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Masking Volcanic Anger: The Repressive World of 19th-Century White Female Emotional Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Linda Grasso
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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
Prospects , Volume 27 , October 2002 , pp. 27 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

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References

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