Christina English

March 27,2012

The Marginalization of Women in Early American Literature

What is the situation of women writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century? This is a question that I have pondered many times in my literature studies. I have read multiple books and novels written by men, but very few from women. It really strikes my curiosity to figure out why women were so marginalized in earlier centuries.

          According to Rosemary Fithian Guruswamy, “Several modern theoretical schools have facilitated interdisciplinary research that has increased our ability to capture a more distinct picture of the full situation of women writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”(103). Women artists and others on the margins of the publishing industry participated in a double transgression to get their voices heard in a system which marginalized and prevented them to transgress by writing literature.

          Scholars have recently tried to publish women’s’ letters and journals as pieces of literature rather than the secondary category they have been placed in due to prejudice. Theresa Gaul expresses that the availability of women’s texts largely determines what is read and taught in classrooms. ”The letters of famous and heretofore little-known women--Abigail Adams, Harriett Gold Boudinot and her four sisters, Sarah Gary, Elizabeth Farmar, Marie Madeleine Hachard, Anne Hulton, Esther de Berdt Reed, Mary Telfair, and Mercy Otis Warren--are now available in scholarly print editions. The new accessibility of these letters underlines the importance of generating frameworks for reading and interpreting them” (Gaul, 262). The letters challenge scholars to rewrite histories of the period and women’s lives within it.

          In her article, The Importance of Women to Early American Study, A Social Justice, Lisa M. Logan discusses individuals of our generation as being “over” the study of early American women. She explains that she interprets the word gender to also mean women. “Far from a mere intellectual exercise, feminist early American studies are also the practice of social justice, a movement out of which feminism grew. Without a social justice consciousness and practice, our work loses the resonance of a project that demands and makes change in the academy and in the world. We risk relegating to silence (again) the voices of individual women, whose stories, as Audre Lorde writes, cry out to be heard” (Logan,642). By referring to the study of early American writers as a social justice project, the study of women is not an essentialist project; rather feminist scholars can and do historicize and contextualize the material realities of actual women.For these reasons, “Feminism cannot be 'liberated' from women. Women are the first subject of feminism, and, as long as we continue to live in patriarchy and study texts written in it, the different lived experiences of women who matriculate in patriarchy in their bodies matter (Logan,643).The emergence of women writers, the expansion of female education and the growth of a women’s literary market are all interconnected expressions of feminism. Women writers became part of the literary scene but always as representatives of their gender rather than as individuals.

Works Cited

Balkun, Mary McAleer. "Introduction: Early American Women Writers: The Gendering of National Identity." Women. 28.1 (1998): 1. Print.

Gaul, Theresea Strouth. "Recovering Recovery: Early American Women and Legacy's Future." Legacy. 26.2 (2010): 262. Print.

Guruswamy, Rosemary Fithian. "Queer Theory and Publication Anxiety: The Case of the Early American Woman Writer.". 34University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 103-112. Print.

Logan, Lisa M. "The Importance of Women to early American Study." a Social Justice Perspective. 44.3 641. Print.