SOURCE: Woolley, Lisa. “‘The Best Conversation the World Has to Offer’: Chicago’s Women Poets and Editors.” In American Voices of the Chicago Renaissance, pp. 91-119. Dekalb.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Woolley surveys the work of such women poets as Eunice Tietjens, Alice Corbin, Mary Aldis, and Marjorie Allen Seiffert in the context of the Chicago Renaissance, noting that these writers challenged and confirmed various stereotypes regarding women's language and writing choices.

If anyone has a delicate and quick way of living it is always not so important to people as if he had a strong and heavy way of saying.

—Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years' War, 250-51

Women poets in Chicago, like their novelist counterparts, faced a specific set of challenges due to the self-conscious development of a midwestern literature dependent on vernacular language. As female voices were being devalued in the region's...