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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
In these words, Tillie Olsen dedicated her book, Silences, to the women whose lives for centuries were constricted by sexual role and social custom, yet who struggled nevertheless to express themselves (pp. 42–43). She further urged women who write and women who teach to give voice to these silent women by moving beyond the novel and the published poem to the journals, letters, memoirs, and other personal utterances that “add to the authentic story of human life, human experience” (pp. 45n).
1. Olsen, Tillie, Silences (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), p. ixGoogle Scholar. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text.
2. Matthews, Jean V., “‘Woman's Place’ and the Search for Identity in Ante-Bellum America,” Canadian Review of American Studies 10, no. 3 (1979): 289–304, here p. 294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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