This panel explores writings by George Eliot, Harriet Tubman, and Lee Maracle to show how these authors engage in literary practices informed by race, class, and historical positioning in order to propose narrative strategies that remedy the erasure of women’s voices from the public sphere. Using a comparative lens that aligns the reading of literary texts with the social/legal landscape represented by each author’s respective work, panelists examine the heightened attention to race and class disparities that inform each author’s gendered literary activism while concurrently exploring how their writing participates in staging the social and legal battles that contribute to codified forms of race and gender dispossession.

Thais Rutledge’s presentation, “Class Consciousness and Social History in George Eliot’s Middlemarch,” opens a new line of inquiry into George Eliot’s magnum opus Middlemarch (1871-1872), and offers a fresh perspective on how Eliot’s narrative engages with English social class through multiple allusions to the fraught social/legal battles around the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 (henceforth MWPA) and related social (and legal) scripts about property rights, social status, divorce and control of assets. By examining how Eliot’s narrative engages with the extended political debates about the MWPA, Rutledge clarifies how Eliot’s novel addresses not just her own politics, but how law impacts class-bound and personal decision-making across the social spectrum. Rutledge argues that Mary Ann Evans’ political views were reshaped into the pseudonym “George Eliot’s” more coded and broadly molded narratives supporting these initiatives about inheritance and property ownership status. Her paper contends that the two volumes of the novel differ from each other in how they portray characters’ responses to situations reflecting these evolving political debates, underscoring how alternate legal solutions correlate with different life paths and personal choices.

Eve Dunbar, in “The Children’s Hero: Harriet Tubman in Black Women’s Radical Literary Tradition,” examines Harriet Tubman’s iconic status in the long history of Black liberation and a favorite figure among Black writers and authors seeking to capture the imaginations of Black children. From W. E. B. Du Bois’s Brownies’ Book to the first issue of Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper, Tubman’s heroism was detailed on the page for young readers. Ann Petry’s 1955 biography of Tubman places her in league with the progressive (leftist) agenda of remedying the historical erasure of Black resistance to enslavement within the American educational system. Thus, this paper explores the young adult works of Ann Petry, Margert Walker, and Alice Childress as each woman attempts to make radical liberation accessible to children during the mid-20th century. Dunbar’s aim is to think about the relationship among children, Black women’s writing, Black history, radical politics, education, and literary production.

Cheryl Suzack uses a law and humanities lens to show how Indigenous women’s writing explores the intersections between violence against Indigenous women and their portrayal as powerless victims by the nation-state. In “‘Suffering under Village Law:’ Lee Maracle's Legal and Literary Poetics in Ravensong,” Suzack analyzes Maracle’s classic coming-of-age novel, Ravensong, to show how the novel breaks the silence surrounding domestic violence by demystifying the state’s depiction of Indigenous women as victims of poor life choices and by portraying the cultural, spiritual, and political dispossession that women are subject to under the imposition of colonial law. Set against the backdrop of a state-of-emergency caused by a flu pandemic, Suzack argues that the novel shifts attention from the state’s portrayal of Indigenous women as helpless victims to aspects of Indigenous law and Stolo village life that dispossess Indigenous women of their political power and matriarchal agency. Showing how the village women band together to form a community of shared Indigenous-feminist cultural practice that overcomes the radical isolation through which domestic violence ensues, Maracle’s novel interrupts the state’s program of “performative caring” that legal scholar Kim Staton observes is representative of its capacity to “hold inquests” while “deny the humanity of Indigenous lives.”

Each panelist will speak for 18 minutes, allowing substantial time for an unstructured question and answer period, and for the diversity of voices and literary frameworks represented by their presentations to prompt debate about how women’s writing interrogates silencing, visibility, and institutionalized practices of erasure.