The decades after the American Revolution witnessed the first great outpouring of women’s published writing in American history. That women expressed themselves through their writing was not a new development. From the earliest days of settlement, as Sharon M. Harris’s recent anthology, American Women Writers to 1800 demonstrates, women composed a vast number of works in a variety of genres. Yet colonial women usually wrote only for a limited audience – for their own satisfaction, for the edification of family members, or for the entertainment of friends in a private social circle. Rarely, and only through exceptional circumstances, did the works of an Anne Bradstreet or a Phillis Wheatley make it into print. What most distinguished the postcolonial culture of women’s writing, then, was that substantial numbers of women began to write with the explicit intention of seeking publication for their work.
What effected this change? This chapter explores the transitional period between 1780 and 1830, a time during which women shifted from writing primarily for private audiences to writing for a broader public. One part of the answer lies in the expansion of print culture. While electoral politics continued to exclude women, publication did not. Whereas the “public sphere,” as Jürgen Habermas has called it, consisted of males, the “literary public sphere” easily assimilated women.1 The enormous increase in the number of books, newspapers, and magazines being published created new audiences, including women. The demand for more material called forth the entry of new writers into the field, especially women. Women’s perceptions of themselves changed, too: rather than consumers of literature, they began to conceive of themselves as producers, as active agents who had something important to say to a public audience. Women found writing a particularly congenial endeavor, representing an extension of their domestic role rather than a separate and distinct enterprise. Writing for publication greatly expanded the scope of woman’s influence. An author who published her works could affect strangers as well as friends, people in all parts of the country, men as well as women. Social strictures forbidding women to speak in public did not apply to print. Women could freely – even anonymously – express their opinions as well as inculcate virtue, reform social evils, and cultivate society’s manners. Women could change the world with their words.
American female authorship developed within the larger context of the Anglo-American world. By the early eighteenth century, thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic had begun to challenge the notion of women’s inherent intellectual inferiority and to propose that both sexes shared an equal capacity for reason. John Locke, Mary Astell, and others suggested that women’s apparent inadequacies resulted more from their failure to receive an adequate education than from any innate deficiency of mind. “Instead of inquiring why all Women are not wise and good,” wrote Astell in 1694, “we have reason to wonder that there are any so. Were the Men as much neglected, and as little care taken to cultivate and improve them, perhaps they wou’d be so far from surpassing those whom they now dispise, that they themselseves wou’d sink into the greatest stupidity and brutality.” The “Incapacity” of the female mind, “if there be any,” she concluded, “is acquired, not natural.”2 A greater appreciation for the female intellect led to calls for improvements in female education. Not only should girls be taught to read, they should be exposed to serious intellectual subjects, such as philosophy and history. While some thinkers doubted feminine abilities, or feared that educated females might become masculine women, others saw the advantages of having educated wives and mothers.
The Anglo-American intellectual climate put a new emphasis on the contributions of women to society. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, authors began to produce a new genre of works – the earliest histories of women – that celebrated the accomplishments of eminent female historical figures. By the ninteenth century, women such as Mary Hays, Lydia Maria Child, Anna Maria, and Sarah Josepha Hale would dominate the genre; but male writers authored the first women’s histories. These volumes recounted a wide range of female accomplishments, including the literary achievements of the ancient poetess Sappho, the political genius of Queen Elizabeth of England, and the intellectual prowess of Laura Bassi, an Italian woman who received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Bologna. These works raised interesting questions about the relative influence of nature and nurture. One of the most popular of the histories, William Alexander’s History of Women, first published in Britain in 1779 and reprinted several times in the United States, observed that women continually overcame the disabilities society imposed on them, “often fully compensat[ing] . . . for all the disadvantages they are laid under by the law, and by custom.”3 After perusing the works, some readers raised more general questions about women’s status and the relations between the sexes. “Why, notwithstanding these [historical examples],” said one New Yorker, “are the ladies condemned to remain in ignorance? It is because the majority of men have an interest in concealing knowledge from them” (New-York Magazine, 90). Others drew even more radical conclusions. “The history of women,” asserted the “Female Advocate” of Connecticut in 1800, “is forever intruding on our unwilling eyes, bold and ardent spirits, who no tyrant could tame, no prejudice enslave . . . FEMALE CITIZENS, follow examples so glorious; accept the station nature intended for you, and double the knowledge and happiness of mankind” (Female Advocate, 12). The implication was clear: custom, not nature, limited the scope of women’s achievements.
Philosophers of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment also engaged in a reevaluation of women’s role. Devising a four-stage theory of history that took into account the position of women in society, Lord Kames, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and others traced humanity’s development through four eras beginning with the savage phase, which yielded to the pastoral age, which gave way to chivalry, which ultimately led to the modern, commercial era, the pinnacle of civilization and progress. At each stage, women both benefited from change, by receiving better treatment, and contributed to it, by stimulating social development. While men ventured out into the larger world of politics, commerce, and war, women acted to soften men’s brutish manners, encourage virtuous behavior, and provide a realm of leisure and refinement, removed from the cares of the world. “The gentle and insinuating manners of the female sex,” noted Kames, “tend to soften the roughness of the other sex; and where-ever women are indulged with any degree of freedom, they polish sooner than men.”4 Whereas in previous eras, women had been men’s slaves or concubines, in the modern, mercantile stage, women shaped men’s morals and manners. They stood as men’s social (though not political) equals – their friends and companions. As American readers assimilated this theory, they injected their own republican spin, concluding that society as well as individuals benefited if women were well educated. “Cultivation of the female mind,” reflected one commentator, “is of great importance, not only with respect to private happiness only, but with respect to society at large. The ladies have it in their power to form the manners of the gentlemen, and they can render them virtuous and happy, or vicious and miserable” (Christian, Scholar’s, 497). Ordinary as well as exceptional women thus helped to mold society and make its history.
In America, the coming of the Revolution heightened the public dimension of women’s role. The war for independence represented not just a conflict between Britain and America, but a civil war, a contest that split towns, counties, and communities into antagonistic factions. Victory in such a war involved winning the hearts and minds of the people. Patriot leaders were quick to realize that success depended, at least in part, on persuading women to support their side. Utilizing print media in a new way, they appealed to women through poems, essays, and orations, urging them to boycott imported luxury goods, produce homemade fabric and clothing, and, if necessary, sacrifice their husbands, sons, and brothers on the field of battle. Women responded to men’s pleas. Women were as heroic in their own sphere as men were in more public arenas. As writers and speakers reflected on women’s contributions to the Revolution, they articulated a new understanding of women’s role, a concept that historian Linda Kerber has called “republican motherhood.” It was now understood that women, though creatures of the domestic realm, had a political role to play. In their capacity as wives and mothers, women influenced the men who would fight the wars, vote for the legislators, and sit in the assemblies; thus, women indirectly helped govern the polity. As a rhetorical construct, the genius of republican motherhood was its “Janus-faced” quality: it looked forward in time by anticipating women’s political influence; it also looked backward by affirming the gender status quo. Those who voiced the notion could accentuate women’s political contributions and at the same time confirm traditional gender roles.5
Republican motherhood linked the private and public realms. In a self-governing republic even more than a monarchy, government depended on the existence of a virtuous, educated, participatory citizenry. Women, it was now understood, shaped the behavior of their husbands and children. They would inculcate patriotism, teach virtue, and encourage self-sacrifice for the public good. Their actions shaped the future of the republic. “Female education,” noted an article in a ladies’ literary magazine, “is all important to the public welfare. The sons of Columbia who are to command her armies and direct her counsels, receive most of their impressions for the first twelve years of their lives, from the example and instructions of their mothers! What an important bias may be given to the character during that interesting period!”6
Recognition of women’s political contributions accelerated the expansion of women’s educational opportunities, which in turn spurred tremendous increases in female literacy. In the colonial era, the Puritan emphasis on the Bible meant that northern mothers taught their children to read. While over half of all New England females could read, they did not necessarily know how to write. Writing was regarded as a vocational skill, necessary to conduct business or engage in a trade, but not essential for those who would grow up to be wives and mothers. In the South, educational opportunities were extremely limited for both boys and girls. Only the elite received any formal education. These patterns changed after the Revolution. Between 1790 and 1830, almost 400 hundred new “female academies” were founded. In addition to teaching feminine skills such as dancing, embroidery, and musicianship, they also instructed their pupils in history, geography, mathematics, and the natural sciences. Writing – both penmanship and composition – was now taught along with reading. By 1800, 80 to 90 per cent of all New England women could read; nearly half of all southern white women could do so. The percentages grew steadily thereafter. By 1850, women’s literacy rate throughout the United States approached that of men.7
Literacy transformed women’s relationship to print culture. More wide-spread literacy meant that more women had access to a vast world of ideas. In addition to the Bible and other spiritual readings, women began to devour histories, biographies, travel literature, conduct books, periodicals, newspapers, and novels. Extensive reading had enormous consequences for women’s perceptions of themselves and their relation to society. Through reading, as historian Mary Kelley notes, women could find “alternative models of womanhood . . . that enabled [them] to resist constraints and to pursue more independent courses of self-definition” (“Reading Women,” 404, 406). Their minds need not be bound by domestic life or the ideology that confined them there.
Broader intellectual trends also raised the moral standing of women in society. Older representations of woman as Eve, the temptress and corrupter, were being replaced by the image of a woman on a pedestal, the symbol of purity, piety, and selflessness. In fact, as historian Ruth Bloch has noted, the gendered connotations of the term “virtue” shifted, increasingly referring to women rather than men. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, virtue had been considered a predominantly masculine trait, associated with martial ardor and patriotic vigor. Virtue meant civic virtue, a man’s willingness to take up arms to defend the polity, or his sacrifice of his own interests for the common good. By the early nineteenth century, however, various social and intellectual forces, including American Protestantism, Scottish moral philosophy, and literary sentimentalism, transformed virtue into a feminine characteristic – indeed, perhaps the preeminent feminine attribute. Virtue shifted from being primarily a male, political trait to being a nonpolitical feature associated with women. The feminization of virtue accompanied the rise of democracy and capitalism in the United States. Men came to be regarded as profit maximizers and seekers of their own self-interest. Women, on the other hand, came to represent generosity and the ability to sacrifice for the larger public good; they embodied a higher, more pure moral standard – the repositories of virtue in a corrupt world (Bloch, “Gendered Meanings,” 52–3).
The feminization of virtue led to a discourse that explained women’s relationship to society in terms of their “influence.” Because of their ability to shape the morals, manners, and ideas of men, women, it was claimed, should direct their abilities toward reforming society, enlightening its culture, and strengthening its values. Unlike men, women would not use brute force or logical syllogisms to overcome their opponents; they would employ the feminine arts of modesty, emotion, charm, and at times, seduction. Their strategy would be persuasion, not coercion. “The influence of the fair sex gives a bias to the moral conduct of our sex,” noted a male writer, “is an axiom that has stood the test of ages. Women, conscious of their natural imbecility to govern men by dint of force, found out a more gentle way of subduing them” (New-York Weekly, 22). The stakes were high, not just for individuals, but for the whole country. “Republics,” insisted one female founder of a female academy, “have failed when [women] calmly suffered that influence, to become enlisted in favour of luxuries and follies wholly incompatible with the existence of freedom.”8 As the Grimké sisters later proved in their campaign against slavery, moral suasion constituted a powerful weapon for influencing society.
Literature represented a particularly effective way for women to use their influence. An obscure poem, called “Literary Talents of Females,” published in 1819 in a minor periodical, summarizes the cultural expectations for women at the time. Written by the pseudonymous “Ella” (perhaps Margaretta Van Wyck Bleecker Faugères), the poem recounts the sad tale of women’s intellectual bondage throughout history and expresses the hope that America will offer different possibilities. Women’s minds, the author said, had been constricted throughout the past. Even in feudal times, women, while protected or praised, were not able to express their own talents or abilities. Yet women, she claimed, deserved far better; they had “An equal right to culture and to fame,/To share the praise of every mental grace,/That raises and adorns the human race.” Ella asked whether her American readers would respond to the challenge and raise women to a new level.
Are there not some noble spirits still,That with the power, possess the generous willTo advocate the cause of woman’s mind,And raise it to the height by Heaven design’d –A height from which her virtues may dispenseThe most auspicious and diffusive influence?
The answer reflected a growing nationalist pride. In the United States, she believed, “mental gloom, expel’d Columbia’s shore,/Shall darken female intellect no more.” In this country, “female genius may display its powers” and
The result would benefit husbands, children, and families by “promoting public, social, [and] private happiness.” In the home,
Enlighten’d taste with fond parental careShall then illustrate the domestic sphere,Maternal love shall wake man’s infant powers,As genial spring awakes the nascent flowers.
The cultivation of women’s intellect and encouragement of literary pursuits among females would, Ella concluded, bring the entire society to a higher level of social development.9
Just as the post-Revolutionary intellectual climate cultivated the ambitions of educated women who might choose to write, so changes in print culture provided women with new opportunities for publication. The number of newspapers in the country doubled during the Revolution, then tripled during the 1790s. Newspapers were cheap and widely available. Print media increasingly sought to appeal to a female audience. Newspapers published articles and poetry addressed to women. Sensing the emergence of a new market, publishers issued books that they believed women would buy, especially novels, women’s histories, conduct books, and household companions.10 Most importantly, the growth of periodicals as a separate genre provided a whole new outlet for women’s reading and writing.
Before the Revolution, most colonists imported their magazines from England. Afterward, the number, kind, and quality of periodicals printed in the United States increased exponentially, to serve a public interested in affirming its patriotism, expanding its knowledge, and becoming polite ladies and gentlemen. The ladies’ magazine formed a distinct subset of this genre. With Addison and Steele’s Spectator as a model, American printers began publishing their own periodicals aimed at attracting a female audience. The first magazine to put “lady” in the title was Job Weedon and William Barret’s The Gentleman and Lady’s Town and Country Magazine, published in 1784. In 1792, a Philadelphia printer issued the Ladies’ Magazine and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge, which was designed to enhance “the province of female excellence alone, with the beams of intellectual light, which illuminates the paths of literature.” Even before the appearance of Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1830, more than 100 periodicals specifically geared toward women appeared in the United States. Women actually edited a handful of these publications, including Mary Clarke Carr’s International Regale or Ladies Tea Table or The Western Ladies Casket, printed by “A Lady.” Whoever published them, most women’s magazines disappeared after only a few issues. A few, like The Weekly Visitor or Ladies’ Miscellany, published in New York, survived from 1804 until 1811. The very existence of these periodicals, however, reflected both the growth in the number of female readers and the potential for the growth of female authorship.11
Magazines gave American women unparalleled opportunities to become published writers. General interest periodicals as well as ladies’ magazines were often desperate for material. Working on a shoestring budget, printers usually could not pay their authors. They filled their pages by borrowing from other publications and asking for voluntary contributions from their readers. Appeals for submissions were often directed to women. In 1827, for example, the editor of The Ariel and Ladies’ Literary Gazette announced in his inaugural issue that he intended to be “more than commonly attentive . . . to the Ladies . . . The pages of the Ariel will be graced with the literary productions of able writers, and of either sex” (1). As magazines became dependent on women’s contributions, women sensed increasing opportunities – and more power. An 1803 piece in a Boston magazine, the Port Folio, satirized the pretensions of “literary ladies.” In a subsequent issue, an outraged female correspondent rebuked the editor, reminding him of the importance of his female audience. “In a periodical paper,” she said, “you must so much depend on women for support both in the reading and writing way, that I am surprised you should there introduce such a satire.” Expressing disgust at the article, she asked him, “How could you for a moment lose sight of your own interest, and of the duty you owe to your female correspondents?” Ending with a demand for an apology, she urged the editor to “rejoice at having given an opportunity of literary exertion to the American women” (n.p.). Women knew that without their support, most magazines could not exist. Margaret Beetham’s observation about English magazines applies equally well to the American periodicals. “The early magazines . . . positioned [women] as members of a reading/writing community rather than simply as consumers . . . The magazine was a communal space in which the fair sex felt welcome. It extended the reader’s community beyond the domestic circle to which she was increasingly confined” (Magazine of Her Own?, 20). Periodicals enhanced women’s sense of their own power both as consumers and producers of literature.
Ironically, most women who wrote for magazines did not publish under their own names. Journalistic conventions of this time dictated that most pieces, whether by men or women, be published anonymously or under a pseudonym. It is thus impossible to tell what proportion of the articles women actually wrote. It seems clear, however, that women were frequent contributors. Even when they did not sign their given names, many authors published under a female pseudonym or identified themselves as “A Lady.” Anonymity may have actually encouraged women to write for publication. As Amy Beth Aronson points out, “Anonymity protected all contributors from post-publication ridicule, and shielded women particularly from gendered accusations of un-‘feminine’ expression. The American magazine formally and conventionally suited to both subvert and redress women’s silence in the public sphere” (“Understanding Equals,” 101). The early periodicals, then, represented an easily accessible and socially sanctioned outlet for women authors.
As significant as new publication opportunities were, most women in the early national period did not regard writing as a career. While it is true that only a few men made a living from their writing, women faced even more obstacles to becoming published authors. The demands on a woman’s time were prodigious. Most women had to take care of their children, minister to their husbands, and manage their numerous household duties before they could even consider setting pen to paper. Writing, then, was an avocation, a hobby that women pursued in their spare time. In the 1790s, Mercy Otis Warren realistically assessed women’s situation. “Whatever delight we may have in the use of the pen, or however eager we may be in the pursuit of knowledge . . . yet heaven has so ordained the lot of female life that every literary attention, must give place to family avocations, and every page, except the sacred one, must be unfolded, till all matters of oeconomy which belong to her department are promptly adjusted.” By the late eighteenth century, however, more women did have time for writing. A growing number lived in towns and cities and did not face the demands imposed by agricultural life. The increasing availability of consumer goods lessened the need for women to make everything from scratch. Middle-class as well as elite women could afford to hire domestic servants to help around the house. Thus a “methodical arrangement of time,” as Warren put it, could give a woman the leisure she needed to engage in literary pursuits.12
By the early nineteenth century, the convergence of means and opportunity allowed a whole generation of women to begin to write for publication. As they sought their public voices, women experimented with a variety of literary genres. A small number, including Mercy Otis Warren and Judith Sargent Murray, wrote about topical political events of the day. Murray, a staunch Federalist, advocated the ratification of the US Constitution in the 1780s and supported the Federalist Party in the 1790s. Warren had a different political viewpoint. After having written poems and plays in support of the American Revolution, she became disaffected with the course of American politics. Writing under the pseudonym, the “Columbian Patriot,” she rejected the proposed US Constitution, pointing out defects that ranged from an overreliance on central authority, to a tendency to promote aristocracy, to the lack of a bill of rights. Her subsequent work criticized major political figures such as George Washington and John Adams. In 1805 she published, under her own name, a History of the American Revolution that gave a highly politicized account of independence and the early years of the republic. Rather than a detached rendering of events, she argued that Federalist policies violated the spirit of the Revolution, producing a pervasive moral decline throughout the country marked by elitism, greediness, and the spread of antidemocratic tendencies. Offended by her perspective, John Adams dismissed Warren’s effort, saying, “History is not the Province of the Ladies.”13 Despite such resistance, Warren was not the only woman to venture into the masculine realm of politics through her writing. Hannah Adams (no relation to John) successfully published several histories of New England. In addition, as Nina Baym has shown in American Women Writers and the Work of History, many other women published works of fiction, poetry, and drama that contained significant historical content.
As highly politicized as Warren and Murray were, even they did not demand that women receive the same political rights as men. Instead, they focused their attention on women’s intellectual potential and viewed education as the best route to equality. Beginning in 1790 with “On the Equality of the Sexes,” published in the Massachusetts Magazine, and then in 1798 in the Gleaner, Murray insisted that women’s minds “are naturally as susceptible to every improvement, as those of men” (710). Education would allow women to realize the full capabilities of their intellect; they would be able to think, write, and converse with the most educated of men. “Such is my confidence in THE SEX,” she proclaimed, “that I expect to see our young women forming a new era in female history” (703). If women were widowed or economically bereft, education would enable them to find a means to support their families – and hence gain a measure of independence. Yet her dreams for women had limits. Denying any desire to “unsex” her colleagues, she admitted that most women would continue to be wives and mothers. More learning, however, would allow women to “fill with honour the parts allotted to them” (731; 704). Women would perform their traditional roles to the best of their ability; they would be a credit to their sex. This universalistic understanding of women’s intellectual equality with men would soon be superseded. As Nina Baym points out, “Whereas early literary women and their male supporters attributed all differences between male and female minds to differences in education, Victorian women were attracted to an idea of innate mental and sexual differences. But these differences, they believed, made women intellectually, morally, and spiritually superior to men, and thus better suited than the other sex to conduct the nation’s important cultural work” (American Women Writers, 30). As the idea of sameness gave way to difference, women would use this notion to carve out a place for themselves. But difference would also be the means of containing women in a subordinate status.
Whatever the legal constraints they faced, women continued to experiment with other literary genres. In the post-Revolutionary era, the theatre came into vogue in many American cities, including Boston, where it had previously been banned. Theatre companies needed new material. Women helped provide it. Warren and Murray, for example, both wrote plays in addition to nonfiction and poetry. Warren’s The Ladies of Castile and The Sack of Rome, written in the 1780s, featured strong female characters. Although her plays were never performed, they were published as part of Warren’s collected works in 1790.14 Murray’s dramatic efforts, such as The Medium, The African, and The Traveller Returned, were performed in Boston and Philadelphia – though none met with great success (Skemp, Murray, 101–3). Susanna Rowson, the novelist, on the other hand, composed one of the most popular – and controversial – plays of the period, a historical drama with satirical bite called Slaves in Algiers (Rowson, Charlotte Temple, xxv). Her work, performed in Philadelphia, sparked a vituperative exchange with William Cobbett, a reactionary newspaper editor who maligned her feminist sympathies and democratic tendencies. Whether or not women’s plays succeeded, their performance sent an important signal about the penetration of women into the literary public sphere.
Women also made inroads in another genre. Poetry, which had long been viewed as an appropriate vehicle for feminine expression, now became specifically identified with women. The explosion of newspapers and periodicals in the post-Revolutionary era gave women many new opportunities to publish their work. Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, who wrote under the pseudonymn “Philenia,” published poems in The Massachusetts Magazine as well as the Universal Asylum & Columbian Magazine. “Ouabi” was an especially haunting tale about nature told through a Native American’s perspective. Anna Eliza Schuyler Bleecker recounted her daughter’s tragic death while in flight from the British in “Written in the Retreat from BURGOYNE,” which appeared in the New-York Magazine of March 1790. Some women eventually sought to cement their reputations by publishing books. After years of writing poetry in the New-York Magazine under the pen name “Ella,” Margaretta Van Wyck Bleecker Faugères, daughter of a wealthy New York family, found a publisher for her and her mother’s poetry, which appeared in 1793. Lydia Sigourney, Maria Gowen Brooks, and Sarah Josepha Hale all published significant collections of poetry under their own names before 1830. Yet even when women did not get credit for authorship, they determined the tone, voice, and subject matter of much of the poetry published in periodicals of the day.15
The emergence of the novel as a distinct literary genre offered unparalleled possibilities for women. By the mid-eighteenth century, the appearance of English works such as Pamela and Clarissa signaled the dawn of a new era in fiction-writing. The sentimental novel emphasized individual experience, realistic characters, and personal emotion. Passion and romance – failed, tragic, or grand – figured largely in the plots. Depicting a world inhabited by men and women who lived in recognizable (if extreme) conditions, novels appealed to a wide, popular readership. The gene became, as Cathy Davidson notes, “the single most prevalent cultural form in the nation.”16 In addition to British imports, more than 100 American novels were published before 1820. Women, in particular, read novels with an insatiable zest.
Despite the genre’s popularity, many social commentators of both sexes disapproved of novel-reading, especially for women. Novels, it was said, were a waste of time, a useless indulgence that implanted unrealistic ideas about life and about the relation between the sexes. An advice book for women, The American Lady’s Preceptor, warned against novels for a variety of reasons. “Love,” the author noted, is the “superstructure of most novels. But what kind of love is there taught? Not that tender sympathy of two mutual hearts, whose love is founded on reason, prudence, and virtue; but a blind, violent and impetuous passion which hurries its readers unhappy victims into endless woes, teaches children disobedience to parents, [and] inspires them with notions of self-sufficiency” (19). In addition, women’s delicate senses might be offended or their morals tainted by the references to illicit sexual matters. Hannah Webster Foster insisted, “Novels are the favourite, and most dangerous kind of reading, now adopted by the generality of young ladies. I say dangerous . . . [because they] fill the imagination with ideas which lead to impure desires . . . and a fondness for show and dissipation . . . They often pervert the judgment, mislead the affections, and blind the understanding” (quoted in Kerber, Women, 239). Foster’s solution was to take up novel-writing herself, so as to insure that the contents would be morally sound.
American women soon made their mark in the field of novel-writing. As early as 1801, female novelist Tabitha Gilman Tenney claimed that women had taken to fiction-writing with such zeal that “the ladies of late seem to have almost appropriated this department of writing.”17 Susanna Haswell Rowson was the most successful. Her best-selling Charlotte Temple (1791) sold nearly 40,000 copies within ten years of its publication. Many female writers began their careers by publishing short fiction in literary periodicals and then, after having gained some experience, went on to write larger works published under their own name. In addition to her plays and political writings, Judith Sargent Murray produced a series of stories about a young woman named Margaretta, collected as part of her Gleaner volume (1798). Hannah Webster Foster published two successful novels, The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton (1797) and The Boarding School (1798). Although most women wrote in a sentimental vein, some authors, such as Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker, wrote historical novels. What began as a trickle in the eighteenth century became a torrent by the nineteenth century, when female authors such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, and Harriet Beecher Stowe appeared on the scene.18
Strongly didactic in tone, early American novels often spoke explicitly to a female audience. Courtship, in particular, came under scrutiny. Choosing between suitors thrust women into a liminal space, creating a time of maximum freedom and independence, but also the time of peril and hidden danger. Seduction and betrayal threatened at every turn. If a woman should compromise her virtue – meaning her chastity and good reputation – then a bleak future of disgrace and/or spinsterhood awaited her. If she should make a foolish choice of mates, based on appearances rather than character, her married life would be a torment. Many novels urged women to make a judicious choice and avoid the fate of their impetuous heroines. Parents’ advice should be heeded. A wise woman, says Charlotte Temple, will “listen not to the voice of love, unless sanctioned by paternal approbation . . . Resist the impulse of inclination when it runs counter to the precepts of religion and virtue” (29). This message reflected larger social changes in American society. In earlier generations, parents played a key role in selecting a mate, guiding their children to the appropriate choice. By the late eighteenth century, parents exercised less economic control over their children. Children often made up their own minds about whom to marry, without much guidance from parents. Novels stepped into the breech, providing women with savvy advice about the ways of the world and the temptations of would-be seducers. In an unfamiliar world increasingly inhabited by strangers rather than family and friends, novels provided a template for romantic encounters.
As a genre, the novel offered women a new-found sense of agency and control over their lives. While the seduction scenario seemed to portray women as powerless victims, the act of reading was itself empowering. According to Cathy Davidson, “by reading about a female character’s good or bad decisions in sexual and marital matters, the early American woman could vicariously enact her own courtship and marriage fantasies. She could, at least in those fantasies, view her life as largely the consequence of her own choices and not merely as the product of the power of others in her life” (Revolution and the Word, 123). Novels, then, provided an alternate vision of women’s lives. They also sanctioned the idea of women’s education and promoted a positive notion of female learning. Most authors explicitly or implicitly condoned the need for greater educational opportunities for women – if for no other reason than to better arm females against threats to their much-vaunted virtue. Novels provided women with the intellectual self-confidence they needed to function in a changed social and political environment.
This changed environment included a host of disturbing and unresolved questions about gender issues. The concept of republican motherhood contained many internal contradictions. Did independence mean greater equality between the sexes and a more egalitarian marriage relationship? If women raised the virtuous male citizens of the republic, why were they denied full citizenship? What were the implications of the American rejection of patriarchy for other patriarchs, especially the father and husband of each family?19 While the Revolution might be seen as an enhancement of women’s political potential, it also could be considered an affirmation of women’s traditional domestic roles. Philip Gould points out that republican motherhood should be understood as a fluid discourse rather than a static concept. As a discourse, republican motherhood “was highly contextual, contingent upon immediate purpose, audience, and genre. It could both add radical undertones to naturally conservative voices and constrain naturally radical voices within the limits of republican propriety” (Covenant and Republic, 99). Thus, the message was mixed. Depending on the context, republican motherhood could be used to alter or affirm women’s traditional role.
Nineteenth-century women used fiction as a means of exploring the internal tensions within the concept of republican motherhood. Fictional characters could say things that real women or men might hesitate to express. In The Coquette, for example, Mrs. Richman bluntly asserted her political opinions and defended her right to do so, saying, “We think ourselves interested in the welfare and prosperity of our country, and, consequently, claim the right of inquiring into those [political] affairs, which may conduce to, or interfere with the common weal. We shall not be called to the senate or the field to assert its privileges, and defend its rights, but we shall feel for the honor and safety of our friends and connections, who are thus employed” (44). Novels provided a glimpse of both the restrictions and potentialities of women’s role: of women who struggled against their own lack of education and economic opportunity as well as of politicized women who spoke their minds publicly. By imaginatively playing with gender issues, female fiction writers opened the door for future discussions when the larger society was more receptive to change.
The entry of women into the literary public sphere challenged the hegemony of separate spheres ideology. A normative ideal rather than a description of reality, the notion of separate spheres postulated that men inhabited the public world of work, wages, and politics while women inhabited an entirely distinct realm bounded by home and family. Although limited by class and region, the ideology was pervasive in early nineteenth-century literature and had a powerful impact on perceptions of gender roles.20 Women’s reading and writing, however, eroded the rigid distinctions between the sexes and made women fuller participants in public life. Reading women participated in an imagined community that discussed a wide variety of social, political, and moral issues. Women reformers made their views known to a large audience and helped frame the scope of public discourse. Women’s fiction and poetry helped elevate the moral and cultural tone of society, providing a more refined and virtuous vision of social interaction. Participation in the literary public sphere made women both the subjects and objects of debate, thus forever altering men’s perceptions of women and women’s perceptions of themselves.
1. Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” 421–61; see also Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America, 55; Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860, 5–6.
2. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (1694), 198–9; Melissa Butler, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism,” 148–59; Hilda L. Smith, Reason’s Disciples, 56–8.
3. William Alexander, History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time, vol. II, 336; Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835, 49–55.
4. Lord Kames, Six Sketches on the History of Man (abridged version), 195; Rosemarie Zagarri, “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” 192–215; Sylvana Tomaselli, “The Enlightenment Debate on Women,” 101–24.
5. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic, 73–113, 269–88; Linda K. Kerber, “Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation,” 484; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, 155–94; Betsy Erkkila, “Revolutionary Women,” 189–223.
6. Masonic Miscellany and Ladies’ Literary Magazine, 328; Mary Kelley, “‘Vindicating the Equality of Female Intellect’,” 1–27.
7. E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England,” 53–80; David A. Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers, 169–71; Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power, 160–96; William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, 116–21; Catherine Hobbs, ed., Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write, 101–2; Joel Perlmann and Dennis Shirley, “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?,” 64; Robert E. Gallman, “Changes in the Level of Literacy in a New Community of Early America,” 574; Julia Cherry Spruill, Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies, 185–207.
8. Emma Willard, An Address to the Public Particularly to Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education, 29. For a critic’s view that depicts women’s influence as “a means of devious social control,” see Ann Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 8–10, 68–76.
9. Literary and Musical Magazine, July 12, 1819 (Philadelphia): 90. For a fascinating example of nineteenth-century women’s poetry that subverted conventional expectations about women’s role, see Susan S. Lanser, “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” 610–29.
10. Donald H. Steward, Opposition Press of the Federalist Period, 12–22, 630; Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers, 279; Brown, Knowledge is Power, 218, 247 n. 1.
11. Mary Clarke Carr, “Preface,” International Regale or Ladies Tea Table, 1815 (Philadelphia), II: 1, 3; “By a Lady,” Western Ladies Casket (Connersville, Indiana, 1823); Bertha Monica Stearns, “Before Godey’s” and “Early Philadelphia Magazines for Ladies,” 479–91.
12. Mercy Otis Warren to a very young lady, n.d. and Mercy Otis Warren to Mrs. M. Warren, November 1791, Letterbook, Mercy Otis Warren Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, 114–15, 486.
13. John Adams to Elbridge Gerry, April 17, 1813, Warren-Adams Letters, vol. II, 380; Sheila L. Skemp, Judith Sargent Murray, 108–11; Rosemarie Zagarri, A Woman’s Dilemma, 120–3, 140–8.
14. Baym, American Women Writers, 192–6; Zagarri, Woman’s Dilemma, 134–8.
15. Baym, American Women Writers, 67–91; Harris, American Women Writers, 325–7, 337–40, 386–7. I would like to thank Paula Bennett for information on Sigourney, Brooks, and Hale as well as other insights into early American women’s poetry.
16. Cathy N. Davidson, “Novel as Subversive Activity,” 287; Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 17, 37.
17. Tabitha Gilman Tenney, “From Female Quixotism,” 408.
18. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 17, 27; Baym, American Women Writers, 186.
19. For exploration of such issues, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims; Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife,” 689–721; Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America,” 203–30.
20. For a summary of the debate on separate spheres ideology, see Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place,” 9–39.