Skip to main content

Part of the book series: Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters ((19CMLL))

  • 119 Accesses

Abstract

Nineteenth-century women’s verse has long been assigned as poetry of the separate spheres. From its time of writing to its going out of print almost immediately upon the death of its authors, and through its gradual recovery by literary history, it has been largely seen as private and domestic, albeit with varying judgments. In the nineteenth century, regarding the poems as domestic and private made them acceptable, popular, diminutive, and safe. As with many other women’s activities, women’s writing could be consigned to the comforting and appropriate domain of the woman’s sphere.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic (New York: Norton, 1986) on Republican Motherhood.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Anne Douglas Wood, “Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote,” American Quarterly 23 (1971), 3–24.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Margaret Ezell, Women Writing Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

    Google Scholar 

  4. Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage (New York: Oxford University Press 1984), p. ix.

    Google Scholar 

  5. J. Tompkins, Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

    Google Scholar 

  6. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Anchor, 1977), p. 254.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Nina Baym, Women’s Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).

    Google Scholar 

  8. Philip Fisher, Hard Facts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

    Google Scholar 

  9. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2002), 23–50.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Ann Romines, The Home Plot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).

    Google Scholar 

  11. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

    Google Scholar 

  12. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

    Google Scholar 

  13. Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

    Google Scholar 

  14. Mary Ryan suggests complicity between women’s literature as “gilded literary package[s] of domestic piety and pathos,” and restrictive domesticity, Womanhood in America (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), p. 76. Cf. Mary Ryan, Empire of the Mother (New York: Howarth, 1982).

    Google Scholar 

  15. Paula Benett, Poets in the Public Sphere (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) offers a range of verse types, but most remains within the rubric of genteel and sentimental in various ways. Her interests are “complaint” literature that focuses on domesticity as constraining, through an equality-feminist political orientation.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Nina Baym underscores this historical dimension in women’s writing in Feminism and American Literary History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 109. Cf. her American Women Writers and the Work of History 1790–1860 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Emily Stipes Watts, The Poetry of American Women 1632–1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977) describes some social involvements, but sees women to lack a “male” involvement with “broad philosophical and social concerns,” p. 67.

    Google Scholar 

  17. See especially Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

    Google Scholar 

  18. Joanne Dobson’s “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” American Literature 69:2 (1997), 263–288.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Elizabeth Patrino, “Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry,” in Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing, eds. Dale M. Buer and Philim Gould (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 122–144.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. Keith Thomas, “The Double Standard,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20:2 (April 1959), 195–216.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971).

    Google Scholar 

  22. Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

    Google Scholar 

  23. Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue (New York: Basic, 1987).

    Google Scholar 

  24. David T. Pivar, Purity Crusade (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973).

    Google Scholar 

  25. Joan Sherman, Invisible Poets (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 62–72.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Elizabeth Animons, “Profile of Frances Harper,” Legacy 2:2 (1985), 61–66.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Hallie Brown, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (1971).

    Google Scholar 

  28. Bruce Dickson, Jr. Black American Writing from the Nadir (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 19.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Mary Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

    Google Scholar 

  30. Susan K. Harris, “But Is It Any Good,” in The (Other) American Traditions, ed. Joyce Warren (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 263–275.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 63, 171.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Mary Wollstoncraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in Works, London; William Pickering, 1989, pp. 191–193.

    Google Scholar 

  33. J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

    Google Scholar 

  34. Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors

Copyright information

© 2010 Shira Wolosky

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Wolosky, S. (2010). Public and Private: Double Standards. In: Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113008_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics