In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, more than 150 women produced historical writing in over 350 different works. Although women engaged enthusiastically with “history” throughout the nineteenth century, the types of history they wrote were constrained by gender prescriptions stressing women’s “essential” domesticity; biography, focused on the interior life of an individual subject, was more suitable for women whose realm of knowledge and activity was believed to be the private world of the “woman’s sphere.” As their preferred historical form, women writers (mostly white middle-class women) used biography to educate readers about the past as historical knowledge, and presented the lives of exemplary women to serve as role models. Also, women writers not only believed that the privilege of historical writing was an avenue for them to move into public sphere, but also that the past itself had the power to shape the present. Among the politically contentious issues they raised in their historical texts, most prominent was the subject of women’s citizenship. Antebellum women were not “constituents” due to the limitations of coverture. History was utilized by women’s rights activists as well as those who opposed the rights in order to approach a question: what would citizenship mean for women?
Sarah J. Hale’s Woman’s Record, first published in 1853 and again in two revised editions in 1855 and 1876, is an ambitious biographical encyclopedia of “distinguished women” from all historical eras and nations, containing some 1650 entries with 230 engraved portraits. Hale was best known as an authoritative editor of. Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read women’s magazine of its day. She was one of major figures who exerted a profound influence on domestic ideology and white middle-class women’s culture of Victorian America. As her conservatism seems to reflect her writing, Woman’s Record has been generally considered as a “domestic history”: a highly conservative text in that it advocates women’s withdrawal from male-dominated political arena, particularly through the refusal of women’s suffrage, while emphasizing women’s moral superiority and domesticity based on distinctly gendered separate spheres.
This paper, however, argues that Woman’s Record is a rather radical and progressive revision of women’s history. Paying close attention to the struggle for women’s rights in the 1850s, it suggests that there was an alternative to full citizenship for American women. Hale advocated the idea of. citizenship in which women could play an important part as citizens without political and legal rights; she did insist that there would be more “citizeness” responsible for and contributed to the civil society’s progress, as those who featured on the pages of her biographical text. Although Hale seems to affirm that a woman, as a paragon of her civil virtue, should uphold the morality of her husband and children, yet many women actually celebrated in the text differ immensely from the ideal image of a “Republican Mother / Wife.” If women as individuals independent of their families were what the text really expected of women, Woman’s Record could be read as a radical manifestation in defense of a woman’s personal fulfillment rather than her motherhood and wifehood.
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