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

Finely bound collection of writings by American women by the Oxford University Press.

• Edited by Linda Wagner-Martin (American) and Cathy N. Davidson (American).
• Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• 596 pages.
• Bound in three-quarter morocco over cloth-covered boards by Harcourt Bindery (Charlestown, Massachusetts) with raised bands to the spine, gilt titling, marbled endpapers, hand-sewn silk headbands and gilt top page ends.

From the publisher: “Provocative and compulsively readable, lively, engaging, and brilliantly representative, The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States presents short stories, poems, essays, plays, speeches, performance pieces, erotica, diaries, correspondence, and even a few recipes from nearly one hundred of our best women writers. 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. The moving autobiography of Zitkala- Sa, whose mother was a Sioux, tells us more about "otherness" than any sociological treatise, while Janice Mirikitani's and Nellie Wong's poems about being young Asian-American women, like Alice Walker's meditation on the beauty of growing old, speak to all readers.”