Are American women writers from different eras and different backgrounds connected by common threads in a coherent tradition? How have the relationships between women's rights, women's rites, and women's writing figured in the history of literature by women in the United States?

Drawing on a wide range of writers from Margaret Fuller to Alice Walker, Elaine Showalter argues that post-colonial as well as feminist literary theory can help us understand the hybrid, intertextual, and changing forms of American women's writing, and the way that `women's culture' intersects with other cultural forms. Showalter looks closely at three American classics - Little Women, The Awakening, and The House of Mirth - and traces the transformations in such major themes, images, and genres of American women's writing as the American Miranda, the Female Gothic, and the patchwork quilt. Ending with a moving description of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, she shows how the women's tradition is a literary quilt that offers a new map of a changing America.