American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860Just as she helped launch the rediscovery of literary texts by American women writers, Nina Baym now uncovers the work of history performed by over 150 writers in over 350 texts. Here she explores a world of important writing unknown even to most specialists. The novels, poems, plays, textbooks, and travel narratives written by women between 1790 and the Civil War defy current theories of women's writing that stress a female domain of the private, homebound, and emotional. History is inarguably public in its nature and these women wrote it. In doing so, they challenged the imaginative and intellectual boundaries that divided domestic and public worlds. They claimed on behalf of all women the rights to know and to speak about the world outside the home, as well as to circulate their knowledge and opinions among the public. Their work helped shape the enormous public interest in history characteristic of the antebellum nation, and ultimately to forge our national identity in the history of the world. Nina Baym deftly outlines the master narrative of history implied in women's writings of this period, and discusses in a completely revisioned context the emergence of women's history in public discourse.
|
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 17
... Ellet significantly different from the historians of women who worked entirely with exceptional cases , and different again from Child , who did not allot any specific agency to women even in the construction of their own condition . Ellet ...
... Ellet attempts to plant the Revolution on every square foot of American soil . Ordering her biographical sketches narratively according to the received view of the war's progress through the states , Ellet moves south from New England ...
... Ellet's title does not invoke a separate female sphere ; Ellet uses it to make the republi- can point that men and women alike live in a domestic world which the Revolution was fought to preserve . In pursuit of its object , A Domestic ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Maternal Historians Didactic Mothers | 29 |
History from the Divine Point of View | 46 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown