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Brief Thoughts on New Approaches, Texts, Anthologies, and Bibliographies of Interest to Readers of Legacy
A recently published group of books signals the burgeoning diversity of interdisciplinary and multi-cultural approaches to American women's writing. Women Writers in the United States: A Timeline of Literary, Cultural, and Social History (Oxford University Press, 1996; 504 pp., $45.00), edited by Cynthia J. Davis and Kathryn West, is an invaluable resource for literary and cultural study. The book proceeds year by year, beginning in 1492 and ending in 1994. For each year, the left side of the page lists texts (plays, novels, songs, cookbooks, etc.), while the right side lists contexts (historical and cultural events). A reader who turns to the entry for 1898, then, would discover not only that this year saw the publication of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's Silence and Other Stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics, Ellen Glasgow's Phases of an Inferior Planet, and Kate Drumgoold's A Slave Girl's Story, Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold, but also that in this year Utah women became the first in the country to qualify for jury service, that in Wilmington, North Carolina, white mobs murdered twenty to one hundred blacks and terrorized the community, and that the Michigan Board of Health estimated that one-third of all in-state pregnancies were artificially terminated. This volume also contains an index that allows the reader to look up individual authors. The book is useful to both students and...