FEMINISM

The term "feminism," broadly defined as the advocacy of political, economic, and social equality between men and women, was not coined until the 1910s; however, though the word itself did not exist in the nineteenth century, the concept of "woman's rights" certainly did. The organized movement for female suffrage and gender equality began in the small upstate village of Seneca Falls, New York, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) organized the first women's rights convention in July 1848. This meeting, attended by some three hundred men and women, ratified the Declaration of Sentiments, a document written by Stanton based on the Declaration of Independence, outlining the key problems faced by nineteenth-century American women. As such the Declaration of Sentiments established the agenda of the women's rights movement for the next seventy-five years.

WOMEN'S ISSUES

In the Declaration of Sentiments, Stanton enumerated specific complaints concerning the oppressed status of women in American society: their inability to vote; exclusion from higher education and professional careers; subordination to male authority in both church and state; and legal victimization in terms of wages, property rights, and divorce. After identifying these injustices, the document proclaimed a series of resolutions, including the assertion that "woman is man's equal . . . and that all laws which prevent woman from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority" (Kraditor, p. 187).

The right to vote became a pressing goal in the latter part of the nineteenth century; from 1870 to 1917 the American Woman's Suffrage Association sponsored the weekly Woman's Journal, edited over the years by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry B. Blackwell, and others. Women would not formally be granted the right to vote until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, but significant progress was made in advancing their social, economic, and legal status during the latter half of the century. For example, in 1848, the same year as the Seneca Falls Convention, the state of New York passed the landmark Married Woman's Property Act, the first legislation of its kind in the United States, recognizing the right of women to own and retain property separate from their husbands. This law was expanded in an 1860 omnibus Act concerning the Rights and Liabilities of Husband and Wife, which improved inheritance laws for women and acknowledged mothers as joint guardians of their children; however, this progressive legislation was partially rescinded in 1862.

The decades between 1850 and 1900 also saw unprecedented growth in the number of colleges founded for women. Many of the "Seven Sisters" were established during this time period—Vassar in 1861, Wellesley in 1870, Smith in 1871, Radcliffe in 1879, Bryn Mawr in 1880, and Barnard in 1893—joining the ranks of institutions like Oberlin and Mount Holyoke that had opened their doors to females in the 1830s. Yet even with improved access to higher education, admission into the professions remained elusive for women. An 1873 Supreme Court decision, Bradwell v. Illinois, epitomizes this difficulty. The case originated in 1869, when Mrs. Myra Bradwell passed the Illinois law exam but was denied admission to the state bar "by reason of the disability imposed by [her] married condition." Arguing that marriage is "neither a crime nor a disqualification" (Cullen-Dupont, p. 26), Bradwell claimed that the state of Illinois had violated her constitutional rights, specifically those guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. She appealed her case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately decided against her. The opinion of Justice Joseph P. Bradley, in which he asserted his "repugnance" at the "idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband," is often cited as an example of the prevailing patriarchal attitudes toward women during this time period: "The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things" (Cullen-Dupont, p. 27).

As Bradley's statement suggests, women were not viewed as individuals in the nineteenth century. They were dependent beings confined to a domestic sphere who were completely defined by their social relationships to others—as daughter, spouse, mother, aunt, and sister. Female fulfillment was not to derive from the pursuit of personal ambition but rather from women's roles as "angels of the house," instilling moral values in their children and creating a tranquil domestic refuge for their husbands. Throughout the nineteenth century the notion of "true woman-hood"—as illustrated in Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel Little Women—dictated that females should be selfless, pious, submissive, and silent; women who deviated from these restrictive norms were ostracized and held in contempt.

Even in matters of dress, women were expected to conform to socially constructed standards of beauty and femininity, much to the detriment of their personal health. Traditional female attire featured long, heavy skirts with multiple layers of petticoats, often weighing as much as twenty pounds, and whalebone corsets so tight that broken ribs and organ damage were common ailments among middle- and upper-class women. Yet despite the obviously impractical and unsafe nature of these garments, Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–1894) was subjected to scathing attack in the early 1850s when she published a pattern for "rational dress"—nicknamed "bloomers"—in the Lily newspaper. Bloomers featured a knee-length skirt beneath which loose linen trousers, gathered at the ankle, were worn. No corsets, petticoats, or other confining under-garments were needed. Women who adopted the bloomer costume, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony, praised the physical freedom it afforded but endured both hostility and ridicule for appropriating traditional male attire. Fearing that the controversy over dress reform would eclipse critical issues like suffrage, these women eventually abandoned bloomers and returned to conventional apparel.

Dress reform resurfaced in the 1890s with the advent of the bicycle. In order to participate in the new recreational sport of cycling, women adopted "knickers" in increasingly large numbers. This manly garb was widely satirized in the popular press, just as bloomers had been four decades earlier; the cartoon "Life in the New Navy, circa 1900" which appeared in the 11 July 1896 issue of Life magazine, reflects a deeply rooted cultural anxiety about the subversive implications of women donning male clothes. As the image depicts, the navy of the future consisted primarily of women wearing uniforms of differently styled knickers—the unique details of each design apparently indicating distinctions in military rank. The cartoon humorously suggests that once females begin usurping traditionally male privileges, such as the wearing of pants, there is no limit to the potential power they might wield.

Beginning in the last two decades of the nineteenth century the "New Woman" emerged in both the United States and Europe as a reaction against the Victorian cult of domesticity. New Women were educated, were committed to the goals of personal autonomy and financial independence, and looked upon marriage and motherhood as a matter of individual choice rather than of economic necessity or biological destiny. The diverse ranks of New Women included writers, political thinkers, suffragettes, and social activists; through the medium of the popular press, they critiqued conventional views of female beauty (long hair and long skirts) and restrictive social protocols such as the need for women to be accompanied by chaperones. They also demanded an end to the sexual "double standard."

LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN AND WOMEN'S RIGHTS

Many writers, both male and female, addressed the issue of women's social condition during this time period. For example, the 1879 novella Daisy Miller by Henry James (1843–1916), features a wealthy, attractive, but uncultured "American girl" touring Europe who openly rebels against the standards of female propriety. As the novella progresses, Daisy's behavior grows increasingly headstrong and reckless; dismissing the need for a chaperone as an absurd, infantilizing encumbrance, she walks unescorted in the Pincio Gardens and visits the Colosseum late at night with Mr. Giovanelli, her "third-rate" Italian suitor. James punishes Daisy for these infractions in etiquette not only by making her the target of malicious gossip but also by inflicting the most dire of consequences—death from malarial fever. In this respect Daisy Miller serves as a cautionary tale for young women, suggesting that their very survival depends on passive, unquestioning acceptance of restrictive gender roles. James's 1886 novel The Bostonians explicitly satirizes the "great sisterhood of women" committed to suffrage and social reform, lampooning their simplistic narrative of "how, during the long ages of history, they had been trampled under the iron heel of man" (p. 58). Some scholars believe that the romantic triangle James dramatizes in the novel, in which the feminist Olive Chancellor and the conservative southern attorney Basil Ransom vie for the affection and control of the beautiful "inspirational" speaker Verena Tarrant, is based on an actual incident involving the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, and a popular young lecturer, Anna Dickinson.

Male aversion to women's entry into both the public sphere and professional careers is also reflected in James's characterization of the female physician Dr. Mary J. Prance in The Bostonians. Prance is unsexed by her profession, short-haired and boyish in her appearance, and forthright in her speech. James further undercuts Prance's legitimacy as a doctor by making her a proponent of homeopathy. Similarly, in William Dean Howells's 1881 novel, Dr. Breen's Practice, the anomalous figure of the female physician (who also happens to be a homeopath) is treated with overt contempt. Grace Breen enters the field of medicine not out of an altruistic desire to heal and to mitigate human suffering but because she has been disappointed in love. The inherent weakness of Grace's character is further symbolized by her inability to drive a carriage. Dependent upon a male driver for transportation to see her patients, Grace eventually falls in love with her chauffeur and forsakes her medical practice in order to marry him. Through his negative characterization of Grace, Howells insidiously questions the fitness and suitability of all women for the practice of medicine.

These negative attitudes toward female physicians are dramatically counterpointed in two contemporary novels by women—Dr. Zay (1882) by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) and A Country Doctor (1884) by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909); together these four works capture the tenor of the contentious public debate regarding women and medicine in the 1880s. In fact, Phelps's novel was largely inspired by the sense of outrage she experienced while reading Dr. Breen's Practice in serial installments in the Atlantic Monthly. In contrast to Grace Breen, Phelps's protagonist, Zaidee Atalanta Lloyd, is strong, competent, and highly successful in her chosen profession, ministering faithfully to her townspeople through epidemics of scarlet fever and diphtheria. Remarkably, Dr. Zay's proud, independent spirit and commitment to medicine do not preclude romantic involvement and marriage; by the novel's end she has accepted the hand of Waldo Yorke, a progressive-minded individual who understands that her duties will regularly take her away from home. As such, the Yorkes' marriage promises to be a true partnership predicated on mutual support and respect, unlike the pattern of domination and submission so common in nineteenth-century literature. Nan Prince, however, the heroine of Jewett's novel A Country Doctor, is not as fortunate. Believing that she must ultimately sacrifice personal happiness in order to pursue her medical career, Nan rejects the proposal of her devoted suitor, Mr. George Gerry, stating:

I could not marry the whole of myself as most women can. . . . I know better and better that most women are made for another sort of existence, but by and by I must do my part in my own way to make many homes happy instead of one; to free them from pain, and teach grown people and little children to keep their bodies free from weakness and deformities. (P. 242)

Nan's statement reveals that she views the healing profession as all-consuming and therefore regards marriage as an unacceptable compromise for both spouses.

The complex issue of women, careers, and marriage is also examined in an 1874 novel called Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master by the suffragist Lillie Devereux Blake (1833–1913). In many ways this melodramatic tale offers a compendium of the obstacles and injustices faced by nineteenth-century American women of various social classes. Blake's protagonist, Laura Stanley, is by all definitions a "New Woman," a recent graduate of Essex College (a thinly disguised version of Vassar) and a strong proponent of female suffrage, who has journeyed alone to New York City in order to establish a career as a teacher. There she encounters a former college acquaintance, a wealthy young woman named Flora Livingstone, who leads the glamorous but unfulfilling life of socialite—constantly dressing, dancing, and flitting from one superficial engagement to the next. Unhappily betrothed to the imperious Ferdinand Le Roy, Flora admires her friend's independence and professional ambition yet feels powerless to change her own situation. The misery of Flora's existence as Mrs. Le Roy is mitigated only by the private satisfaction of writing verse; yet when she dares to publish a poem in a literary magazine without her husband's knowledge or consent, he flies into a rage, burns her manuscripts, and forbids her to write again. Flora then attempts suicide by throwing herself into the sea; although rescued, she dies a few days later of a fever caused by exposure. On her deathbed, Flora pleads with her mother concerning the fate of her younger, unmarried sisters: "Mamma, don't let any of the other girls marry men they don't love. . . .You thought I should be happy in marriage, but it has killed me. . . . I want you to remember this. . . . that women as well as men need an occupation for their energies, and that marriage without love, is worse than death" (pp. 350–351).

Over the course of the novel Laura's life is also threatened by a man—the corrupt, licentious Judge Silas Swinton, whose avocation is the cavalier seduction, abandonment, and ruination of a series of attractive, independent women. When Laura resists Swinton's advances, he orders her kidnapped, chloroformed, and brought to his residence. Laura escapes sexual violation only through the intervention of two other women, Rhoda Dayton and the cross-dressing Frank Heywood, both of whom had been earlier objects of the judge's unsavory attention. With her virtue and reputation intact, Laura goes on to win first prize for one of her paintings at the New York Academy of Design and embarks on a career as an independent artist. And yet despite the successful trajectory of her professional aspirations, the novel ends on a conventional note with Laura's acceptance of a marriage proposal. As in Phelps's novel Dr. Zay, Laura's fiancé, Guy Bradford, offers a promising new model of marriage and manhood, assuring her: "Your obligations to me shall be no greater than mine to you. We will make life's journey hand in hand, equals in all things" (p. 379).

Perhaps the most intriguing character in Fettered for Life, however, is the mysterious Frank Heywood. Like Laura Stanley, Frank (whose female name is never revealed) arrives in New York City friendless and alone, eager to pursue her fortune. After enduring repeated insults, rejections, and sexual propositions, she pawns her last possession—her father's watch—and purchases a man's suit. The transformation, she states, is both instantaneous and remarkable: "My limbs were free; I could move untrammeled, and my actions were free; I could go about unquestioned. No man insulted me, and when I asked for work, I was not offered outrage" (p. 366). Disguised as a man, "Frank" secures a job as an investigative newspaper reporter and works his way up to the position of editor. His ultimate ambition is to become the owner and editor in chief of a prominent journal, which will be the vehicle for promulgating his own progressive social agenda. Yet because Frank's success depends entirely on maintaining a credible male identity, all intimate personal relationships must be forsaken; as he tells Laura, "I shall not marry; my work must be my father and mother, wife and children to me" (p. 302).

Fundamental questions about marriage, personal and professional independence, and the nature of female identity continued to preoccupy women writers throughout the 1890s. Two landmark works of fiction, the 1892 short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) and the 1899 novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1851–1904) reflect these concerns. The first-person narrator of Gilman's story, in the throes of postpartum depression, discovers she is imprisoned both literally in the upstairs bedroom of the home she and her physician husband have rented for the summer and figuratively by the rigid behavioral expectations of the Victorian cult of domesticity. Through her mounting obsession with the grotesque wallpaper decorating her room, she comes to realize that her husband's solicitous concern for her well-being is merely a way of infantilizing and controlling her. The narrator's descent into insanity at the story's end represents a desperate and extreme means of escape from these oppressive circumstances.

Similarly, Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of Chopin's novel, gradually "awakens" to her profound dissatisfaction with the roles imposed by marriage and motherhood. Though her husband, Léonce, provides generously for her outward existence, Edna feels empty and unfulfilled; looking inward she begins "to realize her position in the universe as a human being"—in other words, her identity as a separate, autonomous individual. Edna rebels against custom and convention, abandoning her Tuesday visits to other socially prominent New Orleans wives; she takes up sketching, learns to swim, and eventually becomes involved in an adulterous relationship. By the conclusion of The Awakening, Edna understands that while she can renounce the submissive, acquiescent role of wife, the role and responsibilities of motherhood cannot be ignored. Her sons appear in her imagination "like antagonists . . . who sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days" (p. 175). Edna eludes this entrapment by taking her own life; just as the narrator of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" finds freedom in madness, so Edna Pontellier discovers release in death.

The fiction of Edith Wharton (1862–1937) illustrates how the themes of female dependence and powerlessness persist in early-twentieth-century American literature. In her 1905 novel The House of Mirth, Wharton chronicles the tragic downfall of Lily Bart, a charming woman in her late twenties whose very survival depends upon marrying well. Born into an affluent family ruined by an unspecified financial reversal, Lily is orphaned as a young adult and minimally supported by her staid aunt, Mrs. Peniston. Because of her beauty, sophistication, and family lineage, Lily is welcomed in New York's elite social circles, yet she lacks the financial wherewithal to keep pace with her upper-class associates. Having incurred a significant debt from gambling at bridge, she naively allows Gus Trenor, the husband of a wealthy friend, to "invest" money in the stock market on her behalf. He agrees, hoping thereby to secure the young woman's sexual favors. Over time Trenor provides Lily with many thousands of dollars, which he falsely claims represent the dividends on her original investment. By the time Lily discovers Trenor's duplicity, she is more than $10,000 in debt, with no viable means of repayment.

As vague rumors circulate about the impropriety of her behavior, Lily's prospects of marriage evaporate; she is ostracized and eventually exiled from the privileged social set in which she previously circulated. Lily's downward spiral accelerates when she is disinherited by her conservative aunt and must actually work for a living for the first time in her life. She becomes an apprentice in a millinery shop, where she ineptly sews spangles and veils on ladies' hats and is soon dismissed. Musing on her failure, Lily realizes: "She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose leaf and paint the hummingbird's breast? And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled among social beings than in the world of nature?" (p. 311). Wharton's symbolism is clear—in a patriarchal society, women serve a merely "ornamental" function; they are passive, physically attractive commodities rather than active, purposeful agents. Just prior to Lily's "accidental" overdose from chloral at the end of the novel, she confides to Lawrence Selden, an acquaintance who has deliberately distanced himself from her like all the rest:

I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole? One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap! (P. 320)

The "one hole"—or narrowly defined social niche—into which Lily is destined to fit is that of wife. Once she is deemed unmarriageable, however, Lily loses that foothold and becomes a pariah, concluding after a series of painful humiliations and rejections that her life as a single woman has neither purpose nor intrinsic worth. Like Edna Pontellier, Lily cannot be redeemed; as such, death offers her only means of escape.

These troubling representations of women's plight are echoed and reaffirmed in the work of other late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century female writers like Willa Cather, Susan Glaspell, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. While not overtly propagandistic, these literary texts played a crucial role in galvanizing the political movement for radical social change later known as feminism.

See alsoThe Awakening; Cross-Dressing; Daisy Miller; The House of Mirth; Woman's Journal; Women and Economics; Women's Suffrage; "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Blake, Lillie Devereux. Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master. 1874. New York: Feminist Press, 1996.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening and Selected Stories. 1899. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

James, Henry. The Bostonians. 1886. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

Jewett, Sarah Orne. A Country Doctor. 1884. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. 1905. New York: New American Library, 1964.

Secondary Works

Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American WomenWriters at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Appleby, Joyce, Eileen Change, and Joanne Goodman, eds. Encyclopedia of Women in American History. 3 vols. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2001.

Bardes, Barbara, and Suzanne Gossett. Declarations ofIndependence: Women and Political Power in 19th Century American Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business:American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Cullen-Dupont, Kathryn, ed. The Encyclopedia of Women'sHistory in America. New York: Facts on File, 2000.

Harris, Susan K. 19th Century American Women's Novels:Interpretive Strategies. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Howard, Angela, and Frances Kavenik, eds. Handbook ofAmerican Women's History. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2000.

Kilcup, Karen, ed. Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.

Kraditor, Aileen S., ed. Up from the Pedestal: SelectedWritings in the History of American Feminism. New York: Quadrangle Books, 1968.

Langley, Winston, and Vivian Fox, eds. Women's Rights in the United States: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Marks, Patricia. Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The NewWoman in the Popular Press. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990.

Norton, Mary Beth, and Ruth Alexander. Major Problems inAmerican Women's History: Documents and Essays. 3rd ed. Boston: Heath, 2003.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and M. J. Gage. The History of Woman Suffrage. 3 vols. New York: Ayer, 1979.

Kerry Driscoll