"Women and the Modern Short Story."

Bates acknowledges his literary influences before putting his attention on four women writers who "have played an astonishingly large part in the growth of the modern short story": Dorothy Edwards, Pauline Smith, Malachi Whitaker, and Katherine Ann Porter. "These...are the writers with whom, sometimes, I feel I should like to change places."

Bates wrote in praise of Whitaker, Smith, and Edwards more than ten years earlier in the essay 'Women Short Story Writers I Admire'.

In John O'London's Weekly (January 31, 1941, pp. 449-450, attached).