http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/bo..._r=1&ref=books --- A JURY OF HER PEERS
American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
By Elaine Showalter
586 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30 --- ---'It’s worth noting that many of the most talented writers she discusses —
Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion — objected to being categorized as women
writers and preferred to think of themselves simply as writers. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, “art is art and to
separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc. into two sexes is to emphasize values that are not art.”
Showalter handles these rebels by corralling them into special subchapters with titles like “Dissenters.” One of the
dissenters, Cynthia Ozick, argued against expecting “artists who are women . . . to deliver ‘women’s art,’ as if
10,000 other possibilities, preoccupations, obsessions, were inauthentic, for women, or invalid, or worse yet,
lyingly evasive.”' {excerpt from the review By KATIE ROIPHE, published: March 5, 2009}