In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, wrote, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women…” In this course, we will read some of the works of these oft-forgotten and so-called “scribbling women,” moving from the seduction novel popularized in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to an 1835 historical romance set during the Revolutionary War, to a serial novel with crossdressers and ruthless desperadoes, to one of the most well-known coming-of-age-stories of all time. By reading texts ranging from Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, we will track the ways in which authors wrote their way into the public eye, and we will ask ourselves how women writers may be subverting societal expectations even as they submit to them. Over the course of the semester, in addition to “traditional” writing assignments, students may also be given the opportunity to periodically reflect and react to assigned readings, reimagine portions of the texts, provide creative interpretations of characters, or evaluate the ways in which modern remakes (such as the 2019 Little Women movie) change and stay true to the original texts.