Mental Health

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  “To have [Zitkála-Šá’s] work collected here now speaks to the tenacity of her spirit, her insistence on being heard across generations. Speaking of herself, of her world, she teaches us how to be now.” –Erin Marie Lynch, foreword

  Planted in a Strange Earth: Selected Writings by Zitkála-Šá brings together fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by one of the most influential yet underappreciated activist-artists of the twentieth century. Zitkála-Šá (also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, 1876-1938) spent her early years on the Yankton Indian Reservation before becoming a pupil, teacher, and reluctant poster child of the Indian boarding school system. Her first national publications marked a definitive break with the oppressive ideas behind her education, and her early fame as a musician and writer evolved into a decades-long political career fighting for Native rights.

  The collection focuses on the author’s writing on assimilationist projects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and their impact within Native communities and individuals. Zitkála-Šá’s voice is lyrical, bold and fresh–even over 100 years after initial publication. Her writing captures the intense beauty and pain of growing up and explores what it means to forge an identity in the face of cultural erasure. These are essential feminist texts that dig into the cruel tensions of an era through the eyes of an author who spent a lifetime “actively testing the chains which tightly bound [her] individuality like a mummy for burial.”

  Designer Kassie John created a special zine for this collection that readers can download, print, and fold into a free mini-book at home (complete with a coloring page illustration of Zitkála-Šá!).

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  Ten Days in a Mad-House compiles Nellie Bly's reporting from her first undercover assignment for the New York World in 1887. She disguised herself as "a crazy person" in order to get herself admitted to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt's Island). She spent ten days there as a patient before the World secured her release. Her articles led to a grand jury investigation and a major budget expansion for New York State asylums.

  While Bly's projects were often framed as stunts— by her paper and others—Ten Days is a serious examination of what happens to women that society finds inconvenient (whether or not they have an illness). Bly describes her experience with frank horror while also deploying her trademark observational humor, trained on the absurdity of the institution and the people who uphold its abuses. Cita's edition positions this landmark text within the tradition of feminist literature about women's experiences with mental illness, mental health treatment, and in mental institutions.

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  “'The Yellow Wall-Paper' (1892) holds an important place among rediscovered works by turn-of-the-century American women writers for its bold critique of gender politics in a patriarchal society. The nameless narrator, undergoing the infamous rest cure for what doctors now diagnose as postpartum depression, experiences debilitating psychological effects. At first repulsed by the wallpaper in the room where she is sequestered in a country estate, the narrator comes to like it as she vows to decode its pattern—she imagines many women creeping behind bars and identifies with one trapped woman, arguably a reflection of her painful position as a woman in Victorian America. Many of the story’s first readers considered it a psychological horror tale in the fashion of Poe." - Catherine J. Golden

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  "Passion’s necessity may be one of the lessons we can take from Chopin’s controversial text, but certainly it is not the only lesson. The novel emerged from obscurity like a different kind of storm: taking the literary world to new heights and awareness of what women writers could do." - Heather Ostman

  Kate Chopin's 1899 novel tells the story of Edna Pontellier as she seeks to expand her life beyond the boundaries of Creole society and the restrictive expectations for wives and mothers. Called everything from "poison" to ""not altogether wholesome in its tendencies" upon publication, The Awakening is now recognized as a classic of feminist literature that also laid the stylistic foundation for modernist Southern fiction.