Beginning in the 1980s, a number of popular and influential anthologies organized around themes of shared identityNice Jewish Girls, This Bridge Called My Back, Home Girls, and othershave brought together womens fiction and poetry with journal entries, personal narratives, and transcribed conversations. These groundbreaking multi-genre anthologies, Cynthia G. Franklin demonstrates, have played a crucial role in shaping current literary studies, in defining cultural and political movements, and in building connections between academic and other communities. Exploring intersections and alliances across the often competing categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality, Writing Womens Communities contributes to current public debates about multiculturalism, feminism, identity politics, the academy as a site of political activism, and the relationship between literature and politics.
