3 Review(s)

Emily Dickinson on sex, desire, and 'the chapter . . . in the night.' Emma Goldman against the tyranny of marriage. Ida B. Wells against lynching. Anna Julia Cooper on Black American womanhood. Frances Willard on riding a bicycle. 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 2: Memoir, Essays, and Oratory, selections span from early works like Sarah Mapps Douglass's anti-slavery appeal 'A Mother's Love' (1832) and Maria W. Stewart's 'Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall' (1833), to Zitkala-Sa's memories in 'The Land of Red Apples' (1921) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's moving final essay 'The Right to Die' (1935). In between, readers will discover a whole host of 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.'