Getting into the game: American women writers and the radical tradition

This essay outlines the contours of a socialist feminist tradition in women's fiction in the United States. From Elizabeth Stewart Phelp's The Silent Partner (1971) to contemporary works by writers like Marge Piercy, Alice Walker, and Mary Lee Settle, this literature often embodies a common central drama: the growth of social consciousness as an essential dimension of the quest for individual identity. Phelp's The Silent Partner and Settle's Killing Ground, published 110 years apart, exemplify this thematic continuity, though Settle places her protagonist's quest in a modernist frame of reference. Obviously, the works of different historical eras differ from one another in the institutions they question and the forms of activism they advocate. They may differ most from one another, though, in their construction of aspects of the ‘private’ sphere—sexuality, reproduction, motherhood. Left feminist writers today resist a severance of public and private and insist on the necessity of transforming all our social relations.