SOURCE: Winston, Elizabeth. “Making History in The Mother of Us All.” Mosaic 20, no. 4 (fall 1987): 117-29.

In the following essay, Winston explains the metaphorical implications of the proper names, literary allusions, and historical quotations that Stein used in The Mother of Us All to reflect her development as a literary woman.

Gertrude Stein's last major work, The Mother of Us All (1946), is an opera about Susan B. Anthony, the champion of woman suffrage.¹ Yet like other writing by Stein, it is also “disguised autobiography.”² In dramatizing Anthony's campaign to win the vote for women, Stein relives her own struggle to make a name for herself as a writer and contemplates her growth from literary novice to experienced artist and mentor. According to Elizabeth Fifer, Stein in her early erotic poetry devised “a witty code” of metaphors drawn from domestic life, nature, religion and sports to describe her relationship with...