Thirteen original essays on Gertrude Stein, H. D., Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gwendolyn Brooks demonstrate how these women expand the social, textual, and political boundaries of modernism. The collection places these poets in the context of their times, examining the conditions that helped shape their vivid and diverse poetic careers and reconsidering some of the assumptions that have led to their exclusion from the main narratives of modernist poetry.

Ultimately, the aim is to enlarge the literary history of the movement—for gendered, modernism extends backward to the first years of the century, and forward to the beginnings of postmodernism in the 1960s.