SOURCE: Hedges, Elaine. Review of Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing, by Elaine Showalter. Signs 19, no. 2 (winter 1994): 507-11.

In the following excerpt, Hedges criticizes Sister's Choice, drawing attention to Showalter's historically inaccurate understanding of quiltmaking.

Of the three authors whose books are reviewed here, Cheryl Walker and Elaine Showalter bring to their material familiar feminist critical approaches. Lev Raphael, in contrast, offers a new critical methodology—one, he argues, that will provide “revolutionary insights into human motivation” (322), but that feminists concerned with issues of gender may find questionable. Although Showalter's book also raises serious questions—of fact and historical accuracy—the problems with Raphael's are more apparent. …

In Sister's Choice, Showalter also sees Walker's poets as “casualties” of their time (108). The tenor of her book, however, is better represented by her interpretation of Wharton, whom she views, unlike Raphael, as overcoming her emotional conflicts to...