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16 results

  • Chapter 14 - Defining and Defying a Woman’s Sphere

  • from Part II - Issues
  • Edited by John D. Kerkering, Loyola University, Chicago
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics
    Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    13 March 2025, pp 238-252

  • Summary

    Nineteenth-century women gained limited property and voting rights by embracing naturalized gender roles, including motherhood, as famously described in Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home (1869). Such normative appeals to a feminized domestic sphere appear to contradict a first-wave nineteenth-century feminism that, through efforts like Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Rights and Sentiments (1848), sought political gains for women in the form of property and voting rights equivalent to those of men, but second-wave feminist historians from the 1960s through the 1980s have shown how similar ends were advanced by less radical means: embracing the middle-class mother’s normative gendered role as natural nurturer enabled women to leverage their credibility within the domestic sphere in order to advance political projects both within and beyond it. In addition to resisting traditional restrictions on their rights, women embraced their gendered role as natural mothers to pursue political activism on behalf of impoverished women in urban areas. Third-wave feminism has challenged the normative roles at the core of this gendered separation of spheres, roles that at once restricted nineteenth-century women’s political activity but also authorized them to mobilize, as natural women and mothers, in political resistance to economic oppression.

Nathaniel Hawthorne in Context
  • Edited by Monika M. Elbert
  • Published online:
    26 November 2018
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018
  • This volume provides a comprehensive overview of Nathaniel Hawthorne and demonstrates why he continues to be a critically significant figure in American literature. The first section focuses on Hawthorne's interest in and knowledge of past (Puritan and colonial) and contemporary nineteenth-century history (women's, African American, Native American) as the inspiration for his writings and the source of his literary success. The second section explores his fascination with social history and popular culture by examining topics as mesmerism, utopian life styles, theatrical performances, and artistic innovations. The third section looks at how Hawthorne succeeded and excelled in the literary marketplace, as an author of children's literature, literary sketches, and historical romances. In the fourth section, Hawthorne's literary precursors, peers, colleagues, and successors are analyzed. In the final section, Hawthorne's attachment to family, nature, and home is examined as the source of creative inspiration and philosophical questing.