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."
