Frances Fuller Victor Analyzes “The Woman Question” in Oregon
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Oregon State Library State Oregon SHERI BARTLETT BROWNE “What Shall be Done with Her?” Frances Fuller Victor Analyzes “The Woman Question” in Oregon ON DECEMBER 5, 1873, Far West author Frances Fuller Victor launched her serialized novella “Judith Miles; or, What Shall be Done with Her?” in The New Northwest, an equal-rights newspaper. The story features an extremely beautiful sixteen-year-old protagonist, Judith, the daughter of an irascible, poor cattle rancher who is fighting for his land against powerful San Joaquin Valley farmers. Faced with multiplying financial misfortunes, Jack Miles decides to take his family back to ranchland in Texas, where they once lived. As they drive their rickety, overloaded wagon through the Arizona desert, Apache Indians brutally attack the band of travelers, leaving Judith as the sole survivor. Before the story reaches this climax, Victor illustrates the tragic reality of women’s dependence on and subjugation to men in the late-nineteenth- century West through descriptions of the fictional family’s life and impov- erished circumstances. Jack Miles, a man “deaf to argument and persuasion alike,” mercilessly drives his family on the exhausting trek from Texas to California, resulting in his wife’s death during childbirth. Judith then assumes her mother’s role, raising her precocious little sister in a cheerless household. Judith yearns for education, but her father’s insular worldview provokes rage against “book larnin’ ” and modernity. To Jack, his daughter’s rudimen- An accomplished writer, Victor utilized The New Northwest to advocate for tary ability to read is enough “for a gal.” Judith therefore hides a precious women’s equal rights. During the 1870s, she crafted stories with complex female cache of poetry and literature and fantasizes about the world beyond their protagonists who sought self-determination. Simultaneously, she wrote passionate ranch. At the time of her father’s death in the Arizona desert, she is utterly non-fiction essays, urging women to “investigate for themselves” the roots of male dependent, with no skills or resources. Her tangled emotions and material dominance. This 1883 photograph evokes Victor’s commanding presence and circumstances no doubt contribute to the “brain fever” she suffers on the highlights the centrality of literature to her life. OHQ vol. 113, no. 3 © 01 Oregon Historical Society Browne, Frances Fuller Victor Analyzes “The Woman Question” in Oregon traumatic loss of her family after Judith with letters of introduction to wealthy women in San Francisco. What the Apache assault.1 Judith wishes to do with herself is a question never posed. Thus, each time Found lying in the Arizona a character in the novella wonders what to do with “poor” Judith, Victor’s desert several days later, Judith women readers can see a mirror of their own dependency and vulnerability is taken to Fort Kellogg, where and ask: “What shall we do with ourselves?” her vulnerability is a source Seeking answers to that question, Victor, born in 1826, joined the first of fascination to the officers’ American revolutionaries who called for women’s equal rights, adding her wives, but it also leaves Judith voice to a generational and ideological cohort of social–justice advocates susceptible to exploitation. that was national as well as regional. Typically white, native born, middle Once she recovers from illness, class, and drawn to progressive Protestantism, these women and men shared the fort’s drunken, lecherous a commitment to antebellum colonel preys on her fragile reform causes such as abolition, Library of Congress emotional state and naiveté, temperance, and the improve- sexually harassing her. Rather ment of women’s health. The than coming to her defense, the elder foremothers of this group colonel’s wife blames Judith had been born in the 10s and for her husband’s unwanted included such national figures advances. Judith’s position as as Quaker teacher Lucretia Mott an unattached woman becomes and writer Sarah Grimké, while untenable. Within days she the younger activists, generally is told to leave, cast from the born between 115 and 15, protection of the fort. Put on included writer Elizabeth Cady a stagecoach for San Francisco, Stanton, orator-organizer Susan an apprehensive but hopeful B. Anthony, abolitionist Lucy Judith looks forward to making Stone, and Congregational- Victor’s narrative of a young woman’s quest her own way in the world as an turned-Unitarian minister for independence was serialized weekly in independent woman, deter- Antoinette Brown Blackwell.4 The New Northwest, December 5, 1873, mined to rise above the barriers In 1869, after two decades through May 8, 1874. of class and sex oppression that of concerted effort to achieve threaten to overwhelm her. abolition, women’s property Judith’s plight is expressed rights, and woman suffrage, the Photographed in 1870, at age fifty, Susan in Victor’s subtitle, “What shall be done with her?” Victor cleverly uses the national equal rights movement B. Anthony traveled throughout the Pacific question throughout the narrative to explore the complexities of nineteenth- split into two wings. Leaders had Northwest in autumn 1871 with Abigail century gender and class relations. Never directed toward Judith but instead been unable to reach consensus Scott Duniway as tour manager. Leaving asked of others, the query reiterates the vulnerabilities of a young woman over future tactics and strategy Washington to return to Portland in without family or resources. In a conversation before Judith boards the when congressional Republicans November, Anthony mentioned the grueling schedule: “I have traveled 1,800 miles in stagecoach to San Francisco, for example, an agitated military officer asks disappointingly defined citi- fifty-six days, spoken forty-two nights and the doctor’s wife: “What is to be done with her at the end of this journey? zens as male in the Fourteenth many days, and I am tired, tired” (Ida Do not I know that a young girl cannot be left to herself in a strange city? Amendment and then enfran- Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Has she money? Has she friends?” Exasperated with the barrage of questions, chised only black men in the Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: the woman retorts: “What shall be done with her?”3 She suggests providing Fifteenth Amendment. Stone Bowen-Merrill, 1899), 400). OHQ vol. 113, no. 3 Browne, Frances Fuller Victor Analyzes “The Woman Question” in Oregon 0 and former abolitionist Henry The decade of the 10s, ripe with both possibility and conflict in the 01 Blackwell organized the Ameri- national suffrage movement, also marked a turning point in Victor’s career can Woman Suffrage Asso- and personal history. Separated from her profligate husband and entirely ciation (AWSA) and pledged self-supporting, she utilized her own literary aspirations, thwarted ambitions, to continue working for gender and financial degradation to sharpen and deepen her analysis of women’s OHS digital no. ba OHS digital no. and racial justice. Stanton and subjugation. Victor’s “Judith Miles,” for example, not only represented a liter- Anthony formed the National ary accomplishment but also drew from her personal experiences to explore Woman Suffrage Association the meanings of individuality and womanhood in the nineteenth century. (NWSA), which was commit- The result was “a penetrating critique of gender relations in western society.” ted to the primacy of woman Victor followed “Judith Miles” with a series of ruthlessly insightful prose suffrage and advocated for a essays in The New Northwest that attacked the perceived logic of what she sixteenth amendment, intend- called “the social system” — white male socioeconomic, legal, political, and ing to enfranchise all women. religious dominance — and probed in exhaustive detail its catastrophic Thus, the early 10s, when Vic- effects on women’s humanity. Her intellectual contribution to the regional tor completed “Judith Miles,” and national equal-rights movement, beginning in the 10s, was to awaken was a period of redefinition and women and men to the reality and brutality of patriarchy in order to promote reinvigoration for both national social change. She accomplished this consciousness-raising by utilizing an suffrage organizations.5 ironic, witty, and caustic voice, developed over twenty years in her fiction, to As leaders from the AWSA write feminist prose lectures and essays. In those texts, Victor seized on three and NWSA sought to awaken, interconnected arguments that she used to develop women’s self-awareness educate, and evangelize new and strengthen their commitment to equality: women’s dependency on men members, they increasingly for socioeconomic stability and status infantilized women and perpetuated depended on radical women male political domination; competition for men within a patriarchal system at the local and state levels destroyed women’s interrelationships; and women’s self-education was the whose persuasive writing and key to avoiding victimization and increasing politicization. To provoke and In the first issue of The New Northwest, May 5, 1871, Abigail Scott Duniway energetic oratory could reach motivate women to think critically about the ramifications of their marginal wrote that she was most interested in an untapped audience of both status and power, Victor persistently beseeched them to “investigate for them- demonstrating how socioeconomic divisions the eager and the indifferent. selves” the reasons for their subjugation.