Feminist Writing and Women's Suffrage in 19th-Century America

Introduction: Writing and Suffrage

Writing and women's suffrage were inextricably intertwined in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Suffrage gave women a voice, and they used that voice to challenge the early American patriarchal status quo. By examining those works, new light can be brought to bear on suffrage activists, who at the time were thought to be an unimportant fringe group. Through a study of their writing, we can learn more about their day-to-day lives.

Feminist Standpoint Theory and Social History

According to Sandra Harding, as cited in McClish and Bacon (p. 28), one's knowledge depends on one's position in society. When one occupies a subordinate place in the social hierarchy, one understands life differently than someone at the top. However, because the most powerful tend to write history, that history is rather one-sided. Harding argues that alternative viewpoints are equally valid. By looking at what is often termed social history, one can find information about more than just the dates of wars and conquests — information that is genuinely helpful in understanding our current social makeup.

Because some literature is written by traditionally oppressed people, it can be even more revealing than histories authored by those at the top of the social hierarchy. Feminist standpoint theory holds that minority literature captures the viewpoints not only of those who held power, but also of those who survived underneath that power. Because their very survival depended on understanding the overarching society, the disenfranchised are keen observers (McClish and Bacon, 28).

This can be revealing in many ways. Readers who acknowledge the value of these different points of view can better understand texts. Rather than simply accepting the patriarchal point of view as given, questioning the normative interpretation can lead to new knowledge. Harding suggests that readers should ask questions based on their own experiences (McClish and Bacon, 28), assuming, of course, that one is not a member of the privileged class.

Women's Legal and Social Status in 19th-Century America

In the 1800s in the United States, the privileged class was primarily white men of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant descent. White women could not vote or even own the clothes on their backs. Black men were not legally recognized as persons until after the Civil War, and Black women bore the combined prejudice directed at both Black people and women. They occupied the lowest possible social position, being subservient to white men, white women, and Black men, in that order.

Since white men held all the power, they also tended to have the most disposable income and were therefore the primary sources of funding for writers who made a living from their work. Even writers who did not depend on writing for income had to contend with the white male as an influential reader. A writer would have had to make her work palatable — or at least inoffensive — to avoid being banned, suppressed, or even prosecuted. As a result, marginalized individuals often chose narrative fiction because of the subtlety it afforded (McClish and Bacon, 34). One of the oldest forms of writing is the story, and one can couch in a fictional tale much that could not be expressed in a strident pamphlet — though suffragists used those too. An additional advantage of posing one's challenge to society through fiction is the ability to demonstrate something from another person's point of view. Minority authors could thereby show their mainstream readers new horizons.

Charlotte Temple and the Seduction Novel

One of the earliest narratives to highlight a problem with women's position in society was Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson. This novel depicts the fate of a young, presumably well-to-do white girl. Though first published in England in 1791, it appeared in the United States in 1794 to immediate popularity, and has gone through over 200 American editions, remaining in continuous print ever since. Unlike modern romance novels with their happily-ever-after template, Charlotte Temple tells the story of a young girl who is seduced by a soldier, taken to the United States, impregnated, and then abandoned to destitution and death. While modern readers may find this story disturbing, the "seduction novel" was a popular genre for decades (Rust).

Superficially, the novel contains nothing to alarm the patriarchy. While warning girls not to stray from socially mandated standards of acceptable behavior, it simultaneously legitimizes the licentious conduct of upper-class white men — after all, the male seducer suffers no ill effects from his actions. Women who succumbed to seduction were so ostracized that family and friends would shun them, banishing them from society to starve in the street, as happened to Charlotte. Men who did the seducing faced no such exclusion; indeed, the main male character in Charlotte Temple goes on to marry another young woman. The book thus made a bitter social reality slightly more legible: girls could choose virginity, a husband, and subjugation, or choose sex, homelessness, and martyrdom for the sake of an infant (Rust).

One could even say that Charlotte Temple was the 19th-century equivalent of a cautionary magazine column — a thinly fictionalized tale of horrifying or humiliating incidents designed to teach young readers about life. The particular appeal of the novel was rooted in a kind of schadenfreude, a vicarious pleasure in the misfortunes of others. It was widely understood at the time that Charlotte Temple was a roman à clef involving the author's own family, and Rowson reinforced this belief by using the phrase "a tale of truth" in the subtitle, preface, and novel itself. Young girls learned lessons about society's expectations from the book, without sermons or their own painful experience.

For decades, young girls placed flowers at the grave of Charlotte Stanley at Trinity Churchyard in New York City, recognizing that they could have been Charlotte but for a slight twist of fate. The author specifically implores her readers to feel this identification when she urges them to "feel the woes of Charlotte" (109) and to "reflect how many errors we are ourselves subject to, how many secret faults lie hid in the recesses of our hearts, which we should blush to have brought into open day" (80). Many 19th-century girls likely read Charlotte Temple, felt genuine relief at their relative good fortune, and absorbed a lesson about the grim choices inherent in their social station.

Other interpretations exist. As Marion Rust argues in "What's Wrong with 'Charlotte Temple?'," Rowson's story may have been so popular because it depicted a young woman's struggle to maintain the standards of behavior expected of an upper-class white woman (104). Readers could empathize with Charlotte's initial predicament and fantasize about not adhering to society's dictates. In that sense, the novel offered escapist fantasy, with the emphasis on escape. While 19th-century American men were promised "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," women's roles became increasingly constrained (Rust). Young Charlotte escaped a stifling finishing school with a dashing lover — something her readers could not do.

Like Caesar's wife, women connected to powerful men in the new republic had to be above reproach. While single colonial women and abandoned married women could and did own businesses, enter contracts, and bring lawsuits, this relative freedom ironically faded under the new republic (Salmon). Nineteenth-century upper-class women were expected to remain within the domestic sphere, not dash across oceans (Rust). To lower-class readers, the details of Charlotte's life would have offered a different sort of escapist fantasy: just as modern romance novels feature wealthy suitors or timely inheritances, a dashing wealthy suitor would have tempted women at a time when they could no longer own property or businesses. These readers, too, could easily end up pregnant and destitute.

Furthermore, while abortifacients were readily available to colonial women, abortions and abortifacients were criminalized in the increasingly repressive new republic (Bullough). In 1803, Britain's Lord Ellenborough's Act imposed formal punishment for both pre- and post-quickening abortion (Keown, 2002). In 1829, performing an abortion in New York was made illegal (Bullough, 2001). In 1873, the federal Comstock laws criminalized information about how to obtain an abortion under the guise of public indecency (Bullough, 2001). As abortions and abortifacients became increasingly difficult to obtain, unwanted pregnancy became increasingly dire for single young women — and in Charlotte Temple, it became a literally fatal mistake (Rust).

Conclusion: Writing as Feminist Resistance

Fanny Fern challenged the patriarchy through her books and newspaper columns. She had to fight for the right to write, even unsuccessfully begging her sibling to help her. She was savaged in the press for her writing style and content. Yet she used a domestic frame of reference familiar to her readers to promote feminist ideas like financial independence. Like contemporary mothers, she acknowledged the challenge of being both a successful wife and mother and a successful professional, and — like the feminists of the 1970s and 1980s — she suggested that one could do it all. Her defiance was rewarded through immense popularity, which in turn allowed her to be self-supporting.

Like Fanny Fern, Susanna Rowson was an immensely popular author, though Charlotte Temple was neither scandalous nor overtly defiant of the patriarchy. Nonetheless, she too used her writing to better the lives of women by educating young girls about the realities of their social station. By examining the works of both Rowson and Fern, one can learn a great deal about the daily challenges faced by women in 19th-century America, and about the ways in which literature served as a vehicle for feminist resistance long before the suffrage movement gave women an explicit political voice.

Works Cited

Bullough, Vern, ed. Encyclopedia of Birth Control. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2001.

Laffrado, Laura. Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University, 2009.

McClish, Glen, and Jacqueline Bacon. "'Telling the Story Her Own Way': The Role of Feminist Standpoint Theory in Rhetorical Studies." Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2002): 27–55.

Porche, Amy S. "The Fashioning of Fanny Fern: A Study of Sara Willis Parton's Early Career, 1851–1854." 2010. Georgia State University Digital Archive, English Dissertations. 6 December 2011.

Ross, Christine. "Logic, Rhetoric, and Discourse in the Literary Texts of Nineteenth-Century Women." Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2002): 85–109.

Rust, Marion. "What's Wrong with 'Charlotte Temple?'" The William and Mary Quarterly (2003): 99–118.

Salmon, Marylynn. Women and the Law of Property in Early America. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Warren, Joyce W. Ruth Hall and Other Writings by Fanny Fern. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1986.