Feminine Shorts: Stories Reflecting the Challenges of Being Female at the Turn of the 20th Century

Summary

From the National Women’s History Alliance, by Bonnie Eisenberg and Mary Ruthsdotter, 1998:

“1998 marked the 150th Anniversary of a movement by women to achieve full civil rights in this country. Over the past seven generations, dramatic social and legal changes have been accomplished that are now so accepted that they go unnoticed by people whose lives they have utterly changed. Many people who have lived through the recent decades of this process have come to accept blithely what has transpired. And younger people, for the most part, can hardly believe life was ever otherwise. They take the changes completely in stride, as how life has always been.”

These stories were carefully chosen to reflect what life was once like for women—before the fight for rights was won. Let these stories reveal to this new generation, how it felt to live with oppression and fear, with no hope of real freedom. Take a journey from 1892 to 1921 through fictional stories, to understand the need for constant vigilance in striving for equal rights for all.

Through the voices of these feminist authors, let us never forget from whence we came:

“The Mark on the Wall” by Virginia Woolf
“Tommy, the Sentimental” by Willa Cather
“Daughters of the Late Colonel” by Katherine Mansfield
“A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte P. Gilman
“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin