Edition 11: My words, My voice...
This week, I am trying to explore what it is that women were writing about starting from the early 1600s and while some of the issues endure even in the twenty-first century, I hope to over the next few editions describe their evolution and maturation, not only in England and India but also in America and France.
Anne Dudley Bradstreet is known as America’s first published poet. Born in 1612 in England in a wealthy Puritan[1] family, she was a well-read scholar. She married when she was 16 and emigrated with her husband and her own family to be one of the founding families of Massachusetts in 1630. She bore 8 children; she had public duties as wife and daughter of prominent officials in New England and, also wrote poetry. She developed a unique style of poetry to express her emotions and feelings about motherhood, her struggles and sufferings[2] and her Puritan faith. The Harvard University website has to say this about her: “She could read the Latin and French and had all the prerequisites for admission to Harvard College except gender. Her associations with Harvard were other: her father, Governor Thomas Dudley, was one of the founders of the College, her husband, Simon Bradstreet, was also an overseer, and her two sons graduated from the College.” Nevertheless, despite her status, writing was an unsuitable job (nay unacceptable role) for a woman and she and her work met with criticism. She had this to say in answer[3]!
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits.
A Poet’s Pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits.
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.
Two centuries later, Fanny Fern (1811 – 1872) used a conversational style and humour to attack issues of women's rights, domesticity, and the male-dominated society in America. Her newspaper column, in The New York Ledger, earned her $100 a week, making her the highest-paid columnist of her time. In the beginning, she had hoped to that her brother N.S. Willis would help launch her literary career, but her writing was too “vulgar” for him and suggested she pursue needlework instead.
In a sense, (and somewhat like today in many families), this emphasizes the extent to which women’s decisions and choices were determined by men. Fanny Fern was her pseudonym (no surprises!) – she was born Sara Payson Willis. She married Charles Harrington Eldridge in 1837 and had three children over the next 7 years, and between 1844 and 1846, she tragically lost her sister (who died during childbirth), her mother, her oldest daughter and her husband. With no support from either her father or her in-laws, Fanny Fern was struggling to survive. She married again upon the persuasion of her father, but she felt it was a mistake – she left him and turned to writing to support her family – this must have been quite scandalous for the time!
The titles of Fern’s columns display her sense of wit and satire - Hints to Young Housewives and Independence for example; or Critics and Male Criticism on Ladies Books, in which she exclaims: “I never knew an editor to nob his pen with a knife as sharp as his temper, and write a scathing criticism on a book because the authoress had declined contributing to his paper.”
For long and to date, the female persona has been expected to be submissive, feminine and dependent. Many writers boldly addressed topics such as prostitution, women's rights, and the sexual double standard. Many writers also suggested women get some money for themselves in order to overcome the male-dominated power structure of society. We’ve seen even in our earlier editions that criticism of their novels was often directed at the author rather than at the novel itself. For e.g. Ruth Hall, Fern’s novel was described as “monstrous,” and “unwomanly”. Nathaniel Hawthorne[4] described Fanny Fern as writing “as if the devil was in her”.
Harriet Jacobs (1813 or 1815 – 1897) under the pseudonym of Linda Brent wrote Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); the autobiography was about the relationship between a black female slave and her white slave owners; the sexual exploitation, mistreatment by and the cruelty of slave owners and its impact on family relations. As a black woman, she faced criticism not only from men but also from the entire white population. More importantly, she risked not being understood by women readers who would have never lived the same experience. Just picking up a pen was an act of great courage and the pseudonym would have helped her to some extent.
Much like the caste system, children of slaves were also enslaved at birth – a mother’s status was passed on to her children[5] (a diabolically clever rule, if one thought about it). Her mother died when Jacobs was six years old; she then lived with her owner, a daughter of a deceased tavern keeper, who taught her not only to sew, but also to read and write. Very few slaves were literate – later in 1830 North Carolina, where Jacobs was born, explicitly outlawed teaching slaves to read or write. She could write her story only because she finally got a chance to escape by boat to Philadelphia in 1842, where she was aided by anti-slavery activists of the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee.
Loiusa May Alcott’s (1832 – 1888) Little Women was published in 1868. Her family’s financial difficulties led her to work from an early age to help support them, but she sought an outlet in writing Little Women is set in her family home in Massachusetts and loosely modelled on her childhood with her three sisters, Abigail, Elizabeth and Anna. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life; she was active in such reform movements as temperance and women's suffrage. As a young girl, I loved reading and re-reading Little Women[6]; perhaps (and despite being born in a different country at a different time and in a very different context), it was the sisterhood depicted so lovingly in the book, the strength and equanimity of Marmee as the March girls called their mother, in the face of such strife and uncertainty and Jo’s determination to be a writer with her permanently inked fingers that left a deep impression on me.
My daughter has been reading all the editions and suggested that I look beyond 19th century England and India; she suggested George Sand, and I added the American writers listed above to my study list. Sand was the pen-name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804 – 1876); a French novelist, memoirist, and Socialist, she was one of the more popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s. Reading about her gave me a sense of her fearlessness, almost a refusal to follow any of the restrictive social norms applicable to women. Women were required to apply for a permit to wear male attire in public at the time, and women chose health or occupational or recreational reasons (such as horse riding) to justify the application. Sand simply chose to wear it without receiving a permit to subvert the stereotypes of the time – she said male attire was less expensive and far sturdier than the typical dress of a noblewoman at the time. And in addition to the practical reasons of comfort, her male attire enabled her to move about Paris freely giving her access to places usually barred to women. She also created a scandal by smoking tobacco in public – no woman, even of the gentry was permitted such free indulgence!
Sand remained immensely popular as a writer throughout her lifetime and long after her death. Drawing from her childhood experiences of the countryside, Sand wrote what are called rustic novels. Married happily initially, she soon tired of her husband. Her life was marked by many relationships with famous men including Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and Frédéric Chopin. Her novel Indiana which brought her immediate fame is a passionate protest against the social conventions that bind a wife to her husband against her will and an apologia for a heroine who abandons an unhappy marriage and finds love. Over time her novels extended the ideal of free association to the wider sphere of social and class relationships. Many Sand novels have the hero as a peasant or a workman.
At her funeral, Victor Hugo’s eulogy read: In this country whose law is to complete the French Revolution and begin that of the equality of the sexes, being a part of the equality of men, a great woman was needed. It was necessary to prove that a woman could have all the manly gifts without losing any of her angelic qualities, be strong without ceasing to be tender ... George Sand proved it.
As I look back on the stories and journeys of all the authors over the past ten editions and this eleventh edition, there are so many common issues that all of them agitated for or against through their highly influential writings. Their writing gave voice to millions of women who did not have the same access to education or the ability to use their voice to imagine a different world and reality for other women. Their demand for equality may have taken different forms – they agitated against illiteracy and sati, raised their voice for widow marriage and property rights in India. In England, they wrote about the ill-effects of war and industrialization on ordinary people; they wrote about the reform bills and later became Suffragettes. In America, they were abolitionists and wanted to be heard for what they were, not just women. Sand lived her life as an example of the freedoms that all deserved – whether men or women.
In India, literacy and a new way of thinking engulfed not only men but women too. There are countless women whose participation in the freedom struggle is marked by sacrifice, bravery, selflessness and political sagacity. And there were some other important changes that were taking place at the time that enabled women to seek and obtain greater participation in both polity and economy - their struggle for equality in some senses juggled social, political and economic spaces. Women’s literacy, marriage, ownership of property dominated the early struggles. Sexual relations in a marriage or otherwise was “out of the syllabus” for a long time! Women gradually expanded the struggle by treading into the economic area – writing for money for example, and with industrialization, their participation became more valuable as men had to fight wars, and women could also be paid lower. But they soon realized that political participation, indeed being in all three areas, was necessary for complete equality. Hence, the Suffragette Movement; hence George Sand choosing to be a member of the provisional government of 1848; hence, the increasing participation of women in India’s independence movement!
References:
[1] English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries sought to purify (hence Puritans!) the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant. The primary role of women in a Puritan society was to be wives and mothers and take care of all needs of the family. Women were expected to make the clothing for the family, cook the meals, keep the household clean, and teach the children how to live a Puritan lifestyle.
[2] Anne Bradstreet had smallpox as a teenager in England; later she suffered from paralysis of the joints and died from tuberculosis in 1872; besides, she bore 8 children!
[3] From “Prologue” to The Tenth Muse
[4] Hawthorne’s most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter is set in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1642 to 1649 and tells the story of Hester Prynne who has a daughter out of wedlock and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Sin and guilt, shaming and social stigmatizing feature high in this novel. Incidentally, critics at the time complained that Hawthorne did not understand Christianity, confession, and remorse; another review said that the author "perpetrates bad morals."
[5] In the history of slavery, the legal doctrine of Partus sequitur ventrem (Latin for “That which is brought forth follows the belly”) was used from 1662 in Virginia and later other English royal colonies to establish the legal status of children born there; they were considered to follow the status of their mothers. Under English common law, the father's status was determinative.
[6] Please watch the latest adaptation of Little Women, if you haven’t already, by Greta Gerwig.