SOURCE: “Wrestling Your Ally: Stein, Racism, and Feminist Critical Practice,” in Women's Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, The University of North Carolina Press, 1989, pp. 181–98.

In the following essay, Saldivar-Hull examines critical commentary on Three Lives and deems the text groundbreaking in its treatment of race, class, and gender.

And this movement that began with a moving evocation of truth, begins to appear fraudulent from the outside, begins to mirror all that it says it opposed, for now it, too, is an oppressor of certain truths, and speakers, and begins, like the old oppressors, to hide from itself.

—Susan Griffin, “The Way of All Ideology”

It is crucial that women participate in the open questioning of the exclusionary project of canonization, in literary theory as well as in literature. Through the pioneering efforts of such feminist scholars as Cherríe Moraga and Gloria...