New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1969, Saint-Watching.

“History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art, as the Greeks knew; so that when they were parceling out the deities, they gave history a Muse of her own just as they assigned one each to poetry and playwriting and music and other explosions of the imagination. I was reminded of this truth only yesterday morning. I had picked up for an hour’s refreshment that exquisite but perverse essay of Virginia Woolf’s, ‘A Room of One’s Own.’ One bleak sentence caught my skeptical eye. ‘Nothing,’ it said flatly, ‘is known about women before the eighteenth century.’ Now Mrs. Woolf the novelist is a delight. Mrs. Woolf the historian is something else again. If I put my trust in her I must believe that until recently women had been a voiceless, hopeless multitude, without power or influence in the world. I must take for granted the odd idea that we moderns who write and paint and manage corporations and elect Presidents sprang full-panoplied from the forehead of the Nineteenth Amendment. I am perfectly willing to grant my sex an astonishing adaptability, but I cannot give such a theory as Mrs. Woolf’s a full assent. Naturally I’m grateful for the ballot and my Rights just as I’m grateful for automatic dish-washers, air-conditioning, penicillin, and other latter-day luxuries. But I doubt that, even unenfranchised, our ancestresses were so underprivileged a group as feminist history makes them out. They did not lash themselves to railings in their drive toward equality with men, or go on hunger strikes. But in that they admitted no impediment to their abilities, they were, in a way, the first feminists. And anyone who contends that there were no great women before the eighteenth century has not read history with any care.”