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WOMEN IN THE TREES
'Susan Koppelman brings together many of America's most serious writers to address one of America's most serious problems: domestic violence. This anthology may save your life or the life of someone you love, '--Cathy N. Davidson, coeditor of The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
301 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 17, 2014
In the hour or so it will take me to write this review, 300 American women will sustain black eyes, broken ribs, concussions, lost teeth, organ and brain damage, miscarriages and a mind-boggling panoply of psychological abuse, all at the hands of men. Of those 300, at least one will die of her injuries today as will others over time. These data are nothing new; this has been going on for centuries; it’s an ugly, puzzling and seemingly intractable dimension of reality. And like other ugly, puzzling and intractable social ills, women have been writing stories about it. For a long time.
Women In The Trees, an anthology of these stories written from 1839 to 2000, may not seem a fun read, but curiously, it is. Editor Susan Koppelman’s voice in a long introduction is savvy and compelling yet conversational, like that college English professor whose classes were nearly impossible to get into because the wait list was always a hundred names long. She doesn’t hesitate to ask the difficult questions or to admit that there are no answers, and focuses instead on the resurrection of voices silenced by the assumptions of male intellectual hegemony. Assumptions like, “The concerns of women, and therefore of women writers, are frivolous, transitory and unworthy of serious attention.” Koppelman’s life work is an insistence that the voices of women writers matter.
And so in Women In the Trees she creates a literary tour in which readers meet and engage with female minds that speak from disparate times, geographical locations and cultural biases. All address the issue of abuse of women by men, but from wildly different perspectives that, in a sequential read of several stories, sometimes obscure the theme of abuse in a larger delight at being invited into heretofore unknown worlds. Worlds of Cajun women in Louisiana, and Midwestern farm women. African American and Hispanic women, law-abiding, churchly women and women of more colorful mythologies. Some of the writers, like Zora Neal Hurston, are well-known, but most are the long-forgotten authors of women’s periodical fiction whose voices instructed and entertained our grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
They wrote of sexual enslavement and the effects of alcohol and drug abuse long before there would be organizations and social agencies devoted to those issues. They wrote of crushing cultural notions of “proper” roles for women that then and now allow some women no imaginable avenue of escape from toxic bondage to abusive men. But these writers also laid the (safely fictional) blueprint in which some could begin to imagine a way out. A rattlesnake with which her husband frightens her frees one beaten wife. Two neighbors who see the meaning in a strangled pet canary chatter inanely about pots and pans while police wonder who strangled a man lying in bed beside his meek little wife. A kind stranger rescues a trapped woman with the gift of his horse, and in a story written at the height of interest in Freud and psychoanalytic theory, a woman who has defied convention by leaving an abusive husband goes back to him when she realizes that he’s mentally ill.
Of course these stories have not brought an end to the abuse of women by men. Nothing short of a long-term system of selective breeding like the one suggested in Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country is likely to make a dent in the problem, and that’s not going to happen. The best that can be hoped is that like the writers in this anthology. women keep imagining stories that allow other women to imagine a way out.
Women In The Trees, an anthology of these stories written from 1839 to 2000, may not seem a fun read, but curiously, it is. Editor Susan Koppelman’s voice in a long introduction is savvy and compelling yet conversational, like that college English professor whose classes were nearly impossible to get into because the wait list was always a hundred names long. She doesn’t hesitate to ask the difficult questions or to admit that there are no answers, and focuses instead on the resurrection of voices silenced by the assumptions of male intellectual hegemony. Assumptions like, “The concerns of women, and therefore of women writers, are frivolous, transitory and unworthy of serious attention.” Koppelman’s life work is an insistence that the voices of women writers matter.
And so in Women In the Trees she creates a literary tour in which readers meet and engage with female minds that speak from disparate times, geographical locations and cultural biases. All address the issue of abuse of women by men, but from wildly different perspectives that, in a sequential read of several stories, sometimes obscure the theme of abuse in a larger delight at being invited into heretofore unknown worlds. Worlds of Cajun women in Louisiana, and Midwestern farm women. African American and Hispanic women, law-abiding, churchly women and women of more colorful mythologies. Some of the writers, like Zora Neal Hurston, are well-known, but most are the long-forgotten authors of women’s periodical fiction whose voices instructed and entertained our grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
They wrote of sexual enslavement and the effects of alcohol and drug abuse long before there would be organizations and social agencies devoted to those issues. They wrote of crushing cultural notions of “proper” roles for women that then and now allow some women no imaginable avenue of escape from toxic bondage to abusive men. But these writers also laid the (safely fictional) blueprint in which some could begin to imagine a way out. A rattlesnake with which her husband frightens her frees one beaten wife. Two neighbors who see the meaning in a strangled pet canary chatter inanely about pots and pans while police wonder who strangled a man lying in bed beside his meek little wife. A kind stranger rescues a trapped woman with the gift of his horse, and in a story written at the height of interest in Freud and psychoanalytic theory, a woman who has defied convention by leaving an abusive husband goes back to him when she realizes that he’s mentally ill.
Of course these stories have not brought an end to the abuse of women by men. Nothing short of a long-term system of selective breeding like the one suggested in Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country is likely to make a dent in the problem, and that’s not going to happen. The best that can be hoped is that like the writers in this anthology. women keep imagining stories that allow other women to imagine a way out.
October 30, 2025
Women in the Trees: U.S. Women's Short Stories About Battering and Resistance, 1839-2000, is a remarkable collection.
I first read Susan Glaspell's short story, "A Jury of Her Peers," a long time ago. I think I must also have seen a film version of Glaspell's play, titled "Trifles," which she had adapted to create her short story. There are several versions of "Trifles" to be found on YouTube, including an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
I remembered my visceral reaction to the pathos and tragedy of "A Jury of Her Peers" long after I had forgotten both title and author. When I encountered the short story again in a Flame Tree Publishing collection of gothic detective mysteries, I recognized it and was shocked anew by its perfection.
I've got Google now, which I didn't have all those decades ago when I first discovered "A Jury of Her Peers," so I did a little digging into Susan Glaspell, journalist, novelist, playwright and actor, and Margaret Hossack, 19th century Iowa farmwife, convicted in 1901 of axing to death her husband, John, as he lay asleep in the bed they shared.
A very young Susan Glaspell was still in the journalist phase of what became a lifelong writing career when she covered the trial of Margaret Hossack for the Des Moines Daily News. Drawing from the experience, fifteen years later she penned her play, "Trifles." That was the year 1916, and in 1917 she adapted the play to become her short story, "A Jury of Her Peers."
Google provided me with a list of anthologies in which "A Jury of Her Peers" has since been collected, including Women in the Trees: U.S. Women's Short Stories About Battering & Resistance, 1839-1994.
Having now finished reading this book, I would have to say that of all the many fine and heartbreaking short stories that it contains, those that will continue to stay with me, besides "A Jury of Her Peers," will be "Hattie Turner Versus Hattie Turner," "The Day My Father Tried to Kill Us," and, last but not least, "Women in the Trees" itself.
https://www.midnightassassin.com/stan...
I first read Susan Glaspell's short story, "A Jury of Her Peers," a long time ago. I think I must also have seen a film version of Glaspell's play, titled "Trifles," which she had adapted to create her short story. There are several versions of "Trifles" to be found on YouTube, including an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
I remembered my visceral reaction to the pathos and tragedy of "A Jury of Her Peers" long after I had forgotten both title and author. When I encountered the short story again in a Flame Tree Publishing collection of gothic detective mysteries, I recognized it and was shocked anew by its perfection.
I've got Google now, which I didn't have all those decades ago when I first discovered "A Jury of Her Peers," so I did a little digging into Susan Glaspell, journalist, novelist, playwright and actor, and Margaret Hossack, 19th century Iowa farmwife, convicted in 1901 of axing to death her husband, John, as he lay asleep in the bed they shared.
A very young Susan Glaspell was still in the journalist phase of what became a lifelong writing career when she covered the trial of Margaret Hossack for the Des Moines Daily News. Drawing from the experience, fifteen years later she penned her play, "Trifles." That was the year 1916, and in 1917 she adapted the play to become her short story, "A Jury of Her Peers."
Google provided me with a list of anthologies in which "A Jury of Her Peers" has since been collected, including Women in the Trees: U.S. Women's Short Stories About Battering & Resistance, 1839-1994.
Having now finished reading this book, I would have to say that of all the many fine and heartbreaking short stories that it contains, those that will continue to stay with me, besides "A Jury of Her Peers," will be "Hattie Turner Versus Hattie Turner," "The Day My Father Tried to Kill Us," and, last but not least, "Women in the Trees" itself.
https://www.midnightassassin.com/stan...
April 9, 2010
B- Short stories about women who are victims of domestic violence; not all of the writing is that good; some upsetting stuff, but interesting and important for it to be told.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews