Mary's Reflections on American Print Culture

Once again I am reminded, though by Joanne Dobson and Sandra A Zagarell's chapter "Women Writing in the Early Republic," that progress is definitely not linear. Neither is it inevitable. These writers explain that though "by 1840 American women were much more securely positioned to partake of the multitudinous opportunities...the discourse of domesticity, prevalent but not hegemonic in the postrevolutionary decades, coalesced in the emerging Victorian identification of women's proper sphere with the home and its concerns" (366). I don't believe there is anything anti-progressive about women turning to the home and its concerns, yet it seems that the rhetoric of "domesticity" during this time, by both women and men, not only limited women's agency but also established the domestic as second rate to the masculine public sphere.

If women like Mercy Otis Warrnen, Sarah Wentworth Morton, and Judith Sargent Murray capitalized on their opportunities between 1790 and 1840, what was the rhetoric that silenced women in the following decades? I suppose here is where research in these early American periodicals will be very valuable. The change obviously did not happen overnight, so while these women may have been successful during the early republic, they were competing with strong voices attempting to relegate women to the moral, domestic realm of the home. Who may have been the other voices supporting women like Morton who said that "an author should be considered of no sex...the individual must be lost in the writer"? (qtd. in Dobson and Zagarell). Why were they unsuccessful?

This type of study is not only interesting in order to see how history allowed the "gender codification" of writers during the early American years, but it is also interesting in light of the way rhetoric still works. As I said at the beginning of this blog, history is cyclical. We cannot assume a linear, progressive model of equal rights for men and women. There is the possibility that the voices engaging in dialogue today want to codify roles for individuals based on gender, race, class, political party, religion, etc. If we identify ourselves with a certain group of people or several groups of people, or even if we like to have fluid identities, shifting from one group to another, we should be aware at how labels and codes can define entire generations and can make or break the opportunities we have for expressing and living out our values.