Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller

by Nicole Tonkovich

Overview

Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller by Nicole Tonkovich This study of nonfiction written by four of nineteenth-century America's first professional women writers investigates the paradoxes posed by the conflict of their texts with their lives. They were not homemakers, yet in their works they prescribed ideal domesticity for the women of their day. They were not professional educators, yet they wrote authoritatively about educational theory and practice. They were not involved with organized political agitation for women's rights, yet their writings advanced thoughtful, radical revisions to existing social and political structures, particularly the heterosexual family. Comparable home, school, and community backgrounds prepared Catharine Beecher, Sarah Josepha Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller to write for the public. Their nonfiction texts expose the contradictions between what they prescribed for other women and how they themselves chose to live outside the traditional domestic world. Class, race, age, and geography determined the focus of nineteenth-century women's writing, and as Hale, Beecher, Fern, and Fuller promoted and critiqued one another, they profited reciprocally from the others' work, teachings, and examples. As this study shows, by attending to details of womanly behavior such as language, dress, and manners, their writings contributed to altering women's traditional roles in home, school, and community. No previous study has grouped Hale, Beecher, Fern, and Fuller together because each promoted differing political goals. While respecting these differences, this focus on their nonfiction reveals their strong professional links and demonstrates the similar effects of their writings, which prescribed domesticity for the lives of other women while justifying their own professionalism. Nicole Tonkovitch is a professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781604738483
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	07/12/2010
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1460L (what's this?)

About the Author

Nicole Tonkovich is assistant professor of literature at University of California, San Diego.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	IX
	Introduction: Eccentric Domesticity	XI
Chapter 1	Her Father's Best Boy: Catharine Beecher and Margaret Fuller	3
Chapter 2	Fatherless Daughters: Sarah Josepha Hale and Fanny Fern	26
Chapter 3	Patronymics, Property, and Proper Naming	47
Chapter 4	Domestic Masquerade	72
Chapter 5	The Domestic Manners of American Ladies	91
Chapter 6	Domesticated Eloquence	109
Chapter 7	The Difference Between Authors and Servants	128
Chapter 8	Domesticating Pedagogy	148
Chapter 9	Domesticity with A Difference	173
	Notes	204
	Bibliography	209
	Index	221

Editorial Reviews

An analysis of the work of four 19th-century women writers. Tonkovich (literature, U. of Calif., San Diego) examines the way each woman deals with issues of race, class, domesticity, educational theory, social and political structures, and the heterosexual family. The biographical circumstances of each woman are also discussed; two of them, by Tonkovich's account, were fatherless daughters and two were their father's "best boy." Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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