Scare tactics

About this book

"Between the end of the Civil War and roughly 1930, hundreds of uncanny tales were published by women in the periodical press and in books. These include stories by familiar figures such as Edith Wharton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as by authors almost wholly unknown to twenty-first century readers. In Scare Tactics, Jeffrey Weinstock identifies an important but overlooked tradition of supernatural writing by American women, making a strong case that this body of literature should be read as a specifically feminist literary tradition. Especially intriguing, Weinstock demonstrates, is that women authors repeatedly used Gothic conventions to express discontentment with circumscribed roles for women, creating types of political intervention connected to the broader sphere of women's rights activism"--Back cover.