Memoir, Essays, and Oratory: Audacious Writings by American Women, 1830-1930

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Emily Dickinson on sex, desire, and “the chapter . . . in the night." Emma Goldman against the tyranny of marriage. Ida B. Wells against lynching. Anna Julia Cooper on Black American womanhood. Frances Willard on riding a bicycle. Perhaps the first of its kind, Radicals is a two-volume collection of writings by American women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special attention paid to the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Asian American women. In Volume 2: Memoir, Essays, and Oratory, selections span from early works like Sarah Mapps Douglass's anti-slavery appeal “A Mother's Love” (1832) and Maria W. Stewart's “Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall” (1833), to Zitkala-Sa's memories in “The Land of Red Apples” (1921) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's moving final essay “The Right to Die” (1935). In between, readers will discover a whole host of vibrant and challenging lesser-known texts that are rarely collected today. Some, indeed, have been out of print for more than a century. Unique among anthologies of American literature, Radicals undoes such silences by collecting the underrepresented, the uncategorizable, the unbowed—powerful writings by American women of genius and audacity who looked toward, and wrote toward, what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called “a lifted world.” Contents List of Illustrations Foreword by Katha Pollitt Introduction by Meredith Stabel and Zachary Turpin A Note on the Text Buffalo Bird Woman (Waheenee / Maaxiiriwia) From Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden, As Recounted by Maxi’diwiac (Buffalo Bird Woman) of the Hidatsa Indian Tribe (ca. 1839–1932) (1917) Jennie Collins Woman’s Suffrage (1871) Anna Julia Cooper Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race (1892) Lucy Delaney From From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom (1891) Emily Dickinson Letters to Judge Otis Lord (ca. 1878) Sarah Mapps Douglass To a Friend (1832) A Mother’s Love (1832) Sarah Jane Woodson Early Address to the Youth (1866) Zilpha Elaw From Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, and Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, an American Female of Colour; Together with some Account of the Great Religious Revivals in America (1846) Julia A. J. Foote From A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch (1879) Margaret Fuller From Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) Charlotte Perkins Gilman Maternity Benefits and Reformers (1916) What Is Feminism? (1916) From The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935) The Right to Die (1935) Emma Goldman A New Declaration of Independence (1909) Minorities versus Majorities (1910) Marriage and Love (1910) Charlotte Forten Grimké From The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten (1854) Frances E. W. Harper We Are All Bound Up Together (1866) Woman’s Political Future (1894) Edmonia Goodelle Highgate New Orleans Correspondence (1866) On Horse Back—Saddle-Dash, No. 1 (1866) Harriet Jacobs Letter from a Fugitive Slave (1853) Rebecca Cox Jackson From Gifts of Power (ca. 1830–1864) Belva Lockwood The Growth of Peace Principles (1895) Louisa Picquet From Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon: Or Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life (1861) Ora Eddleman Reed Indian Tales between Pipes (1906) Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin An Open Letter to the Educational League of Georgia (1889) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage Introduction to History of Woman Suffrage (1889) Maria W. Stewart An Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall, Boston, February 27, 1833 Lucy Stone From Lucy Stone (1850) Marriage of Lucy Stone under Protest (1855) Mary Church Terrell Lynching from a Negro’s Point of View (1904) What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States (1907) Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman The Negro among Anglo-Saxon Poets (1898) Sojourner Truth From Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave (1850) Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, on May 29, 1851 Ida B. Wells-Barnett From Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) Frances Willard From A Wheel within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, with Some Reflections by the Way (1895) From Do Everything: A Handbook for the World’s White Ribboners (1895) Sarah Winnemucca From Life among the Piutes, Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) Victoria Woodhull To the Women of the South (1870) Zitkala-Sa From The School Days of an Indian Girl (1900) From An Indian Teacher among Indians (1900) Acknowledgments