The Revolt of “Mother” and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by Mary Wilkins Freeman that was originally published in 1974. There are eight stories in this collection, and they are called “The Revolt of Mother,” “A New England Nun,” “Old Woman Magoun,” “Gentian,” “One Good Time,” “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin,” “The Apple Tree,” and “The Butterfly.” All of the stories are set in New England, and the protagonists are women who are able to rely on themselves alone.
Mary Wilkins Freeman, the author of this work, is one of the most well known American female writers of her era. She wrote everything from short stories to poems to children’s stories, and in each one, she made sure to emphasize her strong feminism and high values. During her lifetime, most of the women in literature were weak things in need of stereotypically strong men to save them. However, Freeman challenged these ideas in her stories with the women all strong enough to endure the struggles of rural women and how strong they had to be to raise their families. Freeman’s stories inspired many more writers to start tackling the unfairness that women all over the world experience, then and today.
