Radicals, Volume 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama: Audacious Writings by American Women, 1830-1930 (Volume 1)

Kate Chopin on pot smoking. Pauline Hopkins on alchemy and the undead. Sui Sin Far on cross-dressing. Emma Lazarus and Angelina Weld Grimké on lesbian longing. Julia Ward Howe on intersexuality. 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 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama , selections span from early works like Sarah Louise Forten's anti-slavery poem 'The Grave of the Slave' (1831) and Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall (1855), a novel about her struggle to break into the male-dominated field of journalism, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's revenge fantasy, 'When I Was a Witch' (1910) and Georgia Douglas Johnson's poem on the fraught nature of African American motherhood, 'Maternity' (1922). In between, readers will discover many 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.' "Smoking. Pauline Hopkins on alchemy and the undead. Frances E.W. Harper on woman's political future. Sui Sin Far on cross-dressing. Emma Lazarus and Angelina Weld Grimké on lesbian longing. Julia Ward Howe on intersexuality. Charlotte Perkins Gilman on euthanasia. Emma Goldman against the tyranny of marriage. Ida B. Wells against lynching. Anna Julia Cooper on Black American womanho. Frances Willard on riding a bicycle. This anthology is perhaps the first of its kind: a full-length collection of radical writings by American women of the 19th and early 20th century, with all major genres represented-fiction, poetry, drama, memoir, essays, and oratory-and voices of color prioritized. Many of these writings have never been anthologized before; some have never even been reprinted before. Stabel and Turpin endeavor to counterbalance widely canonized voices with a greater proportion of writings by less-anthologized Black feminists, Native feminists, and Asian American feminists, many of whom were writing for their lives and the lives of their families and communities, often at the risk of being harassed, slandered, disenfranchised, or lynched. Readers will find the original version of what was later edited into Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, Julia A. J. Foote's account of her fight to be able to preach in the A.M.E. Church despite being a woman, and Julia Ward Howe's sensitive treatment of intersex life in America. They will also encounter new and surprising facets of the authors they know and love. For example, Emily Dickinson's most overtly erotic poems, those usually passed over in favor of other verses that misleadingly suggest a celibacy or disinterest in sex on Dickinson's part; and Kate Chopin's "An Egyptian Cigarette," her first-person fictional account of smoking pot-originally published in Vogue. Readers will enjoy excerpts from Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, a novel of alchemy and the undead, as well as from Amelia E. Johnson's Clarence and Corinne, a traditional love story. Simply writing such works was a radical freedom that these women had to carve out for themselves, in an era when many of them were legally considered property, none could vote, and reading and writing were often seen as privileges only for the free and wealthy. Radicals is ultimately intended to undo silences and prioritize unheard, underrepresented, powerful works of literature-from a period whose later historians often relegated women's writings to the periphery of American culture. One and all, these were women of genius and audacity, and, as Adah Isaacs Menken writes of such radicals, "this very audacity is divine""--. Provided by publisher Contents List of Illustrations Foreword by Roxane Gay Introduction by Meredith Stabel and Zachary Turpin A Note on the Text Kate Chopin The Storm (1898) An Egyptian Cigarette (1900) Rebecca Harding Davis At Noon (1887) Emily Dickinson For each extatic instant (ca. 1859) Come slowly – Eden! (ca. 1860–61) He fumbles at your Soul (ca. 1862) He touched me, so I live to know (ca. 1862) Alice Dunbar-Nelson If I Had Known (1895) The Praline Woman (1899) I Sit and Sew (1918) Sui Sin Far A Chinese Ishmael (1899) A Chinese Boy-Girl (1904) Fanny Fern From Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855) Charlotte Perkins Gilman When I Was a Witch (1910) The Socialist and the Suffragist (1910) From Herland (1915) Angelina Weld Grimké El Beso (1923) The Want of You (1923) The Black Finger (1923) At April (1925) Trees (1928) Frances E. W. Harper Bible Defense of Slavery (1855) Eliza Harris (1855) Only one night beneath your roof (1859) Bury Me in a Free Land (1870) Learning to Read (1891) A Double Standard (1895) Pauline Hopkins Talma Gordon (1900) From Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902) Converting Fanny (1916) Julia Ward Howe From The Hermaphrodite (ca. 1846–47) Georgia Douglas Johnson Smothered Fires (1918) Foredoom (1918) My Little Dreams (1918) Maternity (1922) Utopia (1922) Credo (1922) Fusion (1922) When I Rise Up (1922) Amelia E. Johnson From Clarence and Corinne; or, God’s Way (1890) Maggie Pogue Johnson I Wish I Was a Grown Up Man (1910) Old Maid’s Soliloquy (1910) Emma Lazarus Carmela (1875) Dolores (1876) Assurance (ca. 1880) Adah Isaacs Menken Judith (1868) Myself (1868) Genius (1868) Drifts That Bar My Door (1868) Miserimus (1868) Ann Plato Advice to Young Ladies (1841) The Natives of America (1841) To the First of August (1841) Sarah Forten Purvis The Grave of the Slave (1831) An Appeal to Woman (1834) H. Cordelia Ray Niobe (1893) Lincoln (1893) William Lloyd Garrison (1910) Toussaint L’Ouverture (1910) Harriet Beecher Stowe Immediate Emancipation: A Sketch. (1845) From Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) Eloise Bibb Thompson Masks, A Story (1927) Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman Lines to Ida B. Wells (1894) Clotelle—A Tale of Florida (1902) Bashy (1902) Harriet E. Wilson From Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) Constance Fenimore Woolson Miss Grief. (1880) Zitkala-Sa The Soft-Hearted Sioux (1901) Acknowledgments Kate Chopin on pot smoking. Pauline Hopkins on alchemy and the undead. Sui Sin Far on cross-dressing. Emma Lazarus and Angelina Weld Grimké on lesbian longing. Julia Ward Howe on intersexuality. Perhaps the first of its kind, __Radicals__ __Volume 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama____Ruth Hall__ __Radicals__