Since the founding of the United States, women have picked up their pens to write and express their ideas, affording them independence and self-sufficiency in days when they had little. By way of their poetry, essays, advice columns, investigative journalism and more, women like Helen Keller, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Shirley Jackson wrote not only to entertain and inform, but often to simply keep a roof over their heads. ...