American women endured many inequalities in the 19th century: They
were denied the vote, barred from professional schools and most
higher education, forbidden to speak in public and even attend
public conventions, and unable to own property. Despite these
obstacles, a strong women's network sprang up. Through letters,
personal friendships, formal meetings, women's newspapers, and
books, women furthered social change. Intellectual women drew
parallels between themselves and slaves. They courageously demanded
fundamental reforms, such as the abolition of slavery and women's
suffrage, despite social ostracism and sometimes financial ruin.
Their works were the vanguard of intellectual expression of a
larger women's literary tradition that included the sentimental
novel. Women's sentimental novels, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin, were enormously popular. They appealed to the
emotions and often dramatized contentious social issues,
particularly those touching the family and women's roles and
responsibilities.
Abolitionist Lydia Child (1802-1880), who greatly influenced
Margaret Fuller, was a leader of this network. Her successful 1824
novel Hobomok shows the need for racial and religious toleration.
Its setting -- Puritan Salem, Massachusetts -- anticipated
Nathaniel Hawthorne. An activist, Child founded a private girls'
school, founded and edited the first journal for children in the
United States, and published the first anti- slavery tract, An
Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, in
1833. This daring work made her notorious and ruined her
financially. Her History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages
and Nations (1855) argues for women's equality by pointing to their
historical achievements.
Angelina Grimké (1805-1879) and Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) were born
into a large family of wealthy slaveowners in elegant Charleston,
South Carolina. These sisters moved to the North to defend the
rights of blacks and women. As speakers for the New York
Anti-Slavery Society, they were the first women to publicly lecture
to audiences, including men. In letters, essays, and studies, they
drew parallels between racism and sexism.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), abolitionist and women's rights
activist, lived for a time in Boston, where she befriended Lydia
Child. With Lucretia Mott, she organized the 1848 Seneca Falls
Convention for Women's rights; she also drafted its Declaration of
Sentiments. Her "Woman's Declaration of Independence" begins "men
and women are created equal" and includes a resolution to give
women the right to vote. With Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton campaigned for suffrage in the 1860s and 1870s, formed the
anti-slavery Women's Loyal National League and the National Woman
Suffrage Association, and co-edited the weekly newspaper
Revolution. President of the Woman Suffrage Association for 21
years, she led the struggle for women's rights. She gave public
lectures in several states, partly to support the education of her
seven children.
After her husband died, Cady Stanton deepened her analysis of
inequality between the sexes. Her book The Woman's Bible (1895)
discerns a deep-seated anti-female bias in Judaeo-Christian
tradition. She lectured on such subjects as divorce, women's
rights, and religion until her death at 86, just after writing a
letter to President Theodore Roosevelt supporting the women's vote.
Her numerous works -- at first pseudonymous, but later under her
own name -- include three co-authored volumes of History of Woman
Suffrage (1881-1886) and a candid, humorous autobiography.
Sojourner Truth (c.1797-1883) epitomized the endurance and charisma
of this extraordinary group of women. Born a slave in New York, she
grew up speaking Dutch. She escaped from slavery in 1827, settling
with a son and daughter in the supportive Dutch- American Van
Wagener family, for whom she worked as a servant. They helped her
win a legal battle for her son's freedom, and she took their name.
Striking out on her own, she worked with a preacher to convert
prostitutes to Christianity and lived in a progressive communal
home. She was christened "Sojourner Truth" for the mystical voices
and visions she began to experience. To spread the truth of these
visionary teachings, she sojourned alone, lecturing, singing gospel
songs, and preaching abolitionism through many states over three
decades. Encouraged by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she advocated
women's suffrage. Her life is told in the Narrative of Sojourner
Truth (1850), an autobiographical account transcribed and edited by
Olive Gilbert. Illiterate her whole life, she spoke Dutch-accented
English. Sojourner Truth is said to have bared her breast at a
women's rights convention when she was accused of really being a
man. Her answer to a man who said that women were the weaker sex
has become legendary:
I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into bars, and no man
could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as
much as a man -- when I could get it -- and bear the lash as well!
And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them
most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's
grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?
This humorous and irreverent orator has been compared to the great
blues singers. Harriet Beecher Stowe and many others found wisdom
in this visionary black woman, who could declare, "Lord, Lord, I
can love even de white folk!"
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the
Lowly was the most popular American book of the 19th century. First
published serially in the National Era magazine (1851- 1852), it
was an immediate success. Forty different publishers printed it in
England alone, and it was quickly translated into 20 languages,
receiving the praise of such authors as Georges Sand in France,
Heinrich Heine in Germany, and Ivan Turgenev in Russia.
Its
passionate appeal for an end to slavery in the United States
inflamed the debate that, within a decade, led to the U.S. Civil
War (1861-1865).
Reasons for the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin are obvious. It
reflected the idea that slavery in the United States, the nation
that purportedly embodied democracy and equality for all, was an
injustice of colossal proportions.
Stowe herself was a perfect representative of old New England
Puritan stock. Her father, brother, and husband all were well-
known, learned Protestant clergymen and reformers. Stowe conceived
the idea of the novel -- in a vision of an old, ragged slave being
beaten -- as she participated in a church service. Later, she said
that the novel was inspired and "written by God." Her motive was
the religious passion to reform life by making it more godly. The
Romantic period had ushered in an era of feeling: The virtues of
family and love reigned supreme. Stowe's novel attacked slavery
precisely because it violated domestic values.
Uncle Tom, the slave and central character, is a true Christian
martyr who labors to convert his kind master, St. Clare, prays for
St. Clare's soul as he dies, and is killed defending slave women.
Slavery is depicted as evil not for political or philosophical
reasons but mainly because it divides families, destroys normal
parental love, and is inherently un-Christian. The most touching
scenes show an agonized slave mother unable to help her screaming
child and a father sold away from his family. These were crimes
against the sanctity of domestic love.
Stowe's novel was not originally intended as an attack on the
South; in fact, Stowe had visited the South, liked southerners, and
portrayed them kindly. Southern slaveowners are good masters and
treat Tom well. St. Clare personally abhors slavery and intends to
free all of his slaves. The evil master Simon Legree, on the other
hand, is a nrtherner and the villain. Ironically, the novel was
meant to reconcile the North and South, which were drifting toward
the Civil War a decade away. Ultimately, though, the book was used
by abolitionists and others as a polemic against the South.
Harriet Jacobs (1818-1896)
Born a slave in North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs was taught to read
and write by her mistress. On her mistress's death, Jacobs was sold
to a white master who tried to force her to have sexual relations.
She resisted him, finding another white lover by whom she had two
children, who went to live with her grandmother. "It seems less
degrading to give one's self than to submit to compulsion," she
candidly wrote. She escaped from her owner and started a rumor that
she had fled North.
Terrified of being caught and sent back to slavery and punishment,
she spent almost seven years hidden in her master's town, in the
tiny dark attic of her grandmother's house. She was sustained by
glimpses of her beloved children seen through holes that she
drilled through the ceiling. She finally escaped to the North,
settling in Rochester, New York, where Frederick Douglass was
publishing the anti-slavery newspaper North Star and near which (in
Seneca Falls) a women's rights convention had recently met. There
Jacobs became friends with Amy Post, a Quaker feminist
abolitionist, who encouraged her to write her autobiography.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published under the
pseudonym "Linda Brent" in 1861, was edited by Lydia Child. It
outspokenly condemned the sexual exploitation of black slave women.
Jacobs's book, like Douglass's, is part of the slave narrative
genre extending back to Olauda Equiano in colonial times.
Harriet Wilson (c. 1807-1870)
Harriet Wilson was the first African-American to publish a novel in
the United States -- Our Nig: or, Sketches from the life of a Free
Black, in a two-storey white house, North. showing that Slavery's
Shadows Fall Even There (1859). The novel realistically dramatizes
the marriage between a white woman and a black man, and also
depicts the difficult life of a black servant in a wealthy
Christian household. Formerly thought to be autobiographical, it is
now understood to be a work of fiction.
Like Jacobs, Wilson did not publish under her own name (Our Nig was
ironic), and her work was overlooked until recently. The same can
be said of the work of most of the women writers of the era. Noted
African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. -- in his role of
spearheading the black fiction project -- reissued Our Nig in
1983.
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
The most famous black American anti-lavery leader and orator of the
era, Frederick Douglass was born a slave on a Maryland plantation.
It was his good fortune to be sent to relatively liberal Baltimore
as a young man, where he learned to read and write. Escaping to
Massachusetts in 1838, at age 21, Douglass was helped by
abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison and began to lecture for
anti-lavery societies.
In 1845, he published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave (second version 1855, revised in 1892),
the best and most popular of many "slave narratives." Often
dictated by illiterate blacks to white abolitionists and used as
propaganda, these slave narratives were well-known in the years
just before the Civil War. Douglass's narrative is vivid and highly
literate, and it gives unique insights into the mentality of
slavery and the agony that institution caused among blacks.
The slave narrative was the first black literary prose genre in the
United States. It helped blacks in the difficult task of
establishing an African-American identity in white America, and it
has continued to exert an important influence on black fictional
techniques and themes throughout the 20th century. The search for
identity, anger against discrimination, and sense of living an
invisible, hunted, underground life unacknowledged by the white
majority have recurred in the works of such 20th- century black
American authors as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison,
and Toni Morrison
WOMEN WRITERS AND REFORMERS
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