Publisher's Synopsis
From Harriet Jacobs and Jane Addams to Gloria Steinem and Maxine Hong Kingston, 25 American women tell the stories of their lives. Jill Ker Conway, author of "The Road from Coorain", presents these autobiographical writings by her literary predecessors and contemporaries in a volume that reflects the range of American women's experiences in the last 150 years. Whether the narrator is the fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs or the Southern novelist Ellen Glasgow, the anthropologist Margaret Mead or the feminist reformer Margaret Sanger, the voices are resonant in their passion and unflinching in their quest for self-awareness.;Also included are pieces by Anna Howard Shaw, Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin, Margaret Floy Washburn, Anne Walter Fearn, Anna Louise Strong, Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, Maya Angelou, S.Josephine Baker, Margaret Morse Nice, Lucy Larcom, Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, Zora Neal Hurston, Hortense Powdermaker, Janet Scudder, Margaret Bourke-White, Marian Anderson, Vida Dutton Scudder and Louise Bogan.
