difference in the American Political Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2001.Google Scholar
. What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.Google Scholar
. Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.Google Scholar
. “Women, Citizenship and Civic Sacrifice.” In Bonds of Affection. Ed. . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.Google Scholar
. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.Google Scholar
. The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Vintage, 1998.Google Scholar
. Perspectives of Four Women Writers on the Second World War: Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, Kay Boyle, and Rebecca West. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.Google Scholar
. Writing after War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
. Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.Google Scholar
. “Gender and Sexuality.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism. Ed. . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
. And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America. New York: William Marrow and Co., 1965.Google Scholar
. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, , and , eds. Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism. New York: Zed Books, 2008.Google Scholar
. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. 1682. Ed. . New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1997.Google Scholar
. “The Other Side of Grief: American Women Writers and the Vietnam War.” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36. (1994): 41+.Google Scholar
. “Introduction: Mary Rowlandson and Her Removes.” In The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Ed. . New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1997.Google Scholar
. Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
. Ellen Glasgow: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
and , eds. So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676–1677. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
. The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism, and the First World War. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.Google Scholar
. “The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender.” In Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War. Ed. and . New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
. Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.Google Scholar