Protesting bodies: Transatlantic women's reform writing, 1788--1872

Whitney Ayn Womack, Purdue University

Abstract

This project demonstrates the crucial role late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women's reform fiction and poetry played in popularizing and legitimizing women's social activism. I argue that the entrance of middle-class women into the public sphere in the name of charity and reform was instrumental in breaking down the closely guarded boundaries that kept women from the world of politics and political discourse. Maligned for its didacticism and overt sentimentality, women's reform literature has been largely overlooked or relegated to footnotes in critical discussions of the period's literary landscape. I consider popular British and American writers—including Hannah More and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Gaskell and Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Louisa May Alcott—in order to highlight their shared discursive strategies and intertextual dialogues and debates. The rise of mass publication and frequent voyages between England and the United States resulted in a complex network of transatlantic production and exchange, of circulation and appropriation. I expose the utility, even the necessity, of considering women's reform writing as a transatlantic literary tradition. The reform writers I consider gradually shift the site of women's reform work from the domestic sphere to the public sphere, and share a narrative of the vulnerable body that reveals the diseased state of the body politic. Women's reform writing is ultimately a site of contradictions, with radical and conservative impulses; although women writers often imagine social upheaval and reorganization, they envision a new society that grants middle-class women more power and authority than the objects of reform—slaves, factory workers, prostitutes, who are left in a state of silence and abjection. By writing and agitating on behalf of social causes, women gained voice, agency, and community, all of which contributed to the rise of the women's suffrage movement in the later nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Friedman, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Literature|British and Irish literature|American literature|Womens studies

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