No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Masking Volcanic Anger: The Repressive World of 19th-Century White Female Emotional Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
In the antebellum period, gendered ideologies of anger made it difficult, if not impossible, for many women to acknowledge that their feelings of disappointment were masking their feelings of anger. Instructed that domesticity was their highest calling, their sole reason for being, more often than not, revolutionary white daughters were disappointed when they encountered its constrictions. “In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman,” Lucy Stone, one such daughter, declared. “From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman. When, with my brothers, I reached forth after the sources of knowledge, I was reproved with ‘It isn't fit for you; it doesn't belong to women.’… I was disappointed when I came to seek a profession worthy an immortal being — every employment was closed to me, except those of the teacher, the seamstress, and the housekeeper” (Schneir, 106–109).
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002
References
WORKS CITED
Alcott, Louisa May. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Myerson, Joel and Shealy, Daniel. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.Google Scholar
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women, 1868. Intro. Elaine Showalter. New York: Penguin, 1989.Google Scholar
Anderson, Bonnie S.Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement: 1830–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Aristotle, . The Art of Rhetoric. Translated with an introduction and notes by Lawson-Tancred, H. C.. New York: Penguin, 1991.Google Scholar
Bauermeister, Erica R. “The Lamplighter, The Wide, Wide World and Hope Leslie: Reconsidering the Recipes for Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels.” Legacy 8 (Spring 1991): 17–28.Google Scholar
Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820–1870. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Beecher, Catharine, and Stowe, Harriet Beecher. The American Woman's Home, 1869; reprinted with an introduction by Joseph Van Why, Hartford, Conn.: Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, 1975.Google Scholar
Bennett, Paula. My Life as A Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics. Boston: Beacon, 1986.Google Scholar
Bunkers, Suzanne, and Temple, Judy Nolte. “Mothers, Daughters, and Diaries: Literacy, Relationship, and Cultural Context.” Nineteenth-Century American Women and Literacy. Ed. Hobbs, Catherine. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995: 197–216.Google Scholar
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Johnson, Thomas H.. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.Google Scholar
Dobson, Joanne. Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Dobson, Joanne. “The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Authority in Three Mid-Nineteenth Century American Women's Novels.” American Quarterly 39 (Summer 1986): 230–42.Google Scholar
Elbert, Sarah. A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott's Place in American Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Epstein, Barbara Leslie. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Fields, Annie, ed. Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1898.Google Scholar
Foster, Frances Smith, ed. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. New York: Feminist Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Grasso, Linda M.The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Grimke, Charlotte Forten. The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke. Ed. Stevenson, Brenda. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Harris, Susan K.19th-century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Hedrick, Joan D.Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Horton, James Oliver. “Freedom's Yoke: Gender Conventions Among Antebellum Free Blacks.” Feminist Studies 12 (Spring 1986): 53–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Reynolds, David S.Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson.” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979: 157–83.Google Scholar
Schneir, Miriam, ed. Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. New York: Vintage, 1972.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Ed. and intro. Kelley, Mary. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993.Google Scholar
Sklar, Katherine Kish. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973.Google Scholar
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America.” Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985: 109–28.Google Scholar
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America.” Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985:197–216.Google Scholar
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Anthony, Susan B., Gage, Matilda Joslyn et al. , History of Woman Suffrage. Vols. 1–4. Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1881–1902.Google Scholar
Sterling, Dorothy, ed. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984.Google Scholar
Stern, Madeleine. Louisa May Alcott: A Biography, 1950; rept. New York: Random House, 1996.Google Scholar
Stewart, Maria W.Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, Presented to the First African Baptist Church & Society, of the City of Boston, 1835. Reprinted in Spiritual Narratives, with an introduction by Sue E. Houchins, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Tompkins, Jane. Afterword in The Wide, Wide World. By Susan Warner. New York: Feminist, 1987.Google Scholar
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Turning the World Upside Down: The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. Intro. Sterling, Dorothy. New York: Feminist Press, 1987.Google Scholar
VoloshinBeverly, R. Beverly, R. “The Limits of Domesticity: the Female Bildungsroman in America, 1820–1870.” Women's Studies 10 (1984): 283–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warner, Susan. The Wide, Wide World. 1850. Afterword by Jane Tompkins. New York: Feminist, 1987.Google Scholar
Warren, Joyce. Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Yee, Shirley J.Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Zinsser, William. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.Google Scholar