Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America (review)

As Angela Vietto's slim yet thorough study of women writers of the American revolutionary period demonstrates, women historically have not enjoyed the same relationship to writing, print manuscript cultures, and traditions of authorship as men. Vietto's book marks a necessary intervention into present-day academic conversations about women and textual production, which too often dismiss authorship, feminism, and the gendered dimensions of women's material lives. As Vietto shows, feminist scholars still have quite a bit of work to do. To paraphrase Nancy K. Miller, despite Roland Barthes's 1968 essay proclaiming the death of the author, women have not had enough of authorship to be declared deceased.

Positioning her work in traditions of feminist literary history, Vietto seeks to challenge the processes through which feminists write histories: "[W]e discover the past to be exactly what we suspected it was all along: the necessary precursor of the present" (1). As a result, her study aims to broaden our ideas about women's authorship and to correct assumptions about an imaginary past evolving toward contemporary feminist consciousness. Vietto reminds us that American women authored texts other than the novel, that "[c]ivic, social, and commercial motivations for writing or publishing frequently commingled," and that women sometimes were welcomed into the world of letters (2). Because past studies of women's authorship have privileged the novel, this book takes a multigenre approach, considering histories, essays, speeches, poetry, plays, and various modes of production, including manuscripts and periodical literature. The result is a carefully researched descriptive assessment of women's texts and models of authorship in this era.

Vietto defines women's authorship as performative, a term she draws from Judith Butler, to indicate that the "identity" of the author "is constructed and reconstructed in each performance" (5). These performances, according to Vietto, drew on circulating concepts of womanhood—such as the republican mother and woman warrior—and were dynamic as part of the larger, fluid process of textual production. Women implemented various models of authorship strategically—according to venue, purpose, and numerous other factors—in order to legitimize their own works, the works of their women peers and predecessors, and those constructions of gender they wished to advance.

Vietto incorporates women's works from the revolutionary period and the new Republic that concern the subject of gender. These wide-ranging selections include discussions and images of the "maternal author" (8), of women who trespassed gender norms by going to battle, of masculinity, of gendered definitions of virtue, and of the importance of women's political and civic agency. She frames these discussions with an introductory chapter on literary sorority and a final chapter on Judith Sargent Murray, Mercy Otis Warren, and Sarah Wentworth Morton. These three figures, Vietto demonstrates, adopted various models of authorship throughout their lives and careers.

Women and Authorship offers instructors and students a rich resource and includes notes and suggestions on selected primary texts, many of which are now accessible in digitized form. In addition to providing excellent analyses of a variety of early American women's texts in one volume, Vietto includes astute discussions of Republican models of masculinity and femininity in an American context that recognizes the influence of British publishing at the time, the history of the public/private debate in feminist and American studies, and particular generic conventions and rhetorical strategies. In keeping with her interest in sisterly networks, Vietto suggests areas rich for future study, and her bibliography directs readers to texts that might be useful to have in modern editions.

As Vietto herself notes, hers is by no means a complete study of women's authorship of the period, as she works almost exclusively with the productions of privileged white women in well-populated regions. However, she conscientiously points readers to studies that undertake what her argument omits. Her analyses tend to culminate in discussions of the degree to which texts transgress or disrupt gender norms, a bifurcated end that many feminist scholars resist. Were readers at...