Scare Tactics

Between the end of the Civil War and roughly 1930, hundreds of uncanny tales were published by women. These include stories by familiar figures such as Edith Wharton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte PerkinsGilman, as well as by authors almost wholly unknown to twenty-firstcentury readers, such as Josephine Dodge Bacon, Alice Brown, Emma Frances Dawson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Scare Tactics analyzes this overlooked tradition of supernatural writing by American women as an essentially feminist enterprise. These authors repeatedly used Gothic conventions to express discontentment with circumscribed roles for women and to imagine alternative possibilities. Therefore, this body of literature proves to be a type of political intervention connected to the broader sphere of women's rights activism.