Katherine Joslin – författare

Jane Addams, a Writer's Life is an expansive, revealing, and refreshing reexamination of the renowned reformer as an imaginative writer. Jane Addams is best known for her groundbreaking social work at Hull-House, the force of her efforts toward Progressive political and social reform, and the bravery of her commitment to pacifism, for which she received the Nobel Peace Prize. Katherine Joslin moves beyond this history to present Addams as a literary figure, one whose writing employed a synthesis of fictional and analytical prose that appealed to a wide audience.Joslin traces Addams's style from her early works, Philanthropy and Social Progress and her contributions to Hull House Maps and Papers, influenced by Florence Kelley, to her modernist and experimental last books, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House and My Friend, Julia Lathrop, placing Addams in the context of other Chicago writers including Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Harriet Monroe, Frank Norris and James T. Farrell. Joslin's close readings showcase Addams's distinguishing literary devices, such as using stories about people rather than sociological argument to make moral points. As Joslin pursues the argument that Addams's power as a public figure stemmed from the success of her books and essays, Addams herself emerges as a literary woman.

19th century American writers often differ by gender in the stories they tell about the American experience. The male quest most often depicts the hero's journey away from the domestic world of women; the female quest situates the heroine within the domestic world of marriage and motherhood. This study considers Edith Wharton's fiction in opposition to both the male pastoral romance and the female domestic novel. Like other American women writers, Wharton places her protagonists within the social, domestic world. Unlike male romancers who celebrate escape from society, she depicts the inevitable bond or covenant between the individual and the group. Wharton differs, however, from the female novelists who celebrate domesticity by emphasizing the bonds or restrictions the group imposes on the individual.

This anthology publishes key documents in the history of American feminism that are currently only available in extract form or in archives.This set spans from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women's suffrage in 1920, and includes works of well-known women's campaigners such as: Angelina and Sarah M. Grimke, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Victoria Woodhull, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Addams, Matilda Gage and others.The collection also contains anti-feminist writings, by both men and women, including socio-medical writings and examples from health manuals.