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A Silent Woman Speaks: The Poetry in a Woman's Scrapbook of the 1840s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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In these words, Tillie Olsen dedicated her book, Silences, to the women whose lives for centuries were constricted by sexual role and social custom, yet who struggled nevertheless to express themselves (pp. 42–43). She further urged women who write and women who teach to give voice to these silent women by moving beyond the novel and the published poem to the journals, letters, memoirs, and other personal utterances that “add to the authentic story of human life, human experience” (pp. 45n).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

NOTES

1. Olsen, Tillie, Silences (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), p. ixGoogle Scholar. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text.

2. Matthews, Jean V., “‘Woman's Place’ and the Search for Identity in Ante-Bellum America,” Canadian Review of American Studies 10, no. 3 (1979): 289304, here p. 294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Norton, Mary Beth, Major Problems in A merican Women's History (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1989), p. 112.Google Scholar

4. Reynolds, David, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 344.Google Scholar

5. Barry, Kathleen, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist (New York: Ballantine, 1988), p. 39.Google Scholar

6. Matthews, , “‘Woman's Place’ and the Search,” p. 289.Google Scholar