Legacy

Legacy 19.1 (2002) ix-xiii

Presidential Address

Sharon M. Harris
Texas Christian University

In the early 1990s, the American Literature Association sponsored a "Symposium on American Women Writers" here in San Antonio. It was a marvelous experience to come together with a group of people interested in U.S. women's writings—we didn't have to explain who an author was or give plot summaries of her work. Our audience was knowledgeable in the field—indeed, many participants had been integral to shaping that very field—and audience members and presenters alike challenged each other to think in new and diverse ways about the field of American women writers. In 1996, a group of distinguished feminist scholars put down their own pens long enough to organize a conference that focused on nineteenth-century American women writers and to challenge us to think about how we would address this field in the twenty-first century. Three hundred of us gathered in Hartford and for days focused on this growing field of study.

At the last session of the Hartford conference, when everyone came together for a final plenary session and discussion, comments turned to the challenges that lay before us if we were to insure that the field of American women writers did not once again slip into obscurity. After

all, recovery is a wonderful part of scholarly explorations into the field, but not if it is merely reinventing the wheel. It reminds me of when I first read Judith Sargent Murray's "Observations on Female Abilities," in which she recounts her recovery of women's contributions to world history from the thirteenth century until her own era of the late eighteenth century. When I first came across this four-part essay, I had a moment of feeling connected to Murray—I had spent much of my career recovering and reassessing women's writings. But the sense of euphoric connection lasted only for a moment. After all, the women whom Murray was recovering would be lost to U.S. cultural knowledge within a very short period of time, only to be recovered again in the nineteenth century, lost again, and recovered once more in the twentieth century. It is becoming a very old wheel, indeed. After that final session at the Hartford conference, I felt a need to do something to insure that we not stop with the wheel, but that we find some mechanism to sustain the work that has been done and to build on that work, rather than see it slipping away once again.

Each of these earlier conferences, and others like them, were one-time events. What could be done to perpetuate these early efforts? It was an idea that gnawed at me for the next three years. I thought about it when I saw graduate students' frustration at the lack of access to works [End Page ix] by women writers. I thought about it whenever a new edition of a woman's book was published, and even moreso when I was told that a woman writer's text that I wanted to read and teach was no longer in print. Then in the winter of 1998-99, I began to have conversations with my Legacy co-editor, Karen Dandurand, about changes for the journal. In conjunction with that discussion, we began to formulate the possibility of establishing a society that would bring together under one umbrella anyone interested in U.S. women writers, their texts, and the contexts in which they produced their work. I will long remember the excitement growing as we moved from the fantasy of such an organization to seeing the very real possibilities of bringing it to fruition. It was from those initial hopes that we developed the Society for the Study of American Women Writers and brought the well-established journal Legacy to the Society as its official journal.

As the idea bloomed, we had to ask ourselves: how could we be sure that this endeavor would have a lasting impact, that it would serve what we believed was its primary purpose: to create a "place" where...