Elaine Showalter, why a woman can't write the great american novel

I just sent this article to my book group but I wanted to say it here too. I just read a really interesting article in Salon about a book by Elaine Showalter that is an overview of American women novelists for the last 300 years or so. 

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/02/24/elaine_showalter/?source=newsletter

Very very interesting I thought was the observation that the difference between British and American women writers was that in British families, having a servant was something that went very far down the economic ladder, whereas in American families, even well-off ones or slaveholding ones expected women to tend to domesticity (and yes, I did have to go put the potatoes into the boiling water in the kitchen before I could finish writing this paragraph).