From its earliest years in the United States, the short story was a form which attracted a growing number of women writers. Magazine publication, which did so much to foster the short story form, was from the first often aimed at women readers. Godey's Lady's Book, first published in Philadelphia in 1830, grew out of the fashion for annuals, and was a monthly volume containing articles, tales and sketches, engravings of fashionable ladies and landscapes, and colour fashion plates. A rival magazine from Boston, The American Ladies' Magazine and Literary Gazette, appeared in 1837, and its editor Sarah Joseph Hale announced: ‘We have the assistance of many of our best female writers. We offer a field where female genius may find scope; where the female mind may engage its appropriate work – that of benefiting the female sex.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne, notoriously, dismissed women writers of his day as that ‘damned mob of scribbling women’, but nineteenth-century women writers have recently begun to regain critical attention; republication of the main authors, together with a number of anthologies, has helped to rediscover an important strand of literary tradition. This chapter and the next will focus on seven writers who have come to be seen as especially significant: Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910), Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), Kate Chopin (1851–1904), Edith Wharton (1862–1937) and Willa Cather (1873–1947).