Constructing Womanhood: the Influence of Conduct Books On

CONSTRUCTING WOMANHOOD: THE INFLUENCE OF CONDUCT BOOKS ON GENDER PERFORMANCE AND IDEOLOGY OF WOMANHOOD IN AMERICAN WOMEN’S NOVELS, 1865-1914 A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Colleen Thorndike May 2015 Copyright All rights reserved Dissertation written by Colleen Thorndike B.A., Francis Marion University, 2002 M.A., University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2004 Ph.D., Kent State University, 2015 Approved by Robert Trogdon, Professor and Chair, Department of English, Doctoral Co-Advisor Wesley Raabe, Associate Professor, Department of English, Doctoral Co-Advisor Babacar M’Baye, Associate Professor, Department of English Stephane Booth, Associate Provost Emeritus, Department of History Kathryn A. Kerns, Professor, Department of Psychology Accepted by Robert Trogdon, Professor and Chair, Department of English James L. Blank, Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Conduct Books ............................................................................................................ 11 Chapter 2 : Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Advice for Girls .......................................... 41 Chapter 3: Bands of Women: the Women’s Club Movement and Female Friendship ................ 69 Chapter 4 : Edith Wharton and the Changing of Social Customs ................................................. 95 Chapter 5 : Balancing Self and Motherhood in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis .................................................................................................. 119 Epilogue: Self-Made Women and Conduct Books ..................................................................... 148 References ................................................................................................................................... 154 iii Acknowledgments This dissertation would not be possible without the support and guidance of many people and a few unexpected discoveries along the way. I received a research grant from the Kent State University Graduate Student Senate which enabled me to travel to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, the Winterthur Library in Winterthur, Delaware, and the Library Company of Philadelphia to conduct archival research. I owe a debt of gratitude to the wonderful librarians at each of these libraries; I was able to be highly productive in my limited time because of their assistance and knowledge of the special collections. I would also like to thank my committee, Dr. Wesley Raabe, Dr. Robert Trogdon, Dr. Babacar M’Baye, and Dr. Stephane Booth, for their guidance, support, and invaluable advice throughout this process. Also, my friends and family for listening to me ramble on about conduct books, archival research, and women writers most of them had never heard of, especially Betsy Newman for repeatedly reassuring me that my chapters did make sense, pointing out when they didn’t, and being my go-to source for linguistic information. Finally, I would like to thank all of the wonderful professors I had at Francis Marion University, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Kent State University for inspiring me, pushing me to always do my best, and supporting all of my academic endeavors, however crazy they may have sounded at the time. And especially Dr. Rebecca Flannagan who inspired me as an undergraduate to be a serious scholar and who first introduced me to The Story of Avis which was my original inspiration for this project. iv Introduction “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1989) At the turn of the 21st century, scholars began re-evaluating the idea of separate spheres in 19th century America and pointing out that “the line between the spheres [was] much finer and the boundaries blurrier than was maintained in the past” (Elbert 2). However, in the first fifteen years of the 21st century, scholars are still discussing separate spheres ideology and culturally there seems to be an even bigger divide between genders, especially in regards to equal pay and reproductive rights. Recent cultural and political pushbacks against the equal rights movement and women’s health issues have attempted to re-establish clear gender lines. This shift is part of a continual push-pull struggle that is an integral part of American history and culture. This struggle can be situated along gender, race, and class lines throughout American history and has brought about significant changes including the Civil Rights Movement, the various waves of feminism, and more recently the Marriage Equality Movement; however, for every political advancement—women’s right to vote, the end of Jim Crow laws, the growing number of states allowing gay marriage—there is an equal cultural reaction of holding on to the sepia-toned “good ole days” when men were men and women were women and everyone knew his or her place. Throughout the nineteenth century the prevailing ideology of womanhood was that of the True Woman, an ideal that women were meant to uphold. According to Barbara Welter, 1 the attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society, could be divided into four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife—woman. Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them she was promised happiness and power. (152) These virtues were disseminated through conduct books and showcased in novels throughout much of the first half of the nineteenth century. This propagation of ideals was an important way of establishing and maintaining the status quo and these conduct books are a source of instruction on how to properly perform class and gender. In Dimity Convictions (1976), Welter furthers her discussion of True Womanhood by examining how conduct books established and maintained an ideology of womanhood. Using a similar methodology, Frances Cogan explores the idea of Real Womanhood in All-American Girl (1989). Cogan’s Real Woman ideal “advocated intelligence, physical fitness and health, self-sufficiency, economic self-reliance, and careful marriage: it was, in other words, a survival ethic” (4). Cogan and Welter use conduct books to establish these ideals of womanhood and apply them to novels of the period. While both Cogan and Welter rely on the idea of separate spheres to inform their ideologies, the separate spheres concept has been reevaluated since the turn of the twenty-first century. The separate spheres ideology is rooted in the inequality of the literary canon of the 1970s. During the recovery of nineteenth century women writers and second-wave feminism in the 1970s it became evident that some women writers had been overlooked because of their gender and the types of novels they wrote. Separate spheres ideology enabled the creation of American women’s literature as a subsection of American literature. Moving beyond the 2 recovery movement and second-wave feminism, Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher’s No More Separate Spheres! (2002) and Monika Elbert’s Separate Spheres No More (2000) both center around the idea that at the end of the turn of the twenty-first century separate spheres ideology is no longer necessary as a primary way to discuss nineteenth century American women’s literature because, ostensibly, there is now more equity in the critical literary canon. Also, many critics find separate spheres problematic because it does not accurately, realistically, or fully represent nineteenth century society. These four integral texts along with Nina Baym’s Women’s Fiction (1978) are the critical basis for my discussion of the influence of conduct books on American novels. Since women in the nineteenth century did not have a lot of autonomy and were limited in what they could do to become independent, they sometimes used writing as one socially acceptable means of making money and therefore gaining some autonomy. Women writers of this time did not limit themselves to fiction; some like Lydia Maria Child wrote conduct and advice books in addition to novels, some like Kate Chopin wrote only novels and short stories, and some like Catharine Beecher strictly wrote conduct and advice books. In Women’s Fiction, Baym argues that the woman’s fiction she discusses is “shaped as novels of education (not as bildungsroman, which value self-expression over self-discipline), they aim to forward the development, in young, female readers, of a specific kind of character” (xix). Baym’s idea that these novels were meant to help develop the characters of their readership provides a crucial link between novels and conduct books. Many conduct books integrated stories to show the consequences of bad behavior and the rewards of good deportment. Because conduct books were popular gifts and staples in many homes, many novels reflect the advice and ideology of conduct books. The authors that Baym discusses see their novels functioning in a similar way to conduct 3 books; the authors that I discuss use their novels to react to the

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