Volume 24, Number 14 · September 15, 1977
The Emergence of American Women
By Willie Lee Rose
BOOKS REVIEWED IN THIS ESSAY
The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835
by Nancy F. Cott
Yale University Press, 225 pp., $12.50 (continued from NYR, July 14)
The Feminization of American Culture
by Ann Douglas
Knopf, 403 pp., $15.00 (continued from NYR, July 14)
Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860
by Susan Phinney Conrad
Oxford University Press, 292 pp., $12.95
Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century
by Barbara Welter
Ohio University Press, 198 pp., $4.50 (paper)
Women and Equality: Changing Patterns in American Culture
by William H. Chafe
Oxford University Press, 207 pp., $8.95
Also Noted:
The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America
by Hal D. Sears
Regents Press of Kansas, 279 pp., $15.00
We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America
by Barbara Mayer Wertheimer
Pantheon, 376 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Seven Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition
by Judith Nies
Viking, 235 pp., $8.95
The Female Experience: An American Documentary
by Gerda Lerner
Bobbs-Merrill, 509 pp., $12.50
When life comes near to imitating art, bad art, then truth begins to sound excessive, and the writer who records life may easily become an excessive writer. This is one of the problems of Victorian letters. A check through the typically detailed 'Contents' of many a fat volume of the 'Life and Letters' genre reveals by objective count as well as morbid attention a shocking number of deaths and grave illnesses, particularly of children and young mothers. To flip to the text is to find there the deathbed scenes so dear to the novelists of the day, the intimations of immortality and reassurances of Heaven, and the reason nineteenth-century liberal Christianity ditched the Calvinist doctrine of infant damnation. This was a first step in a process both Ann Douglas and Barbara Welter have called 'the feminization' of American religion.
Review, 8154 words
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