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express themselves and function.” See page 293 in this volume.
    9 . Silences helped prompt Paul Lauter to organize through the Feminist Press the Reconstructing American Literature project in 1979, which led to the publication in 1983 of a volumeof syllabi, course materials, and commentary under that title (Lauter 1991). The Heath Anthology (1990) was an outgrowth of that project.
    10 . Olsen 1988. Silences has also been translated into Norwegian and Dutch.
    11 . Schoedel wrote, “Finally, I want to help overcome what my favorite writer, Tillie Olsen, calls ‘women’s silences of centuries.’ Accounts of women’s lives, in particular workingclass women’s lives, have not been viewed as worth recording” (xiii).
    12 . Other critics not previously mentioned for whom Silences has been important include Elizabeth Meese, Dale Spender, Valerie Trueblood, Alix Kates Shulman, Helen MacNeil, Sandra Whipple Spanier, and Adrienne Rich, who commented on the significance of Silences for criticism: “Tillie Olsen’s Silences will, like A Room of One’sOwn, be quoted wherever there is talk of the circumstances in which literature is possible” (Rich 1982).
    13 . Silences “offered a lot of solace and inspiration” to Lim, who found it “very exciting. It encouraged me to do the work I often doubted doing.” Plays of Lim’s such as “XX,” which deals with the oppression of women from ancient China to the contemporary United States, have been producedin San Francisco. She has published her poetry and a collection of her plays, which she characterizes as “hard-edged feminist” drama (Lim 1989).
    14 . Citing Olsen’s recognition of the importance of “foreground silences,” Sondra Zeidenstein writes, “In breaking the silence imposed by their culture, [the writers in A Wider Giving ] have had to give themselves time and permission, seek out training,face rejection and self-doubt, fight the negativity sometimes ingested from their own mothers, begin to develop their craft and, hardest of all, summon the strength again and again to continue” (Zeidenstein xiii-xiv).
    15 . I am indebted to Carla Peterson for the concept of a “rhetoric of arithmetic” (Peterson 1988).
    16 . Olsen was not the first to use the concept of “counting.” Indeed, she readilycredits both Showalter and Howe with having sparked her awareness of the value of this technique. In the essay Olsen cites Elaine Showalter’s article, “Women and the Literary Curriculum” ( College English, May 1971) as a pioneering precursor. (Olsen 1982, 28) Olsen notes: “I have developed this almost compulsive what I call the Florence Howe Test, after the person I first saw do it. You take anyanthology, any list—look at the contents of a magazine, or at who is being discussed in a book of criticism, a textbook. . . . You run your finger down and you count the number of men who are in it and you count the number of women, and you discover that in the second century in which women have come to writing at all, usually you will find one woman in about every nine to ten men. It is astonishingthat you find this disparity even in the fields of poetry and story—which women have been more likely to write in the past because they presumably do not take as much time, or rather, they fit in more easily between other things, better than forms that require long, concentrated attention—it is astonishing that is, if you assume that human beings are born with similar capacities when it comesto thinking, to dreaming, to creating. I am of those who very strongly believe that this capacity to create is inherent in the human being and has not to do with the body, with the sex into which you areborn. I believe that there is the strongest relationship between circumstances and actual creative production” (Olsen 1972). Olsen’s distinctive contribution was introducing a larger audienceto this valuable tool.
    17 . These complaints were raised by several graduate students,