Womanhood in the Long Nineteenth Century
American and British Women through literature, 1789-1914
American and British Women through literature, 1789-1914
“We have been living, as it were, the life of three hundred years in thirty”
-Dr. Thomas Arnold on the rapid industrialization of England during the Victorian period
With the changes of the Romantic and Victorian periods in the intellectual and economic spheres came a reconceptualization of womanhood through literature. The rise of industrialization expanded the middle class and altered women’s relationship to labor and leisure in and outside of the home. The reform of education and an increase in literacy rates prompted the unprecedented inclusion of non-aristocratic women in literary spaces. The leisure middle class status now granted to many women not only allowed them to be a prominent literary audience for the first time in England’s history, but also subsequently encouraged women to be properly engaged in the private sphere of the home. These conditions coalesced into literature, both instructional and fictional, that emphasized the importance of women’s roles in the home and demonstrated proper examples of domesticity. From governess novels like Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre produced in mid-nineteenth century Britain to American sentimental novels like Maria Susanna Cummins’ The Lamplighter, more literature was being published by women for women exploring their collective social place and civil rights.
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Many children’s books focused on conduct, with morals and ideas of good behavior rooted in Evangelicalism. These works provide an excellent lens into life and expectations for children in the 19th century. Works like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela portrayed their young protagonists as models of the ideal girl.
While the concept of the heroine has been present for centuries, often traced back to the infamous Joan of Arc, the heroine was widely popularized in the nineteenth century as more women were able to publish literature. Literary heroines of nineteenth century literature often fell into two categories: a pious, selfless woman to be worshipped that was consistent with Coventry Patmore’s concept of “the angel in the house” in his poem of the same title, and the “New Woman,” a heroine who pushed back against patriarchal ideals as popularized by Henry James and especially Henrik Ibsen. Though these categories certainly shaped the notion of what a heroine is and can be, the Romantic, Victorian, and Late Victorian period produced a wide variety of heroines from Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet to Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. Take a look below at some examples of heroines of this time period that transformed the perception of women within the narratives and beyond the page.
Born in Domrémy around 1412, Joan of Arc was a heroine of France during the Hundred Years' War. She was canonized in 1920.
With the growth of the middle class came an increase in women’s free time. Leisure was not limited to reading alone; hand-crocheting, practicing the piano, drawing or honing one’s artistic skills were all recreational activities middle- and upper-class women participated in during the nineteenth century. However, these women’s positions as the head of the private sphere while their husbands’ were managing the estate or involved in their occupations did not provide time for excessive leisure. Among women’s domestic duties were supervising the children’s moral and intellectual development, engaging in community social welfare work, overseeing the home, and above all ensuring their husbands’ comfort.
While in the beginning of the nineteenth century women were expected to supervise domestic tasks performed by servants such as cooking, cleaning, and infant care, as the middle class continued to grow it became more common for wives and daughters to perform these tasks themselves. By the end of the nineteenth century, courses in these tasks as well as household management and textile work, such as knitting and sewing, were offered to provide women with a domestic sciences education.
Romance novels, like dime novels and sensation stories, were dismissed as simplistic escapism aimed toward an “inferior” class of female readership. This dismissal of work produced by and consumed by women in the nineteenth century was so common that even Jane Austen only was able to publish Sense and Sensibility through her brother Henry. As Austen and others proved, romances popularity allowed for authors to engage with discourse on important societal issues, such as class and gender, in a way that would reach a wide audience. The representations of women in romantic novels would come to shape the perception of a gender for decades to come.
Enslaved women who cultivated cotton on the Southern plantations of the pre–Civil War United States produced the raw material that English working‐class women spun and wove into cloth in the first English factories
In writing letters, Romantic and Victorian age women were able to shift the perceptions of women on a micro scale in a tangible way by creating representations not of literary heroines, but of themselves and female members of their community on the page.
Descriptions of domesticity abroad—which focused on the housekeeping of colonial subjects, who were invariably described as having private lives and households that were far inferior to that of the colonizing nation—abounded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in both scholarly and popular publications. These descriptions were probably largely imaginary, telling us more about European stereotypes under the context of imperialism than about the actual housekeeping of non‐Europeans.
Balls and other occasions for dancing provided the ultimate means for courtship, socialization, and exercising propriety. Dancing and etiquette were prominently featured in nineteenth century society tales and novels of manners, and could be seen in many works from all over the world including Austen’s novels, Ibsen’s plays, and Pavlova’s works. So prominent was dancing as a means of impressing other members of society and attracting possible proposals that there was a genre in its own right of handbooks, manuals, and etiquette books produced exclusively on dancing and ballroom topics.
As with all other social events no matter how recreational, ballrooms and dances were political spaces. While men used the occasion to solidify business relationships and proposals, unmarried women hoped to leave the ballroom with a developing romantic relationship and marriage proposals. Both were economic endeavors, and both were equally important in the economic livelihood and social success of a family. These high stakes of what some may consider a frivolous event perhaps makes the concept of entire handbooks and manuals on the subject seem less absurd to modern audiences.
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)
Portrait of Alcott and sample of her handwriting from Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals.
One of the most influential female writers of the nineteenth century, Alcott is perhaps best known for Little Women, published in 1868. She mainly grew up in Boston and Concord but moved around with her family when they fell into economic strife. Starting at age sixteen, Louisa May Alcott attempted to help her family make money by writing.
Alcott also wrote sensation stories, or "thrillers," that depicted experimental and unconventional themes such as: incest, suicide, drug addiction, sexual passion, and the supernatural. Little Women, on the other hand, "explores questions of gender and power, focusing on Jo March's dissatisfaction with the constraints of girlhood and her efforts to become a successful writer."
Alcott was admirably outspoken about her abolitionist views. In Recollections of My Childhood (1888), Alcott “gloried in having shared in the struggle ‘which put an end to a great wrong.’” She not only contributed to the Civil War effort as a military nurse, but she also wrote short stories about interracial sexuality and marriage. These stories "[offer] suggestions about such a possibility, while underscoring the hard truths of the sexual violation of black women on slave plantations."
Brief detailing of themes present in Alcott's sensation stories, from Plots and Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott
Domesticity is the idealized conception of family life, homemaking, and the role of women within the household, and was central to gender roles and private life by nineteenth century. Upper class wives and daughters were increasingly removed from wage-earning work, expected to devote themselves to housekeeping, social engagements, and child-rearing.
Perceptions of women in the domestic or private sphere are dominated by a single representation: Coventry Patmore’s “angel in the house.” In his poem developed between 1854 and 1862 of the same title, Patmore constructed women as an object to be worshipped for their unfaltering piety, altruism, compassion, morality, purity, and inherent holiness. Feminist critic and literary monolith Virginia Woolf vehemently criticized this image “both for its sentimentality of the ideal woman and for the oppressive effect of this ideal on women’s lives” (Greenblatt 1613). Many contemporary advocates and scholars even considered this representation to be the primary obstacle in women achieving an equal status.
he lesser-known Olympes de Gouges (1748-1793), a French writer and advocate for women's rights, provided some of the earliest feminist critiques that inspired later arguments in favor of equality. De Gouges published more than twenty pamphlets promoting "relief for the poor, education for women, maternity hospitals, and workshops to help the unemployed." She actively criticized the revolutionaries' refusal of women in the formation of the new French republic. Her writings on slavery and racism make de Gouges one of the earliest proponents of equal rights for all humans. She was executed during the French Revolution for her radical beliefs.
The lesser-known Olympes de Gouges (1748-1793), a French writer and advocate for women's rights, provided some of the earliest feminist critiques that inspired later arguments in favor of equality. De Gouges published more than twenty pamphlets promoting "relief for the poor, education for women, maternity hospitals, and workshops to help the unemployed." She actively criticized the revolutionaries' refusal of women in the formation of the new French republic. Her writings on slavery and racism make de Gouges one of the earliest proponents of equal rights for all humans. She was executed during the French Revolution for her radical beliefs.
Works by Maria Stewart, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Jacobs provide insight into women's roles in the abolition movement. Because of extremely limited educational resources and exclusion from lucrative employment due to racial and gender bias, few free women of color were able to acquire a comfortable lifestyle independently of men.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was the most influential antislavery novel in the nation’s history. Stowe received a serious education at one of the earliest schools to offer education to girls, and her work aimed to inspire emancipation by illustrating the horrors and unchristian nature of slavery.
Lydia Maria Child's 1833 A n Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans was the first extensive study of slavery and emancipation. She argued that slavery hurts everyone it touches – enslaved peoples, slave owners, and free whites alike. The work also advocated for interracial marriage. While ambivalent on rights of woman, she eventually believed in the right to vote.