12
2. SELF-MADE WOMAN
2.1 The Role of Women in Nineteenth-Century American Society
“There can be no question that the present epoch is initiating an empire of the higher
reason, of arts, affections, aspirations; and for that epoch the genius of woman has been
reserved”
12
. This is what Thomas Wentworth Higginson declared in 1859 about his age,
considered the time in which woman could obtain her emancipation since the world, in his
opinion, was finally ready to welcome her genius, power of understanding, and freedom. He
describes the past times as characterized by mere ignorance, muscles and “lower power of the
understanding
13
”, an era which was not ready for such a change, while the nineteenth century
was the right time and ground to let women alter their position, with a consequent social and
moral change. This was, in fact, an era of remarkable cultural and social transformations,
which mostly involved women and their living conditions: many changes occurred both in
England and America, were women were fighting for entering institutions of higher
education, for the vote, rights over their children, obtaining better jobs, be writers, and so on.
Everyone, but predominantly intellectuals and writers, started arguing about the place which
women ought to have in society, until it became a big and debated issue by the name of
“Woman Question”. It had a crucial role in a century in which many other changes occurred,
such as revolutionary turmoil, imperialist expansion, industrialization, and political reforms.
12
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and the Alphabet, The Project Gutenberg eBook, 2004, p. 9.
13
Ivi, p. 47
13
However, despite all the discussions, debates, and the steps forward, there still was an
oppressive and misogynist approach to the idea of femininity, which was still considered as a
paradigm of self-denial and sacrifice, invoking the Christian-based idea of the angelic woman.
Religion has always had a strong impact on social matters and people’s beliefs, especially in
America, which was a very religious country, except for the birth of movements like
Transcendentalism, which tried to revise some of the old traditions of the Church. It was
religion itself, in fact, to influence the characterization of the good woman and mother as a
kind of Madonna, a devoted and obedient angel. The Victorian era was deeply marked by the
cult of the “angel in the house”, and we can find the practical representation of this idea both
in art and literature. Painters, for example, started portraying angels explicitly as female
figures in the 19
th
century, while, before that time, they had been painted mostly without clear
marks of gender, and writers used a vocabulary drawn from religion: all these artistic
recourses were used in order to propose the model of a frail and ethereal woman, characterized
by selflessness, refinement, and piety. Women were not only angels but also queens of the
house, which was their realm and the only place in which they could express themselves or
be partly free.
14
However, the Victorian imagery of women was quite contradictory, as it comprised
conflicting extremes: a woman could be angel or monster, a virgin or a sexual temptress. In
most of the cases, it can be assumed that these opposite images could overlap, since American
and English women could have been both angels and madwomen.
15
But being a madwoman
14
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, Norton &
Company, New York, 1996, pp. 283-289.
15
Ivi, p. 291.
14
was just the manifestation of a mental illness, ascribable to hysteria, which afflicted some
women and became a way to express (also unconsciously) discontent with their limited lives.
Hysteria became the socially accepted illness for women and the alternative role for all those
who couldn’t bear their personal and family status. Illness was, though, extremely connected
to female beauty, and ideal women had to show a melancholic appearance. Besides, they
could not desire a life without children, without a husband, or without self-denial, since they
would have been considered mad or other than the regular behaviour of the “angels of the
house”, which they were expected to be. That is why we have plenty of testimonies of both
angelic and madwomen in the Victorian era, mostly in literature (see 2.2).
16
Women, then,
could not deviate from the path they were assigned by society, since deviating from domestic
duties, from passivity, and from devotion would have been considered a kind of rebellion
imputable to madness and hysteria.
Marriage, in fact, completely oppressed and overshadow them, and William
Blackstone, an English jurist of that time, clearly summarized this situation, referring to
English women: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very
being or legal existence of a woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least it is
incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection, and
cover she performs everything, […].
17
”English Law was the basis of the statute of colonies,
and American married women underwent the same treatment and rules. Married American
women, like their English counterparts, could not own property either earnings, they didn’t
16
Julianna Little, “Frailty, thy name is woman”: Depiction of Female Madness, Virginia Commonwealth University,
Richmond, 2015, pp. 27-30.
17
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. I, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1765, p. 430.
15
have entitlement to their own physical liberty, and their obliteration was both legal and moral.
Their education was also very restricted, since they would have to be taught history,
mathematics, classics, modern languages, drawing, and music in order only to converse
intelligently with men, but all the other fields were considered improper for women. They
had, on the other hand, to complete a lady’s training to acquire an elegant and aristocratic
posture, read the Bible for many hours, knit, sew, think about fashion and society, and care
for the children
18
. Women’s role was, therefore, far more restricted and marginal than men’s
one, since the Victorian feminine ideal wanted them to be secondary to men, which ruled the
public world of politics and business. The ideal woman of the time was a totally submitted
one, and was just required to manage all the responsibilities of the house, obey her husband
and her father, and renounce to her liberty or autonomy. She had to be the guardian of religion
and the spokeswomen for morality, be gentle, loving, and caring.
Woman’s domestic sphere and their angelic image remained the main idea throughout
the nineteenth century
19
, and this can be also inferred from many English and American
literary works which contain testimonies of women’s lives in the nineteenth century. One of
the greatest and most interesting testimonies is Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth
Century (1845), originally published in 1843 in The Dial magazine as “The Great Lawsuit.
Man versus Men. Woman versus Women”, which is considered, as Larry J. Reynolds states,
“the foundational text of the women’s rights movement in America
20
”. However, this text will
be discussed later, since it is one of the most powerful works of that time concerning women’s
18
Gilbert and Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, p. 292, 293.
19
A. Hogan and A. Bradstock (edited by) Women of Faith in Victorian Culture, Macmillan Press, London, 1998, p. 1.
20
Margaret Fuller, L. J. Reynolds (edited by), Woman in the nineteenth century, Norton & Company, New York, 1997,
p. ix.
16
rights and role in society. Margaret Fuller powerfully addresses women and encourages them
to see more in themselves than what society wanted them to see or believe, since they could
gain and yearn for all those things that men already had. This is a strong feminist plea for
women’s liberation from society’s constraints, written in an age in which feminism was just
taking its first steps. This is what was written on American soil, while in Britain we can find
previous testimonies of women talking about their rights and their social situation. In Britain,
in fact, this epoch is remembered as “The long Eighteenth Century”, since it had been an age
characterized by the first stages of middleclass women’s social and cultural emancipation.
This was carried out by associations of women called bluestockings, which gave birth to
private cultural clubs, aimed at promoting women’s talent, demanding rights for women
(despite their continuous exclusion from politics or education), and fighting against prejudices
by creating a more open intellectual environment, more apt to accept the female presence in
the cultural world. The term, alluding playfully to the regular blue socks used both by women
and men in contrast to the strict fashion rules of the time, is still used today with a negative
meaning, indicating women openly expressing their literary interests and cultivating their
intellect, instead of the frivolous and socialite aspects which are believed to be proper of their
sex. However, this was exactly the significant change that characterized the epoch that
Virginia Woolf defined, in 1929, with these words: “[…] towards the end of the Eighteenth
century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully
and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class
woman began to write
21
”. She considers women approaching literature and writing as a
21
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Grafton, Great Britain, 1977, p. 71.
17
watershed moment in history, since they could finally change the entire literary system and
the perception the world had of them, both culturally and socially. The last years of the century
had been determinant in respect to women’s affirmation of their social rights, and many
writers, also in the light of their life experience, took part in this social protest, also becoming
protagonists and promoters.
22
Mary Wollstonecraft was one of them, since she attacked the
way in which women had been constructed to suit society and corrupted to exalt not their
qualities but their inferiority. Her thought is summarized in her A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792), which is mainly considered one of the first arguments for female equality on
different levels, such as political, economic, and cultural ones. The treatise primarily claims
women’s right to education, in order to foster an active and equal collaboration between men
and women for the sake of society. This is her plea: “It is time to bring about a revolution in
female manners, time to restore their lost dignity to them and to make them, as a part of the
human species, work to reform the world by reforming themselves
23
”.
Culture and education were, in fact, two of the areas in which discrepancies were most
evident, as mentioned before, between men and women, not only in Britain but also in
America, despite being considered as a land that could have possibly offered women new
possibilities.
24
By the early eighteenth century, thinkers and intellectuals on both sides of the
Atlantic started disputing women’s intellectual inferiority and proposing equal capacities for
both sexes. There still were, however, thinkers who discouraged this openness and doubted
22
Gioiella Roccia Bruni, Brilliant Women. A proposito di Mary Wollstonecraft, in Quaderno del dipartimento di
letterature comparate Università degli Studi di Roma Tre, Roma, Carocci Editore, 2008, pp.417, 418.
23
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 31,
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/wollstonecraft1792.pdf, last accessed 03/07/19.
24
Gilbert and Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, p. 255.
18
female intellectual abilities, but there also were many others who believed in the advantages
of educating women and, consequently, their wives. Girls shouldn’t be only taught to read but
also introduced to deeper intellectual subjects such as philosophy, history, art. Many people
started thinking that the supposed “incapacity” of the female mind was just something
imposed by the society and not naturally acquired, and that is the reason why there was, in
those years, a greater appreciation for the female intellect. Women had to shape men’s
morality and manners, and educating them would have been determinant for the entire
society, since, through the cultivation of their mind, they could have moulded society and
made history.
25
However, feminist political and educational advances came gradually,
although many movements tried to influence people’s thoughts or beliefs on this theme, as
thinkers like Frances Wright and Catherine Beecher tried to do in America: they mostly fought
to demand trainings for girls, and the actual Oberlin College was the first, in 1833, to admit
young women. Protests were also carried out in order to demand women’s entrance into
higher education, and this caused an increase in female interest in joining the professions,
creating in turn a problem of competition with men and a social unrest, since the world was
not ready yet for such a change
26
.
These claims had been fostered by the impulses toward political reforms, social
changes, and the changes impelled by the Industrial Revolution. The rebelliousness was, then,
encouraged by the awareness that the leisure required for their sex had been completely
unproductive and useless, since women realized that they could contribute, as much as men,
25
D. M. Bauer and P. Gould (edited by), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 20-21.
26
Ivi, pp. 299, 300.
19
to social, economic, and cultural development. More and more women became aware of the
disadvantages of their sex and the different way in which they were treated compared to men,
or by men themselves. Women, including the aristocratic ones, who could have been
apparently privileged, started rebelling and demanding changes to a system which was
completely unjust and unequal. In the United States, the feminist movement moved its first
steps in conjunction with the antislavery movement, which counted many women fighting,
from the 1830s onwards, for the emancipation of the blacks in the southern part of the country.
Some of them wanted to speak in public to support their cause, but they were not allowed to
do that, but, as Sarah Grimké declared in 1838, “whatsoever it is morally right for a man to
do, it is morally right for a woman to do”
27
. She is a well-known feminist, since she was the
first American woman who wrote the first comprehensive assertion of women’s rights, calling
for a change in a legal system which introduced so unequal laws to intensify the disparity
between men and women.
28
Countless other American women, black and white, of all ages
and classes, had become part of this strong movement trying to change a system which didn’t
protect, or even consider, in a social sense, both women and slaves. This bond between
disadvantaged categories, and all the different episodes which did nothing but highlight the
disparity, resulted in the Convention on Women’s Rights (1848) held in Seneca Falls, that
revised the American Declaration of Independence. The American movement had a great
impact over the European countries, and specifically over Britain, which followed its lead and
continued what English women had started first. Political rights, however, were more difficult
to obtain than, for example, social ones, and this is the reason why both English and American
27
Angelina E. Grimké, “Letter XII” in Letters to Catherine Beecher, Isaac Knapp, Boston, 1838.
28
Joyce W. Warren, Women, Money and the Law, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2005, p. 4.
20
women had to wait till the World War I for the vote and for all those rights which could finally
let them reach equality.
29
The coming of the American Revolution, in the second half of the
eighteenth century, had, in fact, been a turning point in the consideration of women’s role,
heightening their importance mostly in the public dimension. They highly contributed to the
Revolution, as much as men did, through their influence over men, which indirectly helped
the country and let them gain a determinant political role. They inculcated patriotism, taught
virtue, and encouraged self-sacrifice: they actively shaped the future of the American
Republic and finally began to be evaluated as they deserved, and not as society imposed.
30
2.2 Women in and through Literature
Literature has always been one of the main testimonies of a given culture, society,
lifestyle and tradition. It is one of the most important records of how people lived in a specific
age, which were their believes, their customs, their social structure and which were their
problems. When investigating a community or an era, as this thesis is trying to do, literature
can be the best tool to gather information and to understand something that would otherwise
be unintelligible. Literary works contain precious elements and details, which must be
considered also in relation to the author, who is a fundamental clue in order to understand the
text and the perspective from which it is written.
29
Ivi, pp. 297-299.
30
Ivi, pp. 21-23.
Ricevi informazioni sui nostri servizi, sulle offerte e non perdere news e consigli su università e lavoro.
