4.2. Women's movement through the 19th Amendment

Major ideological frameworks:

  • continuing discrepancy between foundational documents vs. actual circumstances (no rights (to vote), no education, limitations after marriage)

  • separation of spheres: “By nature different”: Man (public sphere) superior (rational) → Women (domestic sphere) inferior (emotional)

  • “republican motherhood”: finding fulfilment in role of mother raising sons who will later serve republic

  • Cult of true womanhood: piety, purity, submissiveness, domesticity → women as keeper of virtue and home creating nice atmosphere e.g. Fanny Palmer, John Cameron “Four seasons of Life” 1868; Catherine E. Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe “The American Woman's Home” 1869

Women's rights: early proponents

  • Anne Bradstreet 1612-1672

  • Abigail Adams 1735-1818 (mother/wife of president)

    • Letter “Remember the ladies” March 31, 1776 to John Adams: Don't forget women, threatening rebellion

  • Judith Sargent Murray 1751-1820

    • “On the Equality of the Sexes” 1790: inequality culturally constructed, not by nature

  • Margaret Fuller 1810-1850

    • attacks male contradictions: wanting to free slaves but oppress women

      • “Women in the Nineteenth Century” 1845: Rejection of gender roles, intellectual equality

Turned into the emergence of a women's movement

  • into 19th century turned into reform movements

  • link between women's movement and abolitionism

Major figures in emergence:

  • Sarah Moore Grimké 1792-1873

  • soujourner Truth 17??-1883

  • Fanny Fern 1811-1872

  • ….

Example voice: Sojourner Truth 1797-1883

  • “Ain't I a woman” 1851/1863 → The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Dictated by Sojourner Truth by Olive Gilbert 1850

  • born a slave, forced to marry another slave, ran away, became advocat

  • 1851 Sojourner Truth's speech at Women's Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio

  • 1851 speech was published “On Woman's rights”

  • 1863 Published again “Ain't I a woman” by Frances Dana Barker gage with changes: wording, accent (most well known version) → uses famous anti-slavery rhetoric → misrepresentation

Climax

  • 1848 Seneca Falls convention

  • initiated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815-1902 and Lucretia Mott 1793-1880

  • “Declaration of Sentiments”/”Seneca Falls Declaration” 1848: produced there, central document, first of its kind, signed by 100 people, two major issues

    • right to vote

    • law of coverture (no roght to own after marriage) → Goal: Married Women's Property Act

  • 1850s: loss of momentum

During Civil War

  • disappointment of high expectations (women had to step up, take men's jobs but did not get more rights)

  • especially Amendment 15 → exclusion of women

American women's movement 1869-1919

  • major national organizations founded

    • 1869: National Woman Suffrage Organization (NWSA) and American Woman Souffrage Association (AWSA)

    • merged 1890 into NAtional American Woman Suffrage Association NAWSA

      → Protest movement

    • e.g. Susan B. Anthony: History of Woman Suffrage 1881

WWI led to changes (based on racial motives) → developments:

  • voting rights: 1919: 19th constitutional amendment

  • higher education: by 1900, women 30% of college students

  • new role. “New Woman”: independent, confident woman, sexual liberal, central motive: bicycle

  • aroun 1920 term feminism emerged

Women's fiction

Popular women writers of first half of 19th century and cultural work of sentimentality

2 central texts that drew attention to female writers:

  • David S. Reynolds: Beneath the American Renaissance 1988

  • Jane Tompkins: Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985)

Frame

  • growing reading public (esp. women and young people)

  • “feminization of American culture”

  • women writers became best-selling in 19 th century

  • Hawthorne = “mob of ddamned scribbling women”

Sentimental novels some examples 1820s-1850s (only white women”

  • Catharine Maria Segdwick “Hope Leslie” 1827

  • Harriet Beecher Stowe “Uncle Tom's Cabin” 1852

→ Female protagonist not just personification of virtue and morality, also adventurers, abused, slaves, sexual experiences, …

Sentimental fiction as means to achieve reforms

  • power of sentimentality: affective → changes in political

  • protagonist as suffering innocent victim → change has to happen

  • strategy: reader feels and sympathizes

  • bipolar structure: melodramatic, containing obvious contradictions

  • formulaic/stock scenes

H.B. Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin 1852

  • sufferings of black uncle Tom, humanizes slaves, was supposed to cause real consequences

  • was criticised for it: not good representation

    → publishing of “A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin”

Significance of popular/sentimental novels:

  • Women had more agency and moral superiority

  • xpose social conditions / evils as male-dominated

  • different perspective on American history

→ early 19th century sentimental/domestic novel popular into second half of 19th century

Yet: women writers moved beyond pattern

  • realistic, more open criticism

  • “awakening”

  • Solidarity/bonding, call for all females

    → transitional phase between sentimental fiction and feminism e.g. Louisa May Alcott

  • extension of subject matter

  • new protagonists break with roles

  • formal/structural innovations

  • between tradition and innovation

American feminist fiction at turn of 20th century e.g.

  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860-1935

  • Kate Chopin 1851-1904

  • ….

Kate Chopin 1851-1904

  • e.g. “At Fault” 1890

  • Anglo-Irish immigrants, catholics

  • married to Louisiana Creoles business man, had 6 children → fulfilled expectations

  • Setting: 19th century Louisiana → regionalism/local color

  • Central theme:

    • tradition vs. convention

    • individual's (women's) right to self-fulfillment

The Storm 1898

  • unpublished until 1969 edition

  • contradiction to constraining gender roles → attacks separation of spheres

  • symbolically explicit representation of sexual encounter → joy, openness

  • no “narrative condemnation” → no punishments, affirms women's rights

The Awakening 1899

  • woman (Edna) living in oppressing society realizes oppressions after fulfilling them and breaks conventions in several instances but no chances to really break free

Intersection: African American Women

→ intersectionality: multiple oppressions in one identity

  • Harriet Jacobs 1813-1897

  • Elizabeth Keckley 1818-1907

  • ….