The Right to Write

The Right to Write examines how the early American poets Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley gained agency within a traditionally patriarchal field of literary production. Tracing the careers of Bradstreet and Wheatley through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Engberg shows that these women used their positions within society to network themselves into publication. Each woman represents a unique way in which a majority of early American women negotiated their roles as both women and wri