SOURCE: "Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the Task of Discovering a Usable Past," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXX, No. 4, Winter, 1989, pp. 629-44.

In the following essay, Wolff compares feminist ideas in writings by Dickinson and Stanton.

It would be mistaken to suppose that the principal "subject" of Emily Dickinson's poetry was the campaign for woman's suffrage that was conducted throughout New England during all of her creative years. With few exceptions, Dickinson did not choose to focus her work on contemporary issues. Instead, she addressed the existential terror of unavoidable mortality and the tragedy of a world whose fertile beauty is everywhere compromised by an unalterable force of destruction. Nonetheless, at some less-than-primary level, Dickinson's verse not only acknowledges the importance of the very issues that fellow women were fighting for, but often does so in language that is unmistakably suffragist in its tonality. Although she...