A collection of twenty-six of the finest stories by the finest women writers to come out of the U.S. and Canada in the past fifty years. Organized by publication date, authors include Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Beattie, Margaret Atwood, Anne Tyler, Tama Janowitz, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Gordon, and Alice Walker. A collection of 26 of the finest stories by the finest women writers tocome out of the U.S. and Canada in the past 50 years. Authors include Ann Beattie, Ann Tyler, Tama Janowitz and Alice Walker. A collection of 26 of the finest stories by the finest women writers tocome out of the U.S. and Canada in the past 50 years. Authors include Ann Beattie, Ann Tyler, Tama Janowitz and Alice Walker. WENDY MARTIN  is chair of the Department of English at Claremont Graduate University. She is also the editor of More Stories We Tell  (available from Pantheon). Martin founded and has continued to edit  Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and is Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Claremont Graduate University. She lives in Berkeley, California. Introduction   From its earliest beginnings, North American culture has been multi-ethnic and multi-racial, but only recently has there been a concerted effort to acknowledge this fact. Our official literary traditions, like our official cultures histories, have for the most part emphasized our European antecedents. Nevertheless, historians and scholars are remapping the literary territory to include a much broader range of materials, from Native American chants to the journals of early explorers, from Afro-American folktales to poems by early Chinese immigrants. In the past, the literary canon has been not only white but also largely masculine. Now, works by previously ignored women writers like the eighteenth-century Jane Turell, Milcah Martha Moore, Martha Brewster, and Ann Eliza Bleecker are becoming part of that canon, alongside works by such contemporaneous black authors as Jupiter Hammon, Prince Hall, and Gustavus Vassa.   The stories in this volume are important strands in the variegated fabric of fiction from Canada and the United States, written by women of African, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and Jewish antecedents, as well as by women of other European ancestry. Articulating female experience in all its complexity, they give voice to what has been silenced, repressed, and excluded in women’s lives. Insisting on the importance of remembering our personal and collective pasts, these narratives draw on memories, folk stories, legends, and dreams. At the same time, many suggest emancipatory strategies, opening up new lives and new worlds. They explore the diverse terrain of women’s experience as it is and as it could be, often depicting struggle and risk-taking as being among the essential features of that landscape.   This collection is possible because of the radical shift in our views of issues of race, class, and gender that has taken place in the past several decades. These changing social values have had a dramatic impact on our expectations about who writes and what kind of literature is published. In the past, writing women were anomalous creatures, in the New World as well as in the Old. Very few women entered what was essentially a male literary preserve. Anne Bradstreet, a Puritan poet whose family emigrated to Massachusetts, makes it abundantly clear in the preface to her volume of poems The Tenth Muse Lately Spring Up in America (1650) that women writers were not welcome:   I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits. A Poets pen all scorn I should thus wrong, For such despite they cast on female wits: If what I do prove well, it won’t advance, They’l say it’s stoln, or else it was by chance.   Most writing by American women from the time of the European settlement to the end of the Revolution took private forms—spiritual meditations, diaries, letters; increasingly, this work is being included in anthologies and literary histories. In general, it was not included in anthologies and literary histories. In general, it was not acceptable for women to express themselves publicly, in literature or otherwise; the example of Anne Hutchinson, a seventeenth-century midwife who was branded a heretic and exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for holding meetings to read and discuss the Bible, make that abundantly clear. In the late eighteenth century, women writers of fiction wrote under double jeopardy. Not only did they have to contend with gender bias, they also had to answer their many critics who thought fiction encouraged female license (and apparently licentiousness). Puritans denounced fiction as “Satan’s breeding ground,” and women who wrote in this genre were accused of corrupting the community.   In spite of this hostile climate, eighteenth-century novelists like Susanna Haswell Rowson, who wrote the best-selling Char