Unit 6: The Question of Women's Place in Society
As with the economic and technological transformations – sometimes called the Market Revolution – that we examined in Unit 5, gender relations in the United States were also changing during this period. In the rural agrarian economy, men and women often worked side-by-side in the same location at the farm and the home, even when divided along gender lines. During the move to a professionalized capitalist workplace, more distinctions were made between male and female work (for some classes, at least). Alongside the political changes that empowered white men, these transformations coincided with an increasing emphasis on women's importance in the private sphere in opposition to men's dominance in the public realm. In this unit, we examine the emergence of the first wave of the feminist movement in the United States, in the form of the fight for suffrage and increasing literary attention to the place of women in society.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 32 hours.
Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
- describe the development of a Women's Rights Movement in the antebellum US and identify the major voices and platforms that emerged;
- summarize the arguments of Fuller and Peabody in favor of women's rights and analyze them in terms of Transcendentalism;
- delineate how Stoddard's short story characterizes the relationships among sexuality, gender roles, and class during this time period;
- understand the accomplishments and challenges of women of color working toward women's and African-Americans' rights during this time period;
- identify the genre traits of the domestic novel and reconcile how Warner uses those conventions to author one of the most outstanding examples of popular literature written by women at the time; and
- analyze how Alcott's Little Women both challenges and reinforces conventions about women through their use of sentimental tropes.
6.1: Women's Rights in the Young Republic
In this unit, you will read about the various roles of women in society. Read these sections, and note the ways that women's roles were changing during this time. While women were often relegated to the private sphere of the home, they also found ways to challenge the norms of the time and enter public life in ways that would not have been possible in previous decades. In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America, the legal status of married women was defined as "coverture", meaning a married woman had no legal or economic status independent of her husband. She could not conduct business or buy and sell property. Her husband controlled any property she brought to the marriage, although he could not sell it without her agreement. Women also lacked the right to sue, file for divorce, pursue legal recourse, or vote. Married women's status did not change because of the American Revolution, and wives remained economically dependent on their husbands. Many women in the early eighteenth century, however, began to agitate for legal equality between husbands and wives and for the same educational opportunities as men.
Read pages 11–16 for an introduction to Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. You might even look at this document as a whole if you have time. Think about how women's roles have changed over history. Did you know that the Women's Rights Movement began in the nineteenth century?
Now that you've read a short intro to Anthony's life, read her suffragist statement with those biographical details in mind.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues worked hard to bring together a gathering of men and women to address what they saw as a matter of critical concern for American democracy. Several days of discussion resulted in this document, which they cleverly patterned after Jefferson's famous declaration. Today the National Women's Historic Site and Hall of Fame are located at Seneca Falls. Read this important declaration.
Keeping what Stanton and her colleagues worked for in mind, read this overview of the domestic ideology and its relationship to the development of the women's rights movement during the nineteenth century.
6.2: Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, and the Transcendentalists
This article outlines a presentation given by Dr. John Matteson, who wrote a critical text on Margaret Fuller called The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography in 2012. In this article, he contemplates her genius as well as her place in nineteenth century American literature and letters.
For further insight into Margaret Fuller and her young life, read this excerpt from her 1852 autobiographical text, Memoirs of Margaret Full Ossoli. You will see an example of her writing skills here, as well as the way that she conceptualizes herself and her past.
In Fuller's essay "The Great Lawsuit", she applies Transcendentalist thought to the question of women's rights. This essay was published in The Dial, which she co-edited with Emerson. She later expanded this essay into the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller, as with many early feminists, connected the difficulties women faced to the evils of slavery in making her case for women to develop their souls as freely and fully as they could. She makes few to no allusions to legal or political changes, as later feminists would insist upon.
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was a teacher and educational reformer, founder of the kindergarten system in the United States, and an advocate of Native Americans' right to education. She was a prominent figure within the Transcendentalist movement, and published their literary journal, The Dial, in 1842 and 1843. In 1849, in the periodical Aesthetic Papers, she was first to publish Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. She supported important writers of the era, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller, with her bookstore and publishing house in Boston. It was the seat of cultural and intellectual thought in America in the mid-1800s. She was also instrumental in publishing the Paiute Indian activist Sarah Winnemucca's autobiography, Life Among the Paiutes. Peabody has been called "an American Renaissance Woman" for the scope and breadth of her work, which included writing, lecturing, publishing, and activism for minority rights. Her experimental work with kindergartens ignited an educational revolution in the public school systems throughout America, and resulted in a lasting legacy for today's children. Read this biography of her life to understand the important role she played during this time.
6.3: Law, Class, Race, and Marriage
Read Stoddard's emotionally complex short story from 1863. Stoddard's story is told in first person by the main character, who feels trapped by her gender and her class. The story reveals the ways that law and society enforced women's subservience, even as it explores the complicity of the narrator's own sexuality in her entrapment. One major source of Stoddard's importance to American literature is the historicism of her work, the manner in which her writing embodied and subverted the tension of her present-day culture with the archetypal or received values of the American past. A pioneering predecessor of regionalist authors Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin, as well as a precursor of American modernism, Stoddard's writing is remarkable for its almost total lack of sentimentality, pervasive use of irony, psychological depth of richly drawn characters, intense atmospheric descriptions of New England, concise language, and innovative use of narrative voice and structure. Her investigation of relations between the sexes, a dominant focus of her fiction, analyzes emotions ranging from love and desire to disdain, aggression, and depression. You might research her further through a Google search or by consulting Wikipedia.
Read through this profile and of Alice Stokes Paul, who worked on some of the most outstanding political achievements on behalf of women in the 20th century. She was an American suffragist leader, and along with her friend Lucy Burns and others, she led a successful campaign for women's suffrage that resulted in granting the right to vote to women in the US federal election in 1920.
The Women's Movement, which was gaining momentum during this time, included many women of color who often are not remembered for their important contributions. Read this biographical sketch of Frances Harper and take note of her poem "Bury Me in a Free Land", which was composed in 1845.
Ida B. Wells Barnett is another African-American woman who fought for both women's and African-Americans' rights during this time period. You can read her famous 1892 pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases, here. You should also seek out other biographies and writings by women of color, such as Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Eliza Church Terrell, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin, who were all involved in the fight for equal rights.
6.4: Sentiment, Religion, and the Power of Womanhood
The Wide, Wide World is an 1850 novel by Susan Warner. It was published under the pseudonym Elizabeth Wetherell, and is often called America's first bestseller. This text went through fourteen editions in two years, and may ultimately have been as popular as Uncle Tom's Cabin with nineteenth-century American readers. At the beginning of the novel, Ellen Montgomery is driven from her home. She travels through the world and encounters a variety of difficult circumstances. Through these challenges, she begins to craft an identity based on Christian values and principles. The book ends on the verge of her adulthood and marriage, which was the only acceptable form of maturity for a young girl at the time. This book is a textbook example of domestic fiction, and was largely forgotten until recently. Read the short first five chapters to get a sense of this work. While you are reading, identify the generic traits of the domestic novel.
This short piece offers a good introduction to Alcott and her most famous novel Little Women.
Read Alcott's famous novel set during the Civil War in this two-volume version, which was published in 1868 and 1869. Alcott's Little Women depicts the lives of four sisters and their relationships to one another, to men, and to their family. It offers a good cross-section of the experiences – domestic and otherwise – of the new American woman. Think about these discussion questions as you read through this text:
- Why do you think Little Women is divided into two halves? How do the tone and structure of the story change between the two? What is lost? What is gained?
- Is the March family realistic?
- Does Little Women reinforce or challenge gender stereotypes?
- Despite the importance of Christian faith to the March family, why do you think Louisa May Alcott chose to make the religious references in the novel abstract instead of specific?
- Is Little Women really a "children's book"? What aspects of it seem directed at or appropriate for child readers? Adult readers?
- How does this novel address the question of women's place in society at the time?
- Which relationships are the most important in the novel? Why?
Unit 6 Assessment
- Receive a grade
Take this assessment to see how well you understood this unit.
- This assessment does not count towards your grade. It is just for practice!
- You will see the correct answers when you submit your answers. Use this to help you study for the final exam!
- You can take this assessment as many times as you want, whenever you want.