Section III: Some Exceptions

Chapter XIII: Literary Amateurs

"Even the most serious-minded women of the present day stand, in any work they undertake, in precisely the same relation to men that the amateur stands to the professional in games. They may be desperately interested and may work to the limit of endurance at times; but, like the amateur, they got into the game late, and have not had a lifetime of practice, or they do not have the advantage of that pace gained only by competing incessantly with players of the first rank."

—Thomas—Sex and Society.

"The chances are that, being a woman, young,

And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes,

You write as well ... and ill ... upon the whole,

As other women. If as well, what then?

If even a little better ... still what then?

. . . . .

Women as you are,

Mere women, personal and passionate,

You give us doating mothers, and perfect wives,

Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints!

We get no Christ from you—and verily

We shall not get a Poet, in my mind.

. . . . .

You never can be satisfied with praise

Which men give women when they judge a book

Not as mere work, but as mere women's work,

Expressing the comparative respect

Which means the absolute scorn. 'Oh, excellent!

What grace! What facile turns! What fluent sweeps!

What delicate discernment ... almost thought!

The book does honour to the sex, we hold.

Among our female authors we make room

For this fair writer, and congratulate

The country that produces in these times

Such women, competent to ... spell."

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The process of making any new tradition is curiously hesitating and erratic. The new idea, at first proposed in some extreme form, draws to its support a few strong-minded people who become martyrs for its sake; and is then likely to be taken up by the freakish or the zealously unwise, and to become odious to the conventional majority. Between the proponents of the theory and the conservatives, however, there will always be a third group who, while lacking the courage of complete conversion, will, nevertheless, have a sneaking sympathy with the venture. Such as these will decline to identify themselves with the movement so long as it is unpopular, but they cannot avoid furthering it unconsciously by indirect expressions of their own sympathies.

Many of the early women writers of the Nineteenth Century belong to this intermediate class. While the radicals embraced woman's rights and anti-slavery with uncalculating fervor, and were getting themselves mobbed by the populace, reproved by the clergy, and ridiculed by the press, many a clever woman of the more timid and domesticated type was encouraged to break through the domestic traditions by the demand for popular reading matter, which had opportunely opened a new avocation to women. It does not appear that they entered it because they were especially gifted, but rather because writing was a ladylike occupation, which could be pursued in the seclusion of the home, under the protection of a nom de plume, and in the midst of domestic duties. While a few, bolder or more talented, tried to compete with men in the well-worn paths of literature, the most of those who, by virtue of personal inclination or of bread-and-butter necessity, began to write, merely followed the line of least resistance. Although they and their admirers abjured the taint of strong-mindedness, they were really in some wise driven by the same human and unfeminine impulse as their militant sisters. They, too, in varying degree, were "sports" from the traditional feminine type, and their less extravagant departure from it makes their characteristics and achievements all the more significant.

Among men the first national impulse toward expression took the form of oratory, but among conventionalized women writing was the easier outlet, and the one least disapproved of by society. Out of six hundred women born after 1800, and listed in the biographical dictionaries of the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, more than half entered the life of the larger world outside the home through "literature" in its varied forms-through cookbooks, nursery tales, journalistic letters, poetry, fiction, or history. Then, as now, a "facile" pen and a little "inspiration" were thought to be sufficient equipment with which to undertake this graceful and ladylike profession; and the amount of copy turned out by such women as Mrs. Sigourney and Mrs. Child was exceeded by few of their masculine contemporaries.

As might have been expected, they almost invariably began with subjects distinctively feminine, partly because it was familiar ground, but chiefly, no doubt, because it would not be deemed "unwomanly" by their critics; or, as Higginson caustically put it: "Any career you choose so you begin it from the kitchen." Lydia Child, who afterward wrote an anti-slavery argument, which has become a classic, began with a cookery book, The Frugal Housewife, which went to thirty-three editions; and followed it up with A Biography of Good Wives and The Family Nurse. In all of these she was highly popular; and might, perhaps, have been equally so with her romance of ancient Greece, Philothea, but for her fatal espousal of the anti-slavery cause, and her defense of John Brown. Her "Letters from New York" to the Boston Courier show a profound insight into the social and political problems of the time, and have a rarely "masculine" directness and grasp. There was scarcely a field of writing—except science—to which she did not contribute; and in all of them—housewifery, history, biography, religion, reform, journalistic correspondence, novels, and verse—she made a more than creditable showing.

But in Mrs. Child's performance, as in those of most of the thinking women of her time, we see both that diffusion of abilities characteristic of the amateur and that tendency to subordinate artistic talent to a philanthropic cause which, even in our day, are conspicuous traits of intellectual women. Higginson said of her:

"She is one of those prominent instances in our literature, of persons born for the pursuits of the pure intellect whose intellects were yet balanced by their hearts, and both absorbed in the great moral agitation of the age. . . . In a community of artists, she would have belonged to that class, for she had that instinct in her soul. But she was placed where there was as yet no exacting literary standard; she wrote better than most of her contemporaries, and well enough for the public. She did not, therefore, win that intellectual immortality which only the very best writers command and which few Americans have attained."

The career of Lydia Sigourney, the versifier, illustrates even more vividly the facility of those early women writers as well as the way in which the domestic-feminine tradition pervaded and perverted all their work. One of her earlier biographers devoted ten out of his fifteen tedious pages to a laudation of her womanly character, ending with this paragraph:

"Yet even with the temptations which her literary tastes might be supposed to offer, she could never justly be reproached for neglecting any home duty . . . we find her at the head of her household, which at times was large, shrinking from no burden of self-denial needed in her work—living to see her two stepdaughters educated and settled in life, and the brother, at the age of forty-five, consigned to a consumptive's grave; to educate her own daughter and son, and then, just on the verge of a promising manhood, to follow him, too, to his grave; to give her own only daughter away in acceptable marriage; and then to settle herself down, joyful and trustful yet, in her own home . . . until her own change should come."

Having thus forestalled the criticism likely to be brought against this harmless literary creature he grudgingly and fearfully adds:

"But, doubtless, it will be as a literary woman that she will be most widely known. And no estimate of her career which leaves out of account the character and value of her writings can do justice to her memory."

Then, at last, we learn why she should have a place among the "Eminent Women of the Age": she had published fifty-seven volumes of prose and verse; of newspaper and magazine articles nearly as much more; and for several years had averaged seventeen hundred letters per year, amounting to more than all her published work; while all this time she was also visiting reform schools, orphanages, and deaf-and-dumb asylums, attending to church duties, raising a family of children, and performing every required feminine task. In truth, the modern woman, when she thinks herself busy, may well humble herself before such a combination of orthodox womanliness, diluted talents, and prodigious industry.

If it was natural for the women writers of America to enter romance and poetry via the kitchen and nursery, it was not less inevitable for them to experiment in the field of journalism. Progressive newspapers and periodicals, if not as sensational then as now, were just as eager to get something novel. The chatty, effusive, clever copy produced by women of quick but superficial and untrained minds was immediately recognized as having a popular value; while the nom de plume under which they usually wrote protected them from the direct criticism suffered by women more conspicuously out of their sphere.

Mrs. Parton, although three times married, wrote a series of "Fern Leaves," which sold into the second hundred thousand; and punctually furnished the New York Ledger with a weekly letter for fourteen years. For fear "her practical and democratic genius" should mislead a world suspicious of women who did clever things, we are told that she sacrificed the latter years of her life to a little granddaughter, and that "whatever masks of manly independence, pride, or mocking mischief Fanny Fern may put on, she is, at the core of her nature, pure womanly."

Mrs. Lippincott, likewise, wrote "Leaves" under the name of "Grace Greenwood," and in the forties was regarded as the most copious and brilliant lady correspondent of the day. But the manner in which she is supposed to have done it assures us that she, too, was all feminine:

"As plain Sara Clarke, she had helped her mother through the morning work, sweeping, dusting, watering flowers, feeding chickens, sitting down for a few moments to read two stanzas to that white-haired father of hers. . . . In the heat of midday she seeks her chamber, gazes for a few moments with the look of a lover upon the glorious landscape, then dashes off a column for The Home Journal or The National Press."

Mary H. Dodge, better known as "Gail Hamilton," although apparently as feminine in nature as the others, made for herself a somewhat unique position as a satirist. Her fluent and vitriolic, but, on the whole, just satires on society, dress, housekeeping, men, and manners, had the quality, rather rare among the earlier advocates of women's rights, of presenting the masculine as well as the feminine side, and on that account, perhaps, produced an effect quite out of proportion to their literary value.

Two other women—Lydia Child, who has already been mentioned, and Margaret Fuller—stand on a far more dignified plane, and their writings constitute a part of the history of American letters in the transcendental epoch. Margaret Fuller—because of her now acknowledged genius, her conspicuous position as the editor of the Dial, her keen, prophetic estimates of her literary contemporaries, and her tragically premature fate—exhibits more than any other the limitations under which any woman of talent had to struggle, in the first half of the Nineteenth Century.

Although brought up in the most cultivated city in America, among men whose literary ideals have dominated our literature for two generations, she had no systematic advantage of the higher learning, but educated herself while performing the petty duties of her father's household. Just as she was about to undertake writing seriously, her father died, leaving her the practical head of a family of six, and with very small means. Foreign languages being the most salable of her accomplishments, she began to teach, and at the same time to translate and to publish foreign masterpieces. Then followed the establishment of her "Conversations," the brief editorial work on the Dial, and a variety of other literary products-travels, romance, and criticism. According to Professor Bates, her literary significance does not chiefly depend upon her actual writings, which were creditable and suggestive rather than symmetrical, but rather upon her "inspirational personality," which counted for more than her best paragraphs.

"She was not an artist born, and her education, though pursued at high pressure, had been solitary and partial. It is no part of Lowell's greatness to-day that he showered with sneering witticisms the 'Miranda' of his Fable for Critics, and Hawthorne's harsh detractions have redounded to his discredit rather than to hers; but it is permanently to the praise of Emerson, Higginson, and James Freeman Clarke, that, beyond plain face and repellent bearing, they discerned what the English poet Landor was to hail as 'a glorious soul.' "

Margaret Fuller's estimates of men and literature have been justified for the most part by the standards of a later time, and her own relative position as a writer has risen rather than declined. But one aches with pity to see the paucity of tools, of training, of opportunity, and of appreciation under which a creature of so much power had to find expression. Self-made and marvelous she was, indeed, but perverted and far short of her best ability for want of a normal medium. What was said of her might well be applied to most of the talented women of that time:

"Literary work being as yet crude and unorganized in America, the public takes a vague delight in seeing one person do a great many different things. It is like hearing a street musician perform on six instruments at once; he plays them all ill, but it is so remarkable that he should play them together."

Whatever controversy there may be about the incubation of genius, the conditions necessary to the development of talent are tolerably well settled. Among men, literary achievement has usually had a prepared, one might say a prophetic, atmosphere; it has found somehow its opportune moment; for, as Professor Lester Ward long ago pointed out, there may have been many Napoleons born, but the capacity of all but one remained latent for want of the right conjunction of circumstances. Talent, indeed, needs training in technique and the habit of mental concentration, while literary gifts, above all, need emotional stimulation and experience of life.

Of all the literary women before the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe attained the highest mark; yet the conditions under which her talent came to fruition were by no means favorable. Born in New England, if she had remained there she would have been an abolitionist, no doubt, says Higginson; but she would probably not have written Uncle Tom's Cabin! Although reared in a cultivated and brilliant family, it was an atmosphere far more congenial to philosophical discussion than to the creative imagination. Married early, and heavily weighted with poverty and motherhood; without any chance for isolation or continuous thinking; she found only one thing to give her talent impetus—the moral issue of slavery. Compare the equipment and the conditions of Mrs. Stowe with that of her distinguished contemporaries, Lowell, Emerson, or Longfellow, who lived in an atmosphere of highest culture and liberal letters, undistracted by babies, cooking, dishwashing, and family nursing; who were, moreover, encouraged by their fellows, and in line with the accepted conventions of the masculine world! But for the exceptional and almost accidental circumstance that Professor Stowe sympathized with his wife's literary aspirations, it is probable that Uncle Tom's Cabin could not have been written. Even so, we are told that it had to be produced "under grievous burdens and disadvantages . . . much of it actually written as she sat with her portfolio on her knee by the kitchen fire in moments snatched from domestic cares."

But Mrs. Stowe, above all the women of her day, was fortunate in having a subject that burned within her—a topic not purely feminine, but of tremendous and world-wide interest. For this once she emerged into one of the luminous moments of history, and not even her conventional sex limitations could suppress the power of her moral vision. In spite of an uncertain touch, and though her mind was, perhaps, neither very strong nor profound, the conjunction of an artistic impulse and vital emotion with the golden moment of her opportunity makes her still, after more than half a century, one of the foremost literary figures of her time. Nor does it lessen her preeminence that the picturesqueness of the negro and the evangelical flavor of her chief story have carried it among readers to whom the moral issue of slavery was of minor interest. Cooper and Helen Hunt Jackson both owed as much to the Indian; and many a best-seller of modern times would drop dead on the market but for its conventional religious appeal.

The majority even of the best equipped women of that earlier day had so little intellectual stimulus and so little experience of life outside of domesticity, that they were perforce confined to purely feminine topics or to the current plati-tudes of ethics and religion. The tradition that a thinking, and still more a speaking, woman was dangerous to society, checked any natural tendency to choose more vital and picturesque subjects. While educated men in the more refined circles sometimes encouraged their women friends to write, they rarely urged them to go farther than the fields of harmlessly "pure" literature. Indeed, one of the striking and almost uniform characteristics of these early literary amateurs, is their dependence upon a father or a husband for their "atmosphere." Those who married educated men-like Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Lamb, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mrs. Howe, Luella Smith, Maria Child-found in the backing given by their husbands something to neutralize the unfriendly attitude of a world which still looked coldly upon an unprotected woman who undertook any unusual work.

The married woman whose husband was sympathetic and encouraging to her intellectual aims was, by so much, better off than those who faced the disapproval of the world alone. For self-doubt is infinitely more dangerous to the creative faculty than any public censure, and the women of the Nineteenth Century were brought up in the belief that for a woman to compete with credit in the world of art and intellect was as 'abnormal as for a dog to walk erect—and far less possible.

"The literary women of America before Margaret Fuller," says Professor Bates, "pursued their quest of truth or beauty with all feminine timidity;" and then, with humorous touch, she describes "the craven air of Hannah Adams, who had toiled over bookmaking all her apologetic days, who, with eyes grown dim, was looking wistfully toward heaven as a place where she might find her thirst for knowledge fully gratified." Anything was easier for the unprotected woman than to combat the age-long standards of her world, and therefore only those driven by irrepressible talent or by economic necessity were likely to make a venture into fields hitherto untraversed by their sex. It is a striking fact that a very considerable number of the first feminine attempts in American literature were made under the menace of poverty into which women of talent were thrown by the loss of a father or husband. The avenues of self-support for cultivated women were so thorny and so few that plain necessity drove such as Mrs. Southworth, Amelia Barr, Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, the two Carys, Maria Wright, and many others, to writing as a means of livelihood.

Sometimes women of ability were diverted into writing merely because they could get no training or opportunity for the development of less common talents; as in the case of the energetic and versatile Amanda Douglas who, after a hard life on the farm and without a chance to study designing and engraving which she loved, wrote a lot of poor novels and stories. Or, like Mrs. Dodge who, diverted by marriage from the study of sculpture, afterwards produced a children's classic in the little book, Hans Brinker, and, while editor of St. Nicholas, much other prose and verse.

The current histories of American literature, dealing chiefly with the writers who attained distinction before the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, differ widely both quantitatively and qualitatively in their estimate of the place of women; but they are substantially agreed that no woman had reached first rank in any line of literature at the National Era. One author mentions only a scant half-dozen in seventy-five years, granting to two of them, Margaret Fuller Ossoli and Harriet Beecher Stowe, exceptional merit; another expands the list to a dozen, giving them a creditable place in the second and third ranks of literary achievement. A third, both more inclusive and more discriminating, finds no more than thirty women before 1890 whose productions contributed anything of real significance to the history of American Letters. Measured quantitatively, women writers were from one-tenth to one-fourth as many as men; qualitatively, few reached even the secondary rank, and none at all the first. Among the greater names in the National Era of our literature—Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, and Whittier—no woman appears; and yet fifty years afterward there was scarcely a field of writing in which some woman had not attained an excellent secondary rank, and in a few they were standing side by side with men.

Looking back over that period in which the domestic-feminine traditions were being broken down, it is easy to see why amateurs of both sexes produced at first so much that was crude and trivial, sentimental and unreal, stilted in tone and lacking in form. All the criticisms on the writings of women before 1875 had been applied with equal force two generations earlier to the productions of American men of letters. English and American critics vie with each other in pointing out the provincialism, the lack of originality and power. In truth, precisely the same causes which had delayed the development of men in literature, operated through a longer period and with greater force to prevent women from producing anything of permanent value. It was said that American men lacked contact with the great minds of all ages—but women experienced the lack to a far greater degree. Harvard College alone educated three out of five of the foremost literary men of the Nineteenth Century, and opened the door into the wider atmosphere of universal thought to a thousand more, long before any woman had so much as put her foot upon the threshold of any real seat of higher learning.

Although nearly all the women writers were. credited by their biographers with an unusual love of books, their writings show, as did those of men who made the first attempts, a painful deficiency in literary technique. It is certainly not without significance that only sixty of the four hundred and eighty-seven women authors who attained mention in the Who's Who of 1901-2 had a college training, while among the distinguished men of every class, two-thirds had taken college degrees. The literary women, therefore, must have been educated—if at all, beyond the grammar grade—by self-trained teachers in inferior schools, where the "ornamental" were substituted for the "solid" branches. Most of them satisfied their intellectual hunger by miscellaneous reading and study, and missed entirely the give-and-take by which men whetted their minds on each other's knowledge. The taste for serious reading and culture which must be acquired early in life, if at all, was encouraged in boys destined for a profession—but never in girls. We are told that Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell were "bred to cultivation by cultivated parents," and had "tumbled about in libraries." It illuminates, if it does not wholly explain, the voluminous and relatively feeble results achieved by the earlier women, to remember that the very few who attained a place, also lived in the atmosphere of higher culture. Margaret Fuller and Lydia Child shared to some extent, though indirectly, the inspirational influences of Cambridge; Harriet Beecher was reared in the stimulating circle of a brilliant family and an intellectual coterie; and Emily Dickinson, recluse though she was, could not escape the mental impetus of a professor's household.

They were all deficient in technique in proportion to their deficiencies in mental training; still more, in breadth of view in consequence of their narrow life experience. "Words wait on thought and thought on life." The difference between the occasional woman who reached a kind of literary eminence, and the larger number who are quite forgotten now by all but the literary historian, seems to lie rather in the degree of culture and of life experience than in any perceptible difference in native ability. It may be that we owe Uncle Tom's Cabin to the fact that a New England woman was transplanted to a Western border state, and set down where the tragedies of the fugitive slave law gave her talent a concrete impulse; and, perhaps, the accidental circumstance of life in California gave to the author of Ramona her first effective contact with the real life of the world. Certain it is that, in addition to the artistic gift and the hunger for ideal expression in words, there must be the stuff of vital experience with which to work; and of this, women, by the very stationary and domestic condition of their lives, had almost nothing as compared with men, and even yet have immeasurably less.

The early female writers were, too, like their masculine forerunners, caught fast in a saccharine slough of sentiment and piety which in itself destroyed all freedom of thought and originality of method. The cheerful Carys wrote dismal stanzas of death and despair, affecting what they could not feel. The "exemplary" Mrs. Sigourney, "phenomenon rather than an author," composed verse—while knitting socks for the family—in which were commemorated in the approved lachrymose phrases, the funerals, baptisms, and weddings in the circle of her friends. The most successful of the women story-writers invariably combined sentiment and religious emotionality upon a commonplace domestic background. As Professor Trent has pointed out, there was not a trace of romantic interest, and the style was inevitably mediocre and didactic; but whether they portrayed the fortunes of an orphan girl rescued from low life, or the conscientious struggles of a schoolgirl vibrating between tears and prayers, such fiction could be safely recommended by pastors to their flocks as proper mental and spiritual pabulum.

Though women writers had no monopoly of this "milk and water" literature, the middle-class standard set for them was one more weight to hold them back from beholding or attempting better things. In writing, as in every other effort, though less consciously, they were coerced by the tradition of the inferiority of the feminine intellect. Since the province of women-kind was feeling rather than thinking, they felt themselves incompetent outside the realm of didactic poetry and fiction. The literary men of an earlier time had been under a similar thrall through Puritanism, but they had been sooner emancipated into the air of world-culture without which literature is seldom created.

In addition to all the other limitations of superficial education, and absence of intellectual atmosphere, opportunity, and stimulus, women of the Nineteenth Century had still another, self-distrust, which in itself would almost account for their meager representation in the literature of the national era. To man all things are supposedly possible, but nothing intellectual was then believed to be possible to woman; and when, here and there, against great odds, some woman rose above her sex-limitations, compelling recognition, it was set down as merely exceptional, not characteristic nor attainable by her kind. The very essence of genius is supreme confidence in what one has to say. A distinguished actress, in discussing the fact that plays are generally written by men, has lately said:

"Because they are so tremendously clever and such tremendous egotists—that's why men write greater things than women—they are capable of such limitless belief in themselves. All the great creators were so—egotists all."

To all the disadvantages under which men of literary talent had risen and sunk in America, women added self-distrust created by the hostility of a society pervaded by the strict domestic traditions of femininity. And, moreover, the woman of talent was often paralyzed not merely by the common assumption that her mind must be inferior, but by her own fear that she was morally wrong in feeding her slender flame.

No sooner had the tradition of mental inferiority been broken, the doors of culture opened into the universe, and the attention of a reading public attained, than there appeared talented women by the score who, in a single generation, and though still handicapped, earned a wide and creditable reputation for serious literary work. As yet, it does not appear how far they may go, nor to what degree their achievements will be colored by sex-experience. But in the space of half a century they have gone so far that the tale of such crude, effeminate, and imitative efforts as their sex once timidly made, already sounds far off and strange.