Self-Made Women - Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Fanny Fern, masters of women's independence

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2. SELF-MADE WOMAN 
 
2.1 The Role of Women in Nineteenth-Century American Society 
 
“There can be no question that the present epoch is initiating an empire of the higher 
reason, of arts, affections, aspirations; and for that epoch the genius of woman has been 
reserved”
12
. This is what Thomas Wentworth Higginson declared in 1859 about his age, 
considered the time in which woman could obtain her emancipation since the world, in his 
opinion, was finally ready to welcome her genius, power of understanding, and freedom. He 
describes the past times as characterized by mere ignorance, muscles and “lower power of the 
understanding
13
”, an era which was not ready for such a change, while the nineteenth century 
was the right time and ground to let women alter their position, with a consequent social and 
moral change. This was, in fact, an era of remarkable cultural and social transformations, 
which mostly involved women and their living conditions: many changes occurred both in 
England and America, were women were fighting for entering institutions of higher 
education, for the vote, rights over their children, obtaining better jobs, be writers, and so on. 
Everyone, but predominantly intellectuals and writers, started arguing about the place which 
women ought to have in society, until it became a big and debated issue by the name of 
“Woman Question”. It had a crucial role in a century in which many other changes occurred, 
such as revolutionary turmoil, imperialist expansion, industrialization, and political reforms. 
 
12
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and the Alphabet, The Project Gutenberg eBook, 2004, p. 9.  
13
 Ivi, p. 47
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However, despite all the discussions, debates, and the steps forward, there still was an 
oppressive and misogynist approach to the idea of femininity, which was still considered as a 
paradigm of self-denial and sacrifice, invoking the Christian-based idea of the angelic woman. 
Religion has always had a strong impact on social matters and people’s beliefs, especially in 
America, which was a very religious country, except for the birth of movements like 
Transcendentalism, which tried to revise some of the old traditions of the Church. It was 
religion itself, in fact, to influence the characterization of the good woman and mother as a 
kind of Madonna, a devoted and obedient angel. The Victorian era was deeply marked by the 
cult of the “angel in the house”, and we can find the practical representation of this idea both 
in art and literature. Painters, for example, started portraying angels explicitly as female 
figures in the 19
th
 century, while, before that time, they had been painted mostly without clear 
marks of gender, and writers used a vocabulary drawn from religion: all these artistic 
recourses were used in order to propose the model of a frail and ethereal woman, characterized 
by selflessness, refinement, and piety. Women were not only angels but also queens of the 
house, which was their realm and the only place in which they could express themselves or 
be partly free.
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However, the Victorian imagery of women was quite contradictory, as it comprised 
conflicting extremes: a woman could be angel or monster, a virgin or a sexual temptress. In 
most of the cases, it can be assumed that these opposite images could overlap, since American 
and English women could have been both angels and madwomen.
15
 But being a madwoman 
 
14
 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, Norton & 
Company, New York, 1996, pp. 283-289. 
15
 Ivi, p. 291.
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was just the manifestation of a mental illness, ascribable to hysteria, which afflicted some 
women and became a way to express (also unconsciously) discontent with their limited lives. 
Hysteria became the socially accepted illness for women and the alternative role for all those 
who couldn’t bear their personal and family status. Illness was, though, extremely connected 
to female beauty, and ideal women had to show a melancholic appearance. Besides, they 
could not desire a life without children, without a husband, or without self-denial, since they 
would have been considered mad or other than the regular behaviour of the “angels of the 
house”, which they were expected to be. That is why we have plenty of testimonies of both 
angelic and madwomen in the Victorian era, mostly in literature (see 2.2).
16
 Women, then, 
could not deviate from the path they were assigned by society, since deviating from domestic 
duties, from passivity, and from devotion would have been considered a kind of rebellion 
imputable to madness and hysteria.  
Marriage, in fact, completely oppressed and overshadow them, and William 
Blackstone, an English jurist of that time, clearly summarized this situation, referring to 
English women: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very 
being or legal existence of a woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least it is 
incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection, and 
cover she performs everything, […].
17
”English Law was the basis of the statute of colonies, 
and American married women underwent the same treatment and rules. Married American 
women, like their English counterparts, could not own property either earnings, they didn’t 
 
16
 Julianna Little, “Frailty, thy name is woman”: Depiction of Female Madness, Virginia Commonwealth University, 
Richmond, 2015, pp. 27-30. 
17
 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. I, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1765, p. 430.
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have entitlement to their own physical liberty, and their obliteration was both legal and moral. 
Their education was also very restricted, since they would have to be taught history, 
mathematics, classics, modern languages, drawing, and music in order only to converse 
intelligently with men, but all the other fields were considered improper for women. They 
had, on the other hand, to complete a lady’s training to acquire an elegant and aristocratic 
posture, read the Bible for many hours, knit, sew, think about fashion and society, and care 
for the children
18
. Women’s role was, therefore, far more restricted and marginal than men’s 
one, since the Victorian feminine ideal wanted them to be secondary to men, which ruled the 
public world of politics and business. The ideal woman of the time was a totally submitted 
one, and was just required to manage all the responsibilities of the house, obey her husband 
and her father, and renounce to her liberty or autonomy. She had to be the guardian of religion 
and the spokeswomen for morality, be gentle, loving, and caring.   
Woman’s domestic sphere and their angelic image remained the main idea throughout 
the nineteenth century
19
, and this can be also inferred from many English and American 
literary works which contain testimonies of women’s lives in the nineteenth century. One of 
the greatest and most interesting testimonies is Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth 
Century (1845), originally published in 1843 in The Dial magazine as “The Great Lawsuit. 
Man versus Men. Woman versus Women”, which is considered, as Larry J. Reynolds states, 
“the foundational text of the women’s rights movement in America
20
”. However, this text will 
be discussed later, since it is one of the most powerful works of that time concerning women’s 
 
18
 Gilbert and Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, p. 292, 293. 
19
 A. Hogan and A. Bradstock (edited by) Women of Faith in Victorian Culture, Macmillan Press, London, 1998, p. 1. 
20
 Margaret Fuller, L. J. Reynolds (edited by), Woman in the nineteenth century, Norton & Company, New York, 1997, 
p. ix.
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rights and role in society. Margaret Fuller powerfully addresses women and encourages them 
to see more in themselves than what society wanted them to see or believe, since they could 
gain and yearn for all those things that men already had. This is a strong feminist plea for 
women’s liberation from society’s constraints, written in an age in which feminism was just 
taking its first steps. This is what was written on American soil, while in Britain we can find 
previous testimonies of women talking about their rights and their social situation. In Britain, 
in fact, this epoch is remembered as “The long Eighteenth Century”, since it had been an age 
characterized by the first stages of middleclass women’s social and cultural emancipation. 
This was carried out by associations of women called bluestockings, which gave birth to 
private cultural clubs, aimed at promoting women’s talent, demanding rights for women 
(despite their continuous exclusion from politics or education), and fighting against prejudices 
by creating a more open intellectual environment, more apt to accept the female presence in 
the cultural world. The term, alluding playfully to the regular blue socks used both by women 
and men in contrast to the strict fashion rules of the time, is still used today with a negative 
meaning, indicating women openly expressing their literary interests and cultivating their 
intellect, instead of the frivolous and socialite aspects which are believed to be proper of their 
sex. However, this was exactly the significant change that characterized the epoch that 
Virginia Woolf defined, in 1929, with these words: “[…] towards the end of the Eighteenth 
century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully 
and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class 
woman began to write
21
”. She considers women approaching literature and writing as a 
 
21
 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Grafton, Great Britain, 1977, p. 71.
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watershed moment in history, since they could finally change the entire literary system and 
the perception the world had of them, both culturally and socially. The last years of the century 
had been determinant in respect to women’s affirmation of their social rights, and many 
writers, also in the light of their life experience, took part in this social protest, also becoming 
protagonists and promoters.
22
 Mary Wollstonecraft was one of them, since she attacked the 
way in which women had been constructed to suit society and corrupted to exalt not their 
qualities but their inferiority. Her thought is summarized in her A Vindication of the Rights of 
Woman (1792), which is mainly considered one of the first arguments for female equality on 
different levels, such as political, economic, and cultural ones. The treatise primarily claims 
women’s right to education, in order to foster an active and equal collaboration between men 
and women for the sake of society. This is her plea: “It is time to bring about a revolution in 
female manners, time to restore their lost dignity to them and to make them, as a part of the 
human species, work to reform the world by reforming themselves
23
”. 
Culture and education were, in fact, two of the areas in which discrepancies were most 
evident, as mentioned before, between men and women, not only in Britain but also in 
America, despite being considered as a land that could have possibly offered women new 
possibilities.
24
 By the early eighteenth century, thinkers and intellectuals on both sides of the 
Atlantic started disputing women’s intellectual inferiority and proposing equal capacities for 
both sexes. There still were, however, thinkers who discouraged this openness and doubted 
 
22
 Gioiella Roccia Bruni, Brilliant Women. A proposito di Mary Wollstonecraft, in Quaderno del dipartimento di 
letterature comparate Università degli Studi di Roma Tre, Roma, Carocci Editore, 2008, pp.417, 418. 
23
 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 31, 
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/wollstonecraft1792.pdf, last accessed 03/07/19. 
24
 Gilbert and Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, p. 255.
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female intellectual abilities, but there also were many others who believed in the advantages 
of educating women and, consequently, their wives. Girls shouldn’t be only taught to read but 
also introduced to deeper intellectual subjects such as philosophy, history, art. Many people 
started thinking that the supposed “incapacity” of the female mind was just something 
imposed by the society and not naturally acquired, and that is the reason why there was, in 
those years, a greater appreciation for the female intellect. Women had to shape men’s 
morality and manners, and  educating them would have been determinant for the entire 
society, since, through the cultivation of their mind, they could have moulded society and 
made history.
25
 However, feminist political and educational advances came gradually, 
although many movements tried to influence people’s thoughts or beliefs on this theme, as 
thinkers like Frances Wright and Catherine Beecher tried to do in America: they mostly fought 
to demand trainings for girls, and the actual Oberlin College was the first, in 1833, to admit 
young women. Protests were also carried out in order to demand women’s entrance into 
higher education, and this caused an increase in female interest in joining the professions, 
creating in turn a problem of competition with men and a social unrest, since the world was 
not ready yet for such a change
26
. 
These claims had been fostered by the impulses toward political reforms, social 
changes, and the changes impelled by the Industrial Revolution. The rebelliousness was, then, 
encouraged by the awareness that the leisure required for their sex had been completely 
unproductive and useless, since women realized that they could contribute, as much as men, 
 
25
 D. M. Bauer and P. Gould (edited by), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing, 
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 20-21. 
26
 Ivi, pp. 299, 300.
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to social, economic, and cultural development. More and more women became aware of the 
disadvantages of their sex and the different way in which they were treated compared to men, 
or by men themselves. Women, including the aristocratic ones, who could have been 
apparently privileged, started rebelling and demanding changes to a system which was 
completely unjust and unequal. In the United States, the feminist movement moved its first 
steps in conjunction with the antislavery movement, which counted many women fighting, 
from the 1830s onwards, for the emancipation of the blacks in the southern part of the country. 
Some of them wanted to speak in public to support their cause, but they were not allowed to 
do that, but, as Sarah Grimké declared in 1838, “whatsoever it is morally right for a man to 
do, it is morally right for a woman to do”
27
. She is a well-known feminist, since she was the 
first American woman who wrote the first comprehensive assertion of women’s rights, calling 
for a change in a legal system which introduced so unequal laws to intensify the disparity 
between men and women.
28
   Countless other American women, black and white, of all ages 
and classes, had become part of this strong movement trying to change a system which didn’t 
protect, or even consider, in a social sense, both women and slaves. This bond between 
disadvantaged categories, and all the different episodes which did nothing but highlight the 
disparity, resulted in the Convention on Women’s Rights (1848) held in Seneca Falls, that 
revised the American Declaration of Independence. The American movement had a great 
impact over the European countries, and specifically over Britain, which followed its lead and 
continued what English women had started first. Political rights, however, were more difficult 
to obtain than, for example, social ones, and this is the reason why both English and American 
 
27
 Angelina E. Grimké, “Letter XII” in Letters to Catherine Beecher, Isaac Knapp, Boston, 1838. 
28
 Joyce W. Warren, Women, Money and the Law, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2005, p. 4.
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women had to wait till the World War I for the vote and for all those rights which could finally 
let them reach equality.
29
 The coming of the American Revolution, in the second half of the 
eighteenth century, had, in fact, been a turning point in the consideration of women’s role, 
heightening their importance mostly in the public dimension. They highly contributed to the 
Revolution, as much as men did, through their influence over men, which indirectly helped 
the country and let them gain a determinant political role. They inculcated patriotism, taught 
virtue, and encouraged self-sacrifice: they actively shaped the future of the American 
Republic and finally began to be evaluated as they deserved, and not as society imposed.
30
  
 
 
2.2 Women in and through Literature 
 
Literature has always been one of the main testimonies of a given culture, society, 
lifestyle and tradition. It is one of the most important records of how people lived in a specific 
age, which were their believes, their customs, their social structure and which were their 
problems. When investigating a community or an era, as this thesis is trying to do, literature 
can be the best tool to gather information and to understand something that would otherwise 
be unintelligible. Literary works contain precious elements and details, which must be 
considered also in relation to the author, who is a fundamental clue in order to understand the 
text and the perspective from which it is written.  
 
29
 Ivi, pp. 297-299. 
30
 Ivi, pp. 21-23.