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.