Female Minds, Feminine Experience: The Emerging Definition of Female Intellect in American History

Abstract

Margaret Vanderhaar Allen, The Achievement of Margaret Fuller. University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979.212 pp. Jan Cohn. Improbable Fiction: The Life of Mary Roberts Rinehart. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. 293 pp. Mary A, Hill. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-18%. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. 362 pp. Una Mainiero, ed. American Women Writers, From Colonial Times to the Present. A Critical Reference Guide, 2 vols. New York : Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1979-80.1., 601 pp., II.; 575 pp. Joan Shelley Rubin. Constance Rourke and American Culture. Chapel Hill": The University of North Carolina Press, 1980.244 pp. Marie Mitchell Oleson Urbanski. Margaret Fuller's "Woman in the Nineteenth Century ": A Literary Study of Form and Content, of Sources and Influence. Westport, Conn, and London : Greenwood Press, 1980. 189 pp. Women's Studies and American Studies developed as collective efforts by critics of traditional disciplines to transform fundamentally the public record of America's past. These revisionist scholars of history, literature and culture challenged long-accepted methodologies and subject matter. Narrow textual criticism, political history and exclusively male subjects, together with approaches which ignored the essential operational context—whether the home and the workplace or the United States itself—were challenged as failing to present an accurate portrait of human experience. First American Studies, and then Women's Studies, aroused widespread consciousness that there were substantial gaps in the accepted account.