Harriet Beecher Stowe's Multifaceted Response to the Nineteenth

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Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Multifaceted Response to the Nineteenth-Century Woman Question

amy easton-ﬂake

N the decade following the American Civil War, the I renowned children of Lyman Beecher each took his or her own position along the broad spectrum of debate con- cerning woman suffrage. Henry Ward Beecher served as the first president of the American Woman Suffrage Association (estab. 1869); Isabella Beecher Hooker worked closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the National Woman Suffrage Association (estab. 1869); Catharine Beecher helped found the first female-led antisuffrage association, the Anti-Sixteenth Amendment Society (estab. 1870); and Harriet Beecher Stowe, despite pressure from her siblings and other movement leaders and an obvious interest in the issue, remained aloof from all organized groups. In the absence of any definitive statement from her, each faction claimed her as an advocate. Between 1870 and 1871, for example, each organization’s journal either listed Stowe as a contributor or quoted from her writings.1 In recent years, literary critics Josephine Donovan and Bar- bara A. White have investigated Stowe’s relation to suffrage

1Stanton listed both Isabella Beecher Hooker and Harriet Beecher Stowe as “prin- cipal contributors” (p. 397)inthe23 December 1869 Revolution, organ of the National Woman Suffrage Association, although Stowe never contributed a single piece of writing to it. Stowe did contribute numerous pieces to the Woman’s Journal. For instance, she praised the Woman’s Journal for its “conservative religious tone” and for not following George Sand and the French Woman’s movement (3 September 1870,p.273). The antisuffrage journal True Woman quoted extensively from Stowe’s novels My Wife and I and Pink and White Tyranny in August 1871,p.44.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 30 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY movements.2 However, with the exception of noting her writings in antisuffrage publications and her comments that the vote would not solve women’s problems and should not be granted immediately, scholars have largely ignored Stowe’s in- volvement with or attitude toward antisuffrage organizations. Moreover, even though her primary manifesto on the Woman Question, her novel My Wife and I, brought her more letters than any of her works except Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it too has received little attention of late.3 If we place Stowe’s fictional and nonfictional works in conversation with both suffrage and antisuffrage associations and ideas, her contributions to the Woman Question become clear. Building on key tenets of both the suffrage and antisuffrage movements yet conforming to no specific creed, Stowe’s idiosyncratic vision of progressive womanhood is at once optimistic and multidimensional. Given her larger-than-life profile in the nineteenth century’s cultural, social, and political spheres, then, Stowe’s views about women’s place in a postwar society merit serious attention from histori- ans and literary critics alike, no less for what they say about the movements in general than for what they reveal about Stowe.

The Context: Suffrage and Antisuffrage Organizations The Fifteenth Amendment, proposed by Congress in Febru- ary 1869 to grant black men the right to vote, ripped the woman’s rights movement in two. At the time, the Equal Rights Association, which had been founded in 1866 to promote both

2Josephine Donovan, “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Feminism,” American Transcen- dental Quarterly 47–48 (1980): 141–57; Barbara A. White, The Beecher Sisters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 141–53. 3As Robert Forrest Wilson observes in Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941), “After its book-publication Harriet remarked that only Uncle Tom’s Cabin had brought her more letters from readers. . . . When the story ended [in its serialized form] in the autumn of 1871,theChristian Union [in which it had appeared] had a circulation of nearly 90,000,atleasthalfof which had been added by the serial” (p. 566). Joan D. Hedrick corrects this number in her Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)to 133,000 (p. 379) and adds that when My Wife and I was brought out in book form it sold over 50,000 copies (p. 468). Commentary on the novel’s relation to woman’s rights appears almost exclusively in histories of the Beecher sisters.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 31 racial and gender equality, accepted the prioritization of black over woman suffrage. Angered and dismayed, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony withdrew to form the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in May 1869. Six months later, in November, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, who continued to hold fast to the ERA’s founding principles, ofﬁcially organized the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).4 Each new group pursued differing organizational models and strategies: the NWSA leadership was made up primarily of women and focused on obtaining the vote through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution; the AWSA leadership was composed of both men and women and concentrated on obtaining the vote through state amendments. The two groups diverged as well over issues and argument: the NWSA brought marriage, divorce, and the sexual division of labor into the debate;5 whereas the AWSA, which billed itself as a conservative alternative to the NWSA, refrained from a holistic critique of women’s position in American society and concentrated almost exclusively on obtaining the vote. Although personal rivalries and tactical disagreements dis- tanced the two organizations from one another until 1890, both sought to alter entrenched societal beliefs. One particularly signiﬁcant shift was to classify the individual, rather than the family, as the basic unit of society. As suffrage historian Ellen Carol DuBois explains, “Citizenship represented a relationship to the larger society that was entirely and explicitly outside the boundaries of women’s familial relations. As citizens and voters, women would participate directly in society as individuals, not indirectly through their subordinate position

4For more information on the original break, see Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 150–52; Israel Kugler, From Ladies to Women: The Organized Struggle for Woman’s Rights in the Reconstruction Era (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 72–85; and Sally Gregory McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 177. 5Divorce reform was a major point of contention between the two groups. Stanton thought it was a central concern, but Stone, who considered marriage a lifelong com- mitment, did not believe divorce should be made easier to obtain. For more details, see Sue Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women’s Rights and the American Political Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 2008), p. 139.

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as wives and mothers.”6 In promoting an independent status for women in the political sphere, early suffragists were not, by and large, advocating comprehensive gender equality. Although many may not have valued women’s traditional domestic roles as highly as Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catharine did, most early suffragists considered the private sphere the proper purview for most women. As DuBois writes, “No suffragist of whom I am aware, including the otherwise iconoclas- tic Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seriously suggested that men take equal responsibilities with women for domestic activities. . . . To nineteenth-century feminists, domestic activities seemed as ‘naturally’ female as child bearing, and as little subject to social manipulation.”7 As DuBois’s comments suggest, we have been all too ready to view women’s vanguard movement from a twenty-ﬁrst- century feminist perspective rather than within its nineteenth- century historical context. In fact, there was a surprising degree of overlap between suffrage and female-led antisuffrage organizations, such as the Anti-Sixteenth Amendment Society— founded in 1870 by Madeline Vinton Dahlgren, Almira Lin- coln Phelps, Charlotte McKay, and Catharine Beecher8—but because antisuffrage was such a widespread, long-lasting, and most often male-directed phenomenon, scholars have tended to view the relatively limited number of female-led initiatives within the larger opposition effort and, therefore, have often misunderstood those groups.9 Contrary to today’s popular

6Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Woman’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 34. 7DuBois, Woman Suffrage, pp. 33–34. 8The Anti-Sixteenth Amendment Society was established to oppose Anthony’s fed- eral suffrage amendment (a potential sixteenth amendment). Presenting their own proposal to the United States Senate, the group focused on reforming property, marriage, and divorce laws; a remonstrance signed by ﬁve thousand women set forth their objections to woman suffrage. For more information, see Thomas J. Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1994), p. 3, and Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), p. 20. 9In recent years, a few full-length works have taken the woman’s antisuffrage movement seriously. These include Jane Jerome Camhi, Women against Women: Ameri- can Antisuffragism, 1880–1920 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1994); Jablonsky,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 33 conception of antisuffragists as culturally backward, retiring housewives, they shared their rivals’ opinions on many important issues, such as education and employment. They too recognized and worked to correct the injustices women suffered.10 It is important to acknowledge the crucial distinction that women who aligned themselves with antisuffrage groups drew between woman suffrage and woman’s rights.11 As one partisan commented in the antisuffrage journal True Woman, “itispos- sible to be ardently desirous of woman’s ‘equality before the law,’ of her higher education and broader culture, of ampler av- enues for her labor, and juster recompense for her toil; in short, to believe ardently in her being and doing all that is in her to be and to do, and at the same time to be profoundly skeptical as to the power of the ballot to accomplish for her those results.”12 Suffragists and antisuffragists differed mainly about how best to realize and enhance women’s power. Suffragists, who saw the vote as the most effective means for changing society and rais- ing women’s awareness and position in the polity, insisted that men would never take women’s views seriously until women had a voice in government. Antisuffragists, however, believed that ﬁghting for woman suffrage was an inefﬁcient use of time

Home, Heaven, and Mother Party; Anne M. Benjamin, A History of the Anti-suffrage Movement in the United States from 1895 to 1920: Women against Equality (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991); and Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood. These works focus mainly on the period 1890–1920;forthe1870s, I rely on the anitsuffrage journal True Woman (1871–73) and writings from self-identiﬁed antisuffragists. 10Catharine Beecher begins her article “Something for Women Better Than the Ballot” by acknowledging, “There is something essentially wrong in the present condition of women, [this] is every year growing more and more apparent” (Appleton’s Journal, 4 September 1869,p.81). Her complaints include women’s lack of education and employment opportunities as well as the poverty in which too many women lived. A number of articles in True Woman address these issues as well as the unfair laws regarding property and child guardianship. For instance, Almira Lincoln Phelps writes, “There were certainly evils to be remedied in the condition of women—Legislatures have studied how to do this in regard to the rights of property, the guardianship of children, &c” (True Woman, March 1871,p.2). To ensure that the public saw them as a group dedicated to promoting women’s place in society, antisuffragists routinely insisted that “we ﬁnd among the women who oppose female suffrage most strenuously those who have hitherto led the way in education, in benevolence, and literature” (Madeline Vinton Dahlgren, True Woman, November 1871,p.67). 11In referring to woman suffrage and woman’s rights in the singular, I follow the most common usage in nineteenth-century America. 12True Woman, April 1871,p.14.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 34 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and energy, which would be better spent on achieving reform through personal initiatives and benevolent actions. In remain- ing outside of electoral politics, antisuffragists felt that they retained, rather than sacrificed, authority. They were free to petition either or both parties as needed to pass favorable legislation, and because most were from the elite stratum and so had the connections to generate results, they were reluctant to muddy the purity of their other alliances with a potentially un- helpful party affiliation.13 Antisuffragists also believed fervently in women’s unique sexual character, and thus they supported separate but generally equal public spheres of influence.14

Stowe’s Work within the Context: Weighing in on the Woman Question With three organizations having been established within the past year and the media examining the Woman Question from every conceivable angle, 1870 was a fitting year for Stowe to begin My Wife and I. In the introduction to her novel, which deals with woman suffrage more explicitly than any of her other fictional works, Stowe announces that she is exploring “the subject which is in everybody’s mind and mouth, discussed on every platform, ringing from everybody’s tongue, and coming home to every man’s business and bosom.” She recognizes, as well, the moral force and influence of her chosen medium: “It is now understood that whoever wishes to gain the public ear, and to propound a new theory, must do it in a serial story.”15

13For an articulation of this attitude, see Catharine Beecher, “An Appeal to Ameri- can Women by the Senior Author of the Volume,” at the end of The American Woman’s Home: or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being A Guide to the Formation and Main- tenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (New York: J. B. Ford and Co., 1869), pp. 463–70, which she wrote with her sister Harriet. Beecher believed women could achieve their goals more quickly through a “united petition” of women or by appealing directly to men. 14For an extended explanation of antisuffrage arguments and rationale, including evidence from primary sources, see Manuela Thurner, “Better Citizens without the Ballot,” Journal of Women’s History 5.1 (Spring 1993): 33–61. 15Harriet Beecher Stowe, My Wife and I (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hubert, 1871), pp. 3, 2. Further references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 35 My Wife and I appeared weekly from 12 November 1870 through 8 November 1871 in the Christian Union (1870–83), a journal owned and edited by Harriet’s brother Henry Ward Beecher until 1881. Stowe had long desired to have a pulpit from which to preach, and in a letter to Henry, she declares her aspiration that the journal be a means through which the Beecher family may espouse their secular and spiritual views. “What I want is that the paper be a power—and a distinctively Christian power,” she wrote.16 With the publication of her serialized story on woman’s rights in the Christian Union, she made public the intent she had earlier expressed privately. In a pun that plays on the journal’s title, she explains to the reader that her story’s title refers to “the oldest and most venerable form of Christian union,” marriage (MWI, p. 3). Her interest in making such a definitive proclamation begins to emerge in a clearly mocking reference to Anthony and Stanton: “I trust that Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton, and all the prophetesses of our day, will remark the humility and propriety of my title. It is not I and My Wife—oh no! It is My Wife and I. What am I, and what is my father’s house, that I should go before my wife in anything?” (MWI, p. 3). The jab at Anthony and Stanton and their call for more liberal divorce laws becomes more pronounced as Stowe proceeds to satirize the idea of husbands and wives as being “only temporary partners, engaged on time, with the liberty of giving three months’ notice, and starting off to a new firm” (MWI, pp. 3–4). In 1869, Anthony and Stanton asked Stowe to become the editor of the Revolution, a weekly newspaper they had launched the previous year to promote woman suffrage and other progressive causes. In addition to assuming editorial duties, Stowe would, the NWSA leaders hoped, write a serialized novel for the Revolution that would do for the woman suffrage movement what Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for the fight against slavery.17

16Quoted in Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 371. For more information on this letter and Stowe’s hopes for the Christian Union, see pp. 370–71. 17See Susan B. Anthony to Paulina Wright Davis, 12 August 1869:“Theoneaim, that is my one aim just now—is to be able to announce that The Revolution will

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 36 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY At the time of their request, Stowe’s sister Isabella Beecher Hooker had become a well-known leader in the woman suffrage movement. Stanton, acknowledging that her radical views at times hurt the movement, was interested in turning over its leadership to the Beecher sisters, who would undoubtedly at- tract a wide following. As Stanton conﬁded to Pauline Wright Davis shortly after she and Anthony met with Hooker and Stowe, “[W]e are through the wilderness, and now if Mrs Hooker and Mrs Stowe will take it up, and one of them be President of the National Association and one editor of ‘The Revolution’ no one would rejoice more than I.”18 Though Stowe eventually turned down the offer and never aligned herself with any of the suffrage movements that had attracted members of her family, Stanton’s proposal was not misdirected. As scholars who have studied Stowe’s articles and letters on the subject have noted, Stowe’s approval of those advocating for woman suffrage rose steadily from 1865 through 1869;19 it was not until thereafter that it dipped, and rapidly so. In a series of essays titled The Chimney-Corner, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1865 and 1866,Stowe— writing under the pseudonym Christopher Crowﬁeld— articulates her views on the Woman Question.20 As the authors of The Limits of Sisterhood and of The Beecher Sisters have

commence its next volume . . . with a serial from Mrs. Stowe. . . . Mrs. Stowe—even— has never yet given to the world her very best—for she nor any other woman can, until she writes direct out of her own soul’s experiences—Oh how I long to [see] the future as none but that one pen can draw it” (The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, ed. Ann Gordon (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 255. 18Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Paulina Wright Davis, 12 August 1869, Selected Papers of Stanton and Anthony, 2:257. 19See, e.g., Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margolis, The Limits of Sis- terhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 258–62; Donovan, “Stowe’s Feminism,” pp. 142–46; and White, The Beecher Sisters, pp. 141–42. 20Stowe’s Chimney-Corner series was reprinted ﬁrst as a collected volume of essays in 1868, entitled The Chimney-Corner (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868). These essays were then combined with her collection of essays, House and Home Papers, in 1896 and reprinted as Household Papers and Stories (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifﬂin, and Co., 1896). This is the edition from which I am quoting, cited parenthetically in the essay.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 37 observed, she registers support for suffrage, but although she at times musters the same natural rights claims as Stanton and Anthony, those theoretical doctrines are less important to her than the beneficial influence women might exert on public morals, education, and temperance if they were to have the vote,21 a rationale that became increasingly popular in the AWSA’s state-by-state campaigns.22 What scholars have not observed is that in focusing on employment and education and all but neglecting suffrage, Stowe essentially removed herself from the central concern of the postbellum woman’s rights movements.23 Stowe launched her Chimney-Corner series with an essay entitled “What Will You Do with Her? Or, the Woman Question,” which appeared in the November 1865 issue of the Atlantic. It is interesting to note that from the outset, Stowe redefines the Woman Question. Having lost their husbands, fathers, and brothers in the recently concluded Civil War, women have been left with the responsibility of supporting their families, yet often they lack the wherewithal to earn a living. According to Stowe, the problem was not that vocations were closed to women but that women did not have the education to fill them, “meaning by education that which fits a woman for practical and profitable employment in life, and not mere common-school learning” (p. 264). At the top of the list of suitable jobs for women, a job for which they could be trained, was the “domestic vocation” (p. 268). What Stowe meant by the domestic vocation depended in part on a woman’s economic standing. For those who did not have to earn a wage, it referred to “mak[ing] and keep[ing] a home” or “the training and guiding of a family” (p. 268). Women of the upper and upper-middle classes generally took a managerial approach to such tasks, teaching and overseeing

21Boydston, Kelley, and Margolis, Limits of Sisterhood, p. 260, and White, The Beecher Sisters, p. 142. 22Carolyn Vacca, A Reform against Nature: Woman Suffrage and the Rethinking of American Citizenship, 1840–1920 (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 67–68. 23Of course, in 1865, when Stowe’s Chimney-Corner series appeared, the split in the woman’s rights movement had not yet occurred.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 38 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY servants in their performance. Women required to work outside the home, Stowe believed, had “talents and instincts peculiarly fitted” to domestic labor (p. 242), which could be enhanced and directed if “domestic work [was] sufficiently honored to be taught as an art and science in our boarding-schools and high- schools” (p. 272). Thus systematized, domestic work might take on the status of a “profession,” for just like a man training to be a lawyer, physician, mechanic, bookkeeper, or printer, a woman would be expected to have specific training to excel in her duties (pp. 268–69).24 And if domestic service were thus profes- sionalized, it would be seen as respectable. And so Stowe comes round to the problem with which she began: educated women needing to earn a living were not considering domestic service an honorable option. In short, like her sister Catharine, Stowe believed that the leaders of the woman’s rights movement did great harm when they spoke of “domestic labors” as “‘Domestic drudgery’” (pp. 246–47) and that they would improve the lot of woman “not so much by creating for [her] new spheres of action as by elevating her conceptions of that domestic vocation to which God and Nature have assigned her” (p. 268). Although Stowe valued women’s traditional duties to a greater degree than many suffragists, she was far from re- actionary. In 1865, she based her plan for the advancement of women on the “doctrine of vocations”(p.256). A woman should be free to enter any field, Stowe argued, for “which, by her natural organization and talent, she is peculiarly adapted” (p. 254). Along with many suffragists and antisuffragists, Stowe maintained that some exceptional women were meant for something other than the profession of domesticity.25 Her articles

24Applied as it is to any sort of job that requires some level of skill, Stowe’s use of the term “profession” in her Chimney-Corner series is quite broad; it covers many types of labor that in the nineteenth century would have fallen into the categories of occupation or vocation. 25Many issues of the antisuffrage journal True Woman offer sketches of “true women” who are not married with children but, rather, are pursuing their chosen vocations. One article explicitly comments that these women had “received eligible offers of marriage” but had opted instead for careers (December 1871,p.76). By applauding women for their choices, the editor of the journal indicates that antisuffragists did not see marriage and mothering as the only acceptable role for women. Antoinette Brown

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 39 contain lengthy lists of vocations open to women—teaching, nursing, bookkeeping, accounting, architecture, authorship, painting, cloth manufacture, photography, lecturing, etc.—and she takes care to cite the talented women who pioneered them (pp. 255–60). Most of the women Stowe and other proponents of the doctrine of vocations deemed exceptional were, however, from the middle or upper classes, which indicates a problematic hierarchy and class bias implicit within a policy intended to be broadly liberating. A close analysis of Stowe’s articles suggests that her pur- pose in writing them was not to endorse suffrage, as Josephine Donovan has argued,26 but rather to elevate the status of wives and mothers, encourage the teaching of domestic economy, es- tablish the dignity of household labor, and promote women’s progress through education and employment. When Stowe does speak approvingly of the woman’s rights movement, she heralds its promotion not of suffrage but rather of “certain ne- glected truths”—woman’s right to hold independent property, receive equal pay, and choose any vocation for which “she is peculiarly adapted” (pp. 253–54). For example, Crowﬁeld, the pseudonymic “commentator” with whose views Stowe’s appear to be aligned, endorses woman suffrage, though not necessarily the movement, yet also insists that what women really need is equal pay and employment—an argument commonly pro- pounded by sister Catharine and other antisuffragists.27 More- over, the series’ stress on women’s duties follows the standard rhetoric of the antisuffragists: as Crowﬁeld’s wife states, “in all this talk about the rights of men, and the rights of women, and the rights of children, the world seems to be forgetting

Blackwell, pioneer suffragist and minister, asserted that “the work nearest and dearest before the eyes of average womanhood is work within family boundaries” (quoted in DuBois, Woman Suffrage, p. 33). Like her, however, some women were better suited for other endeavors. 26Donovan, “Stowe’s Feminism,” p. 144. 27Catharine Beecher made this argument ﬁrst in TheTrueRemedyfortheWrongs of Women (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Co., 1851) and in more elaborate form twenty years later in Woman’s Profession as Mother and Educator with Views in Opposition to Woman Suffrage (Philadelphia and Boston: George Maclean, 1872), esp. pp. 18–20.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 40 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY what is quite as important, the duties of men and women and children. We all hear of our rights till we forget our duties (p. 250).28 Stowe, however, differs markedly from antisuffragists on a fundamental issue: whereas they believed that the vote would detract from women’s status and make them less inﬂuential in society, Stowe maintained that the vote would assist women in both of these areas. As the authors of Limits of Sisterhood explain, Stowe “envisioned the achievement of women’s rights as the catalyst for the performance of woman’s duties.”29 Four years later, when Stowe again publicly weighed in on woman suffrage, she wrote more approvingly of the movement and of natural rights arguments. In two articles published in Hearth and Home in August 1869, she praises John Stuart Mills’s The Subjection of Women (1869); credits the woman’s rights movement for the improvement of women’s legal status; describes the movement as “calm, composed, digniﬁed” and its members as models of “what a true woman and a true lady should be”; and asserts that by the logic established in the Declaration of Independence, women should have the right to vote.30 That same month, the Atlantic ran an article in which Stowe accused Lord Byron of abusing his wife and of incest with his half-sister.31 Her implied indictment of a sexual double standard paralleled Stanton and Anthony’s efforts to dis- sect the sexual politics of the home to expose the necessity

28For example, in True Woman Madeline Vinton Dahlgren recounts addresses by Almira Lincoln Phelps in which she urged her audience to think not of “‘woman’s rights but of woman’s duties.’ This sentiment may well be taken as the key-note of the excellentworkpublished...byMrs.LincolnPhelps”(“TheEducator,”True Woman, April 1871,p.11). 29Boydston, Kelley, and Margolis, Limits of Sisterhood, p. 258. 30Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Woman Question” and “What Is and What Is Not the Point of the Woman Question,” Hearth and Home, August 1869, pp. 520–21, 568–69; quotation p. 520. At the time, Stowe was the coeditor of Hearth and Home. 31During a trip to England in 1856, Stowe befriended Lady Byron and learned about Lord Byron’s incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. After Lady Byron’s death, Countess Guiccioli, Byron’s mistress, published a memoir that depicted Lord and Lady Byron’s failed marriage and placed all of the blame on Lady Byron. Incensed, Stowe decided to tell Lady Byron’s side of the story. For more information, see White, The Beecher Sisters, pp. 150–51, and Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 354.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 41 of revising marriage and divorce laws.32 Given her published opinions, Stanton and Anthony were convinced that Stowe was poised to become an influential spokeswoman for the woman’s rights movement; consequently, when Stowe wrote to Anthony that same month that she was “not quite ready to join the Woman’s Rights Church,” Anthony believed it was only a matter of time.33 If Stanton and Anthony had not been blinded by their op- timism, perhaps they would have recognized the ongoing dis- crepancies between Stowe’s convictions and their own. For instance, Stowe warned the proponents of suffrage not to give “prominencetounessentialthings...which,inturn,furnisha mark for the attack on the other side.”34 The allusion was likely to what Stowe perceived to be Stanton and Anthony’s radical views on divorce and marriage, which she felt diverted attention from the goal of women gaining suffrage. Other possible indications of the ideological gap include Stowe’s mentioning leaders of the soon-to-be-officially-organized AWSA and of the movement in England but not Stanton and Anthony as well as her referring to the Woman’s Rights Convention in Worces- ter, Massachusetts (1850), and the resolutions presented there rather than the earlier Seneca Falls Convention (1848)andits “Declaration of Sentiments.”35 Though relatively minor, each of these oversights suggests that Stowe felt more comfortable with the individuals who would form the AWSA than with the leaders of the NWSA.36 More significant is the fact that her 1869 articles focused not on suffrage but on legislation

32On Stanton and Anthony’s efforts, see Lori Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), pp. 136–37; and Kugler, Ladies to Women, pp. 88–89. 33As quoted in Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 358. 34Stowe, in Hearth and Home, August 1869,p.568. 35Stowe, in Hearth and Home, August 1869, pp. 520, 568. The Worcester gathering, headed by Lucy Stone and Paulina Wright Davis, was generally considered to be the ﬁrst national suffrage convention. Those who supported Stanton and Anthony tended to trace the origins of the suffrage movement to the Women’s Right Convention that Stanton had organized, whereas those who supported Stone and Blackwell looked to Worcester. 36In August 1869, when Stowe’s articles appeared, the split in the movement had occurred; NWSA had been ofﬁcially organized, but AWSA was still in process.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 42 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY granting property rights and guardianship of children to married women. As it turned out, August 1869 marked Stowe’s closest approach to the woman’s rights movement.37 Over the next four months, as she dealt with the backlash from her condemna- tions of Lord Byron—criticisms leveled by people who thought women should not write about such matters as incest and abuse—and as Anthony and Stanton increasingly advocated divorce and marriage reform, Stowe began to shift her stance.38 Discussion between the two parties ceased in December 1869 when Stowe declined the offer to edit the Revolution, citing as her ofﬁcial reason Anthony and Stanton’s unwillingness to change the name of the paper to the True Republic.39 As the disagreement over the name indicates, Stowe deemed Anthony and Stanton too radical and so felt she could not lend her voice to their cause. The demise of negotiations brought an end to Anthony and Stanton’s hope not only that Stowe would edit their journal but that she would produce a ﬁctional manifesto on woman suffrage that would rival her work denouncing African American slavery. Although it is not in the same league as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe did pen an opus on the Woman Question. It was not, however, the novel Anthony and Stanton had desired. Just before she began writing My Wife and I, Stowe produced an article for the Woman’s Journal warning suffrage proponents against meddling with marriage and divorce. Stanton lashed out in the Revolution, where she expressed her disdain for Stowe’s conservative betrayal and proclaimed her support for George

37In a private letter to Sara Parton (Fanny Fern) on 25 July 1869, Stowe stated, “Yes, I do believe in Female Suffrage” (reprinted in Boydston, Kelley, and Margolis, Limits of Sisterhood, p. 278). Even in the summer of 1869, however, Stowe remained leery of the organized movements and continued to put forth her own solutions for women’s advancement. 38For more on the backlash against Stowe in the Byron matter, see Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline, pp. 535–51;Hedrick,Harriet Beecher Stowe, pp. 361–70; and White, The Beecher Sisters, pp. 150–52. 39Harriet Beecher Stowe and Isabella Beecher Hooker to Susan B. Anthony, De- cember 1869, quoted in Boydston, Kelley, and Margolis, Limits of Sisterhood, pp. 278–79. For more information on the negotiations over the Revolution, see Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, pp. 358–61, and White, The Beecher Sisters, pp. 149–53.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 43 Sand and the French woman’s movement. An outraged Stowe wrote to Mary A. Livermore, editor of the Woman’s Journal, in August 1870. “If it be free divorce and free love that is wanted . . . there will come a return wave whose strength you have no idea—I for one shall go with all my might and strength against such a movement.”40 My Wife and I is Stowe’s return wave— an indictment of the NWSA in favor of a model of rights for women that draws from the both the AWSA and the female-led antisuffrage movements.

Multiple Models of Progressive Womanhood in “My Wife and I” With its dramatizations of the need for legal and social change to benefit women, its pointed dialogue and discourse, conversion narrative, engaging narrator, standard cast of character types,41 and emphasis on theme over plot, My Wife and I: or, Harry Henderson’s History is in the mainstream of nineteenth-century woman’s rights fiction written by both proponents and opponents of woman’s rights and woman suffrage. Stowe is, in fact, quite explicit about positioning her novel in, and bringing her voice to, the national debate when she explains in the first chapter, “it is not so much the story, as the things it gives the author a chance to say. . . . [W]e shall take occasion to keep up with the spirit of this dis- cussing age in all these matters” (p. 5). What distinguishes Stowe’s work from that of others is her endorsement of multiple paths for women’s advancement. She encapsulates this idea, in the first part of her novel, when she lists women’s numerous roles in Greek mythology, concluding, “In short, the Greeks conceived a variety of spheres of womanhood” (p. 119). Throughout her novel, Stowe illustrates that a similar diversity

40Quoted in Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 373. For more on the back-and- forth between Stowe and Stanton, see, besides Hedrick, White, The Beecher Sisters, pp. 159–60. 41Stowe’s novel contains the major characters found in novels written in opposition to suffrage: the woman’s rights activist; the activist’s foil, a true woman of sorts; the suffragist villain; the mother; and the love interest.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 44 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of opportunity does and should exist in nineteenth-century America. The plot of My Wife and I is simple: Harry Henderson leaves his New Hampshire home to pursue love and literary fortune in New York City. Stowe’s decision to employ a male, rather than a female, narrator, who then traces his path to marriage, is, however, surprising, particularly since the vast majority of suffrage and antisuffrage fiction written by women is from the perspective of the female protagonist or a female omniscient narrator. Stowe’s deviation from the usual point of view in woman’s rights fiction highlights the role she saw men playing in the quest for woman’s rights. Her experience with the Lady Byron scandal taught her that men still had greater liberty to speak out on controversial subjects; consequently, she increasingly turned to men, such as her brother Henry, to voice her opinions on topics such as divorce and the sexual double standard. In a letter written to Henry in June of 1870, Stowe asks him to write against George Sand and the loose morals she represents because “the things to be said are such as a man can far better say & such as would only draw malignant reaction on me. For if a woman undertakes to utter a protest when licentiousness is concerned she is overwhelmed with a deluge of filth.”42 A month later, Stowe urged Henry to run an article she had written as an editorial so that it would have “the sanction of [his] authority.”43 Stowe’s choice of a male narrator for My Wife and I—a choice emphasized by her selection of a name (Harry) that mimics her own (Harriet)—follows the same logic. In each instance, the opinions are hers but she relies on a man to be her medium of expression, for Stowe, like her sister Catharine, believed that women could exert tremendous influence over men and would often have more success by working through men than around them. Settling on a male narrator likely gave Stowe greater freedom to express her views while simultaneously allowing her to depict

42Quoted in Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 372. 43Quoted in Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 372.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 45 the ways in which women may shape men and society, Harry clearly being guided and inspired by the women in his life. As she follows Harry on his search for a wife, Stowe demon- strates this influence and introduces the reader to the many women who serve either as models or anti-models of progressive women. Through Harry, the author comments on their merits, their suitability for a given role, and their value to the society at large. The first woman Stowe presents is Harry’s mother, a reincarnation of the ideal woman common to Stowe’s historical New England novels. Harry describes her through the effect that she has: “Her house was a miracle of neatness and order—her [ten] children of all ages and sizes under her perfect control, and the accumulations of labor of all descrip- tions which beset a great family where there are no servants all melted away under her hands as if by enchantment” (p. 6).44 Although Harry’s father is a minister, his wife “stood nearer to heaven than he, and looking in, told him what she saw, and he, holding her hand, felt the thrill of celestial electricity” (p. 36).45 Stowe uses Harry’s description of his mother to reorient the Woman Question around motherhood: “The woman question of our day, as I understand it, is this.—Shall motherhood ever be felt in the public administration of the affairs of state? The state is nothing more nor less than a collection of families, and what would be good or bad for the individual family would be good or bad for the state” (pp. 37–38). In showcasing, through Harry’s mother, women’s many virtues and competencies—“my mother’s was the administra- tive power”; “my father habitually referred everything to her” (p. 37)—Stowe exemplifies and affirms the AWSA’s fundamental position that women should be given the vote because the community and the nation, extensions of the home, would

44For more information on stalwart matriarchs of Stowe’s historical New England novels, see Lisa Watt MacFarlane, “The New England Kitchen Goes Uptown: Domes- tic Displacement in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s New York,” New England Quarterly 64.2 (June 1991): pp. 275–79. 45For an overview of critics who have noted Stowe’s belief that women are inher- ently more moral and closer to God than are men, see Elizabeth Ammons, “Heroines in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Literature 49.2 (May 1977): 162–63.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 46 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY benefit from some brisk housekeeping.46 Stowe complicates that potential solution, however, when her narrator reminds readers that the women to whom the state should most ap- propriately turn are those “to whom in an especial manner all noise and publicity and unrestful conflict are peculiarly dis- tasteful” (p. 38). To accommodate such admirable delicacy of feeling, Stowe proposes a less overt way for women to participate in the nation; they may be like the nymph Egeria, who “made the laws by which Rome ruled the world” without being a member of the senate or “lift[ing] up her voice in the street” (p. 39). In essence, Stowe insists that the “mother- influence” must be pervasive if it is to create an “ideal state in a millennial community” (p. 37); however, the “mother- influence” may be manifest in several ways. By illustrating this principle throughout the novel—for example, Harry’s father declares that his wife has “made him” “by her influence” (p. 36), and Harry traces all his good qualities to his upbringing by women—Stowe validates the antisuffrage position that women have more effective means for altering men and society than the ballot. Harry’s mother represents Stowe’s ideal woman of an older generation; Stowe’s novel, though, is primarily concerned with the new generation. Caroline Simmons, the first such woman portrayed, expresses dissatisfaction with “woman’s lot in life” (p. 102), and in the course of their acquaintance, she alters Harry’s (and, Stowe hopes, readers’) opinion of those women who seek a nontraditional position in society. Harry, who has recently graduated from college, has returned home. Soon his mother begins encouraging him to visit his cousin Caroline, whom Harry recalls from their school days as his intellectual superior. When he first encounters the adult Caroline, he describes her as having a “head and bust of the Venus de Milo Type,” a “graceful” figure, and a “glowing bloom, speaking of health and vigor” (p. 100). Yet while his family and hers wish that the two young people might develop a romantic attach- ment, Caroline is eager to follow her own course.

46Vacca, Reform against Nature, pp. 52–53, 67–68.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 47 Shortly before he is to leave on a trip to Europe, Caroline explains to Harry that she has no interest in marriage. As the adult daughter of her widowed father, she has full responsibility for his household. This is a task she does not enjoy, for which she is not compensated, and that she believes could be ade- quately performed by a housekeeper. Marriage, she assumes, will do little to alter her lot, and she speaks passionately about the alternative she seeks. “I don’t want to wait for a husband to make me a position,” Caroline insists, “I want to make one for myself; I don’t want to take a husband’s money, I want my own. You have individual ideas of life, you want to work them out; so have I: you are expected and encouraged to work them out independently, while I am forbidden” (p. 104). In Stowe’s vision of womanhood, pursuing an education and a profession is more acceptable than flaunting oneself before men in hopes of obtaining a marriage proposal (p. 113). Nineteenth-century domestic fiction and conduct literature cautioned women against marrying out of purely economic motives. Such alliances, suffragists and antisuffragists agreed, were a form of slavery or prostitution, a clear violation of the Christian ideal of marriage.47 Caroline refuses to market herself to men who would choose her “as they do cooking stoves” (p. 103). However, her father’s overbearing temperament and societal restrictions on women’s access to advanced education prevent her from engaging in a vocation. Stowe emphasizes that Caroline does not wish to be “unwomanly” in her quest for “a sphere of independent action” (p. 104) but simply to find an outlet other than marriage for her energies and abilities. In resisting marriage, Caroline is not blind to her future. “You are sure to find me ten or twenty years hence a fixture in this neighborhood, spoken of familiarly as ‘old Miss Caroline

47One of the most famous uses of this metaphor was John Stuart Mills’s proclamation, “There remain no legal slaves, save the mistress of every house” (“The Subjection of Women,” 1869). In the 31 March 1870 issueoftheRevolution, Stanton commented that most marriages constituted “legalized prostitution” (quoted in Kugler, Ladies to Women, p. 88). For a good discussion of the slavery/marriage analogy, see Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 130–31.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 48 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Simmons,’ a cross-pious old maid, held up as a warning to contumacious young beauties how they neglect their first gra- cious offer. ‘Caroline was a handsome gal in her time,’ they’ll say, ‘but she was too perticklar, and now her day is over and she’s left an old maid’” (p. 105). Caroline is a proud, independent, intelligent woman; she is also a beautiful woman who is free of any “coquetry” (p. 101) and whom, given her sarcastic self-awareness, is a perfect intermediary for Stowe to combat prevailing negative stereotypes of woman’s rights advocates as either unsexed, embittered spinsters or sexually loose, manipu- lative sirens.48 In a clear thrust at Stanton and Anthony, Stowe also counters the notion that strong-minded women wish not simply to share men’s opportunities but to mimic their ways. “I would not, if I could, do as Georges Sand did,” Caroline declares, “put on men’s clothes and live a man’s life. Anything of that sort in a woman is very repulsive and disgusting to me” (p. 109). By stressing that Caroline’s appearance, actions, and desires adhere to womanly dictates even as she hopes to forge her own path in life, Stowe expands the definition of what femininity encompasses. Caroline hopes to pursue a career in medicine, a profession that, significantly, both the AWSA’s organ The Woman’s Jour- nal and the antisuffrage journal TheTrueWomanextolled as falling within the purview of women’s work.49 Caroline’s aspiration gives Stowe an opportunity to introduce her “doctrine of vocations” into the novel. And once Harry gains employment as an editorialist in New York City, he follows Caroline’s advice “to speak for the dumb, for us whose lives burn themselves out into white ashes in silence and repression” (p. 111)ashewrites a series of articles on the “Modern Woman” for the Milky Way.

48For more on prevailing negative stereotypes of women, see Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–14 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 161–67. 49Woman’s Journal, 4 March 1871,p.65,and24 June 1871,p.195; True Woman, June 1871,p.27,andJuly1871,p.37. For an in-depth discussion of why proponents and opponents of suffrage both supported women entering the medical profession, see Barbara Bardes and Suzanne Gossett, Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 133–37.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 49 He soon becomes a recognized advocate for woman’s rights and is “deluged with letters, appeals, pamphlets, and newspapers all calling” for him to prepare articles supporting various aspects of “the cause” (p. 234). The sentiments he chooses to express are, signiﬁcantly, those Caroline imparted about the “doctrine of vocations.” To broaden the concept’s base of support to an older, and a more conservative, segment of the population, Stowe also has Harry’s mother promote it. “I have always believed in the doctrine of vocations,” replies Harry’s mother after Harry explains Caroline’s situation and desire to pursue a medical profession (p. 123). Recognizing that Caroline “possesse[s] an uncommon character and great abilities” (p. 121), Harry’s mother agrees to use her inﬂuence to persuade her brother, Caroline’s father, to allow Caroline to pursue her chosen path. While this is a liberating moment within the text, the doctrine’s core principle—only those women who possess the “rarest and highest” talents are destined for a role beyond the domestic (p. 106)—exposes a problematic exceptionalist strain that runs throughout suffrage and antisuffrage writings.50 Even as activists sought to create a space in which a few skilled women might act directly in the civic sphere, they simultaneously reinforced the assumption that most women should remain in the domestic sphere. My Wife and I features another exceptional woman, Ida Van Arsdel (sister of the heroine whom Harry will marry), whose capabilities draw her beyond a life of domesticity. Ida, daughter of a wealthy New York family, manages her father’s foreign correspondence and, like Caroline, plans to study medicine in Paris.51 Stowe’s admiration for the type of woman Ida

50For discussions of exceptionalism in suffrage and antisuffrage writings, see Louise Michele, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 56–85; Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, pp. 137–39; and Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, pp. 208–14. 51That Ida and Caroline both plan to pursue their medical studies in Paris is likely a critique of American educational policy. By 1871, six women’s medical colleges had been established in America, but most coeducational schools and all the best regular schools of medicine still refused to admit women. For more information, see Lillian R. Furst, Woman Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), pp. 221–24.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 50 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY represents is apparent in the respect other characters express for her. One describes her as having “the air of a queen” (p. 200), another as having the “air of a lady” (p. 213). Seeing Ida as “a good, noble woman, of a strength and independence perfectly incomprehensible to me” (p. 169), her sister Eva wants to follow her example (p. 196). To construct the character Ida, Stowe draws from, mer- ges, and then transcends ideas from each of the major woman’s movements. After attending a salon of opinionated woman’s rights activists, whom Stowe portrays as fractious and ineffec- tual, Ida declares, “I have long since made up my mind, for my own part, that if the cause of woman is to be advanced in this world, it is not so much by meeting together and talking about it, as by each individual woman proposing to herself some good work for the sex, and setting about it patiently, and doing it quietly” (p. 238). Such a statement accords perfectly with those of leading antisuffragists.52 Ida, however, identiﬁes herself as a member of the “moderate party,” a recognizable reference to the AWSA, and she echoes some of the organization’s arguments and its usual charges against the NWSA. For instance, Ida faults the more radical group for carrying principles “to every ridiculous extreme” (p. 260), and she claims that radical activists are directly “injur[ing] all women who are trying to be self-supporting and independent” (p. 259).53 Despite her cen- sure of NWSA’s leaders, Ida endorses the group’s natural rights argument (p. 264). Stowe adds yet another level of complexity to Ida’s position when she has Ida declare that she “never was disposed to insist on the immediate granting of political rights to women” (p. 264). With these words, the novel’s respectable

52See, e.g., Sarah Josepha Hale, “Notes and Notices,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, May 1871,p.477: “In no profession is woman’s right to work so clear as in that of medicine; and the ladies who are by their success quietly establishing the fact that women are suited to the profession, and even to its higher branches, are doing more for the true advancement of women in the matter of the right to a livelihood than can any oratory.” 53Stowe and Lucy Stone often lamented all activists being lumped together, particularly when Stanton or Anthony drew criticism to the larger movement. For Stone, see Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 154–58, 166. For Stowe, see Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 373.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 51 activist distinguishes herself from the leadership of both the NWSA and the AWSA. She is, like Stowe, a progressive who thinks for herself. Ida, credibly, becomes a spokesperson for Stowe’s views on woman suffrage. If we accept that premise, then Ida’s expanded explanation of her position suggests that although Stowe supported suffrage in theory, she feared that in practice the majority of women were incapable of using it properly. Ida explains:

I am, on the whole, very well pleased that there is no immediate prospect of the suffrage being granted to women until a generation with superior education and better balanced minds and better habits of consecutive thought shall have grown up among us. I think the gift of the ballot will come at last as the result of a superior culture and education. And I am in no hurry for it before. . . . I would a great deal rather [have suffrage] come to them by gradual evolution than by destructive revolution. I do not want [political rights for women] to be forced upon society, when there is so little preparation among women that they will do themselves no credit by it. [Pp. 261, 264]

Although Stowe decidedly advocates suffrage, she recommends delay so that further education may mitigate the negative im- pact radical or uneducated women might exert in the political arena.54 Despite this delay, through Ida she urges that women have “some share in making the laws with which they are to be governed.” Her rationale is simple: “Women are different than men, and have altogether a different class of feelings and wants and necessities” (p. 265). Although Ida offers no plan for draw- ing women into the legislative process, her sister Eva, another stand-in for Stowe, recommends an idea promoted by some leading antisuffragists: women should form their own parliament to “meet by themselves, and deliberate and have a voice in all that concerns the State” (p. 265). It is a notion with which Stowe was familiar. In 1869, journalist Jane Cunningham Croly

54See, e.g., Beecher, Woman’s Profession as Mother and Educator (New York: Maclean, Gibson, and Co., 1872), pp. 11–12,andTrue Woman, March 1871,p.4: “If you vote, all Sodom and Gomorrah must vote with you, and it is easy to imagine the men and measures they would vote.” In the 1890s Stanton promoted limiting voting by education for a time (Davis, Political Thought, p. 211).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 52 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY organized Sorosis, a professional women’s club in New York City to which both Stowe and her sister Catharine belonged. That same year Croly called for a Woman’s Parliament, which she hoped would take responsibility for those issues male partisan politics handled poorly; although it was intended to function as a sort of parallel government, it met only once.55 The radical activists Stowe distrusts are personiﬁed in My Wife and I by Audacia Dangyereys. This portrayal leaves no room to doubt the intensity of Stowe’s disapproval of Stan- ton, Anthony, and their newest prodigy, Victoria Woodhull.56 Readers in the 1870s readily recognized Dacia as a lampoon of Woodhull, a ﬂamboyant and notorious advocate of woman’s rights, free love, and spiritualism whose beauty, charm, and or- atorical prowess won over NWSA leaders Stanton, Anthony, and Stowe’s sister Isabella.57 Woodhull’s unsavory past and radical ideas, however, drove women such as Stowe away

55For more on the Woman’s Parliament, see Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” in Unequal Sisters, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 73–74. 56Commentary on My Wife and I tends to concur (see Donovan, “Stowe’s Femi- nism,” pp. 153–54, and Boydston, Kelley, and Margolis, Limits of Sisterhood, pp. 262– 63) with Margaret Wyman’s 1952 reading (“Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topical Novel on Woman Suffrage,” New England Quarterly 25 [September 1952]: 383–91), which notes an abrupt shift in the serialized novel from “serious homage to satiric ridicule” of the suffrage movement (p. 386) after Victoria Woodhull joined its ranks in Jan- uary 1871. White, who expands on Wyman’s interpretation (The Beecher Sisters, pp. 182–84), observes that Ida, the novel’s positive exemplar of woman’s rights activism, is transformed from a feminist into a Catharine Beecher–like ﬁgure after Audacia, the character representing Woodhull, enters the plot. To substantiate that Stowe changed direction midway through her novel, critics often cite a conversation she had with John Raymond Howard, which he subsequently quoted as: “You think you are going to write one kind of thing, and behold! your pen travels off in an entirely different direction. Now I thought I would make this Harry Henderson a free-and-easy, chatty sort of story. But just as I began it, Mrs. Stanton and all those people began making their loud talk and unsettling attacks on marriage and its sacredness, setting up new and false notions. I couldn’t stand that; and so you see this story has taken a deeper hold of me than I thought it would” (John Raymond Howard, Remembrance of Things Past: A Familiar Chronicle of Kinsfolk and Friends Worth While [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1925], p. 284; italics mine). But, as the phrase I have italicized shows, Stowe had determined her plot line before she began, not midway through, writing her novel, an interpretation corroborated by its ﬁrst chapter, which mocks Stanton and Anthony. 57See White, Beecher Sisters, pp. 182–83; Wyman, “Stowe’s Topical Novel,” pp. 386–87, 390; and Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline, p. 568.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 53 from the movement and attracted to it a series of pointed attacks.58 Stowe represents Dacia as the epitome of the brazen, young, sexually loose, gender-reversing advocate of woman’s rights, a type the media had used to discredit proponents of suffrage.59 The reader ﬁrst meets Dacia—“a jaunty, dashing young woman, with bold blue eyes, and curling brown hair, with a little wicked looking cap” (p. 240)—when she marches into Harry’s apart- ment unannounced and sits down at his writing table. She “burst[s] out laughing,” seizes Harry “frankly by the hand,” and intimidates him into silence (p. 240). Dacia has read his articles on the “Modern Woman” in the Milky Way and has come to secure his subscription to her paper, The Emancipated Woman, and to enlighten him about the woman’s movement. Although Harry has written articles on the emancipation of women, Dacia believes he hasn’t “the least idea what it means” (p. 240). Un- der the banner of women’s emancipation, she claims the right to smoke, to drink, to make social calls, to be outspoken, and to invite men to visit her (p. 241). For Stowe, Dacia lays bare the undesirable consequences of women focusing on their rights instead of their duties, thus reinforcing her previous caution- ary approach to granting them suffrage before a thoroughgoing education has prepared them for their responsibilities. Dacia’s outlandish behavior causes Harry, previously an avid proponent of woman’s rights, to question whether “granting larger liberty and wider opportunities was going to change the women we reverence to things like these” (p. 244), a concern that echoes

58For Woodhull’s participation in the suffrage movement, see Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 28–33. When Stowe wrote My Wife and I, her attack on Woodhull simply reﬂected the harm she believed Woodhull was inﬂicting on earnest seekers of woman’s rights. In 1872, however, Stowe’s animosity became quite personal after Woodhull accused her brother Henry Ward Beecher of having an affair with a married woman, Elizabeth Tilton. Woodhull did not condemn the affair itself but, rather, Beecher’s hypocrisy since he had publicly denounced her for practicing free love while engaging in it himself. The incident mushroomed into the most controversial and publicized sex scandal of the nineteenth century. 59For more information on this stereotype, see Tickner, Spectacle of Women, pp. 161–67.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 54 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY antisuffragists’ argument that if women receive the vote they will not thereby purify politics but rather be sullied by it. But although Dacia’s negative attributes lend credence to the antisuffragists’ claims, Stowe is more interested in using them as ammunition against not the movement in general but the NWSA in particular. Harry’s friend Bolton advises him to not “be ashamed of having spoken the truth, because crazy people and fools caricature it” (p. 245). Then, in a clear rebuke of Stanton’s Revolution and Woodhull’s Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, Bolton continues: “I always said that one must have a strong conviction for a cause, if he could stand the things its friends say for it, or read a weekly paper devoted to it” (p. 245). Later Harry echoes this criticism as he condemns Dacia’s journal for “set[ting] itself up to be the head leader of Woman’s Rights; and to give its harsh clamors as the voice of woman” (p. 258). With Dacia and her radical ilk occupying one end of womanhood’s spectrum, Stowe places at the other “the Dolls of fashion, the Butterflies” (p. 195), whose sole objective is seeking amusement and acquiring a husband (p. 186). Stowe denounces these women for wasting their time in frivolous activities, yet she is quick to emphasize that men and society encourage such behavior (p. 195). As Ida explains, “women are brought up in a way to smother all the life out of them. All literature from the earliest age teaches them that it is graceful to be pretty and helpless; they aspire to be superficial and showy” (p. 196). The marriage market, Stowe insists, is the root of the problem, and in her novel she advocates an alternative. Women, she believes, should be free to devote themselves to a meaningful career that grants them financial independence. Thus liberated, women are able to approach marriage as a matter of choice rather than of economic necessity. With Caroline and Ida, Stowe models that alternative for her readers. However, as Caroline notes, “for the largest class of women there is nothing like marriage” (p. 106). To offer readers a representative of that more common life calling for women, Stowe returns to her most famous novel and names the heroine of My Wife and I after the angelic Eva of Uncle

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 55 Tom’s Cabin, an association that would not have been lost on most readers and that endows the Eva of the later novel with an immediate aura and ethos. Though not progressive in the same way that Caroline and Ida are as they pursue a profession and independence, Eva illustrates what it means to be a progressive domestic woman as she seeks to escape the triviality and emptiness of fashionable life as well as the commodifica- tion of marriageable women. Eva, too, promotes women’s right to education, the professions, and a role in community affairs. And through Eva, Stowe champions a model of womanhood that grows directly out of her earlier writings.60 Eva is intriguing because of the surprising contradictions she embodies. Born into the New York elite, her values are decidedly bourgeois. Harry first describes her as “one of the New York princesses of the blood” (p. 157)andlaterasthelead- ing belle of New York society. But Eva is no butterfly of fashion; ashamed of the role in which she has been cast, she longs to fill her life with “a definite duty for each hour” (p. 167). She attends church daily during Lent and strives to honor her confirmation vows. She recognizes the hypocrisy of those who promise to “renounce the vain pomp and glory of the world” and live a “higher, purer, nobler life” (p. 170)yet who devote themselves to acquiring wealth. Eva, then, serves Stowe’s rhetorical ends of reforming the elite and promoting the religious, educational, and economic values of mainstream Protestants. When she is introduced into the plot, Eva is being pursued by the wealthiest bachelor in New York, Wat Sydney. Her family is eager for her to accept his proposal, but Eva is reluctant (p. 250). Harry and Eva first meet on a streetcar in New York when he pays her fare upon noticing that she has only a ten- dollar note; he then sees her home, shielding her under his um- brella during an unexpected rain shower. As thanks, Eva invites Harry to her family’s regular Wednesday evening visiting hours (pp. 158–59). At the reception, the two fall into a discussion of

60For an overview of this model of womanhood, see MacFarlane, “The New En- gland Kitchen Goes Uptown,” pp. 272–79.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 56 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Italian poetry and art. Because Harry is in no position to marry, Eva’s mother considers him “safe” and welcomes him “as one of the family” (p. 217). Harry becomes a frequent visitor at the Van Arsdels’, and his friendship with Eva deepens into love, but recognizing the vast difference in their economic standing and his own inability to support a wife, he refrains from speaking about matrimony (p. 305). All the while, Eva’s mother and aunt pressure her to accept Sydney’s offer of marriage, but Eva is determined that when she marries “it shall be for the man alone, not a pieced up affair of carriages, horses, diamonds, opera boxes, [and ] cashmere” (p. 212). Eva insists that only a man whom she can love, respect, and “talk with about everything” (p. 324), in short, a man she “could be happy with if [she] lost all beside” (p. 370), will win her hand. When Bolton helps Harry find a job that offers him the means to support a wife, Harry promptly proposes to Eva and she accepts. In doing so, she not only chooses love but also a middle-class lifestyle and its attendant domestic responsibilities. Once the marriage takes place, the focus of the novel shifts away from Harry’s quest to find a wife and toward Eva, who is busy “set[ting] up her kingdom” (p. 434). As Harry fades into the novel’s background, drawn away by the demands of his job from home, Stowe turns to Eva’s work within it, structurally configured to highlight the author’s belief that the home is the center of society and women its rulers.61 Stowe had offered one or another version of that argument in The American Woman’s Home (1869), a housekeeping manual she wrote with her sister Catharine,62 and in many of her historical New England novels. In My Wife and I, she extends her previous comments to

61Many critics have discussed Stowe’s matriarchal governance. Among the most inﬂuential have been Jane P. Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,” Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 122–46, and Elizabeth Ammons, “Stowe’s Dream of the Mother- Savior: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Women Writers before the 1920s,” in New Essays on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” ed. Eric Sundquist (Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 155–95. 62Kathryn Sklar provides the most complete account of the sisters’ domestic agenda in Catharine Beecher: A Study of American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 57 show how matriarchal power functions in America’s commer- cial hub.63 The status of women would be advanced, Stowe asserts, if that of wives and mothers, as well as the dignity of household labor, were more respected. As she contends in both her 1865 Chimney-Corner series and in The American Woman’s Home, “the chief cause of [women’s sufferings] is the fact that the honor and duties of the family state are not duly appreciated, [and] that women are not trained for these duties as men are trained for their trades and professions.”64 By showing a member of the New York elite readily embracing household duties, Stowe suggests that wives and mothers, and those who work in others’ homes as well, should view domestic labor as a voca- tional choice rather than a task to be endured. Eva proclaims, “I have so much superﬂuous activity and energy that I should bequitethrownawayonarichman....Ialwayswantedanice little house all my own where I could show what I could do” (pp. 251, 392). Eva’s actions prove the validity of her words as she sets about transforming the couple’s house into a home and cheerfully displaying her progress to Harry each night when he returns from work (pp. 254–57). She also happily accepts the tasks of household cleaning and cooking—“I’m rather fond of cooking; I have decided genius that way too” (p. 251)—although she does have, as many middle-class families did, a servant to help with these daily tasks. Although groomed to be a show- piece of her husband’s wealth, Eva prefers “to have a sphere and show what [she] can do” (p. 251). Stowe further ennobles the art of housekeeping when she ties it to ancient Greek rituals and gods. When Eva visits his mother and aunt, Harry describes the event as a pilgrimage to the “temple of domestic experience” (p. 433). They are the “elderly priestesses” and she “the young neophyte that seeks admission to these Eleusinian mysteries” (p. 433), the most

63MacFarlane analyzes this switch in “The New England Kitchen Goes Uptown.” The conclusion she reaches is that Eva is a greatly diminished character and does not possess the same abilities and power as her predecessors in the historical New England novels (p. 285). I disagree; Eva is, I believe, a capable and inﬂuential woman. 64Beecher and Stowe, American Woman’s Home, p. 13.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 58 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY important rites in ancient Greece.65 That a process of initiation is required emphasizes that any woman who wants to attend to her domestic duties with skill and devotion must first learn what is involved. Though women often have, as Eva does, a “genius for home life”(p.434), they still need to be schooled in its finer points to achieve the highest levels of competency, and those activities need to be systematized into a science, a domestic science, to be recognized by women and men alike as a profession worthy of respect. Though not revolutionary in the way Anthony and Stanton had hoped, My Wife and I does advance the cause of women. First, it contains the “revolutionary potential” that Jane Tomp- kins identified in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—“Stowe relocates the centerofpowerinAmericanlife...inthekitchen,”which means “the new society will not be controlled by men, but by women.”66 In figuring marriage as a man’s rather than a woman’s quest in My Wife and I, Stowe structurally reinforces the home as America’s essential space, for both sexes; and by portraying Harry as an undeniable product of female influence, she illustrates how women may exert control in the larger society. Second, the novel endorses women who are ac- tively pursuing careers in the civic sphere. In the twenty years between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and My Wife and I, Stowe’s vision for women grew more expansive; by 1870 she was comfortable with women altering society through direct, as well as indirect, means. In the preface, Stowe commends women for holding “self-sustaining careers” and “opening paths of usefulness” (p. v), and throughout her novel, she offers two distinct models— Ida and Caroline—for professional women to emulate. As is evident in her nonfictional and fictional works, Harriet Beecher Stowe approached the Woman Question with an open mind. In incorporating both suffrage and antisuffrage

65For more information on the Eleusinian mysteries, see Dudley Wright, The Eleusinian Mysteries and Rites (1913; repr. Whiteﬁsh, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), pp. 17–26. 66Tompkins, “Sentimental Power,” p. 145. Ammons also argues that in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe “placed woman at the center of a radical script for social change” (“Stowe’s Dream,” p. 159).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00256 by guest on 28 September 2021 STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 59 arguments into her philosophy, she demonstrated the power of pluralism. She did not struggle, as many other writers and leaders did, to imagine progressive women or a society in which they could ﬂourish; rather, in My Wife and I, she creatively modeled a society that allowed for multiple possibilities in the present and that prepared for even grander opportunities in the future.

Amy Easton-Flake received her Ph.D. in American literature from Brandeis University and currently teaches at Framingham State University. Her scholarship focuses on nineteenth-century women writers and creative literature written in the service of reform movements.

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