WOMEN WRITERS VOICES FROM THE 1800s BY JONATHAN WINGNumber of Words: 2535 PHOTOGRAPHY CRE! Cover © The Granger Collection. 1 © The Granger Collection. 3 © Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. 4 © Mary Evans Picture Library. 5 © Bettmann/CORBIS/ MAGMA. 7 © The Granger Collection. 9 © Bettmann/CORBIS/MAGMA. 10 © The Granger Collection. 11 © Mary Evans Picture Library. 13 © Topham/ The Image Works. 14 © James Marshall/CORBIS/MAGMA. Back Cover © The Granger Collection. Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company, All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Houghton Mifflin Company unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. Address inquiries to School Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116. Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN: 0-618-482199 123456789 VH 111009 08 07 06 05 04WOMEN WRITERS VOICES FROM THE 1800s by Jonathan Wing ay HOUGHTON MIFFLIN BOSTON‘Women in the nineteenth century were not encouraged to have a job. They were expected to keep house, take care of the family, and have babies. But there were women who managed to make a difference anyway. The three women in this book were all examples of that. Harriet Beecher Stowe helped to end slavery. Louisa May Alcott wrote one of the best-selling children’s books of all time. And Emily Dickinson became one of the greatest American poets ever, despite spending most of her time in her home. Harriet Beecher Stowe Charley Stowe didn’t know anything about slavery. He didn’t know much about anything in the adult world. That’s because he was a baby. But his mother, Harriet Beecher Stowe, knew all about slavery. And she was disgusted by it. Stowe knew how enslaved African Americans were ripped from their families and sold as property. She knew how slave owners treated the enslaved with no more respect than they gave their animals. Enslaved African Americans had little control over their lives. Stowe understood that enslaved African Americans were people with a free will. She knew slavery was wrong. But she was just a housewife in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1840s. What could she do about it? Then cholera, a terrible disease, swept across Cincinnati. So many people died, that carts and buggies were used asHarriet Beecher Stowe hearses. Unfortunately, Charley caught the disease. He was dead within two weeks. Stowe’s husband, Calvin, was out of town when Charley got sick. Stowe told him about the death in a letter. “I write as though there is no sorrow like my sorrow, yet there has been in this city . . . scarce a house without its dead,” she wrote. “This heart-break, this anguish, has been everywhere, and when it will end God alone knows.”Another misery was happening in America at the same time. African Americans were suffering under the cruel burden of slavery. Like the cholera, it caused heartbreak and sorrow in all of their houses. And no one knew when it would end. Stowe had heard and seen the anguish of slavery firsthand. She had learned about it from one of her servants; he was an escaped slave who used the Underground Railroad to reach freedom in Ohio. She could see it across the border in Kentucky, which was a slave state. She saw it at a slave auction there where wives and husbands were each sold to different “owners.” She witnessed it one frozen winter day when a woman carried her baby across the iced-over Ohio River, trying to reach freedom on the Cincinnati shoreline. Harrier Beecher Stowe’s house in Cincinnati, Ohio 4But everything clicked into place for Stowe when Charley died. Experiencing the agony of losing her beloved child, she understood how enslaved African mothers felt when their own children were sold, never to be seen again. “Tt was at [Charley's] dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her,” Stowe wrote to a friend. “In my depths of sorrow which seemed to me immeasurable, it was my Title page, Uncle Tom’s Cabin only prayer to God that such anguish might not be suffered in vain .. . I could never be consoled for it unless this crushing of my own heart might enable me to work out some great good to others.” That’s when Stowe had a vision. She said that God dictated a book to her, and she took down God’s words. The book was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it was probably the most important book of the century.Uncle Tom’s Cabin showed the way enslaved people were treated. It showed the evil ways in which their captors abused them. Stowe moved her readers as few authors had with scenes such as the young enslaved woman, Eliza, escaping with her baby by crossing the frozen Ohio River into free Ohio. The cruel slave owner, Simon Legree, became a villain for a new age. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1851 in forty parts in an anti-slavery weekly publication called The National Era. Then it was published as a book in 1852 and sold 300,000 copies in a year. Stowe became the best-known author of her generation. Putnam’s Magazine said Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “the first real success in bookmaking.” Abolitionists — people who wanted to get rid of slavery — used the book to strengthen their arguments. Slavery’s supporters attacked Stowe as unreliable because she was white. But no matter what anybody said or did, the book was a hit. The book influenced more than just the reading public. ‘Theater groups acted out the book as a play. Public sentiment against slavery grew. Readers, especially in the Northern states, demanded an end to slavery. The Southern states refused. They said the fight wasn’t about slavery at all. They said it was an argument about a state’s right to govern itself. The Southern states decided to withdraw from the United States and start their own country. But President Abraham Lincoln would not let that happen. He said the southern states must stay in the Union, and they must end slavery. 6a wl A scene from a theatrical version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, c. 1881 So the Civil War started. It lasted from 1861 to 1865. When it was over, the Union was intact and slavery was outlawed. Stowe met with President Lincoln in 1862. He introduced himself by saying, “So this is the little lady who started this great war?” But Stowe didn’t think of herself in that way. She saw herself only as a messenger. Once, late in her life, she was tending her garden. A neighbor stopped by and said he was happy to shake hands with the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “T did not write it,” Stowe said. “You didn’t?” the neighbor said. “God wrote it,” she answered. “I merely did his dictation.” 7Louisa May Alcott Little Women was one of the most popular children’s books of all time. Author Louisa May Alcott wrote it because she swore never to be poor again. Alcott’s parents loved her very much, but they could not provide a stable life for the family. Her father was Amos Bronson Alcott. He was a teacher and philosopher who always had the best of intentions and the emptiest of pockets. For example, Bronson Alcott started a revolutionary school in 1834 in Boston called the Temple School. But his liberal views about religion scared many parents. They did not send their children to his school. And the few students he did have were yanked out when he let a nonwhite child attend classes. Before long, the school had only five students — the nonwhite girl and Bronson’s four daughters. Bronson stood by his principles, but his principles didn’t put food on the table. So Bronson started a communal farm called Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts. The concept was simple: like-minded people ran the farm by day, then debated philosophy by night. But what looked good in principle was a disaster in reality. The men mostly spent their days talking. Louisa, her three sisters, and their mother tried to run both the farm and the house. And nobody knew anything about being a farmer. The men did not even plant crops until June, so there was no food in the fall. The Fruitlands experiment was a failure.Alcott’s Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, 1900s But perhaps it was not a complete failure. It did cause young Louisa to make a solemn promise. She would see to it that the family would never be poor again. “I will do something by and by,” Louisa wrote. “[I] don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and T'll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won't!” It would be several years more before Alcott could make good on that promise. For ten years, she was a teacher. She took in sewing. She even spent a horrible month working as a maid, She also wrote Gothic novels — strange and mysterious tales that sold well but were frowned upon by literary critics. Alcott wrote those books under the pen name A.M. Barnard. She never admitted publicly that she wrote them, but they made enough money to take care of her family.Louisa May Alcott When the Civil War started in 1861, Alcott wanted to help the war effort. Her entire family was against slavery. Their home was even a part of the Underground Railroad (that is, it was part of the Railroad when the escaped slaves could find it; the Alcotts moved twenty times in thirty years). Alcott went to Washington, D.C. in 1862 to be a nurse. She took care of wounded soldiers from both the North and the South. She considered her job an honor. But she only lasted as a nurse for a month. She caught typhoid fever and almost died. She was saved by a medicine that included mercury. Alcott recovered from the typhoid, but she suffered from mercury poisoning for the rest of her life. 10Speaking of her month as a nurse, she wrote, “I have never regretted that brief, yet costly experience. All that is best and bravest in the hearts of man and woman comes out in times [like that], and the courage, loyalty, fortitude and self-sacrifice I saw and learned to love and admire in both northern and southern soldiers can never be forgotten.” Once home, Alcott edited her letters from the time she spent as a nurse. She sold them as a book called Hospital Sketches. She also sold a couple of other books to help support the family. Then her publisher, Thomas Niles, told her that he wanted “a girls’ book.” Alcott waited more than a year to start it. She then wrote Little Women in about two months. It told the story of the four daughters of the March family. The characters were based on real people. Each of the Alcott sisters was represented. Louisa even included herself as Jo March. The book was an instant hit. It sold 2,000 copies on the first day of its publication in 1868. } LONDON: WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED, ATERNOSTER SQUARE. Early edition of Little Women llA second printing immediately sold 13,000 copies. Before Alcott died, Little Women had sold more than one million copies. It was the greatest-selling book of her time besides the Bible. The Alcotts never worried about money again. Alcott continued to publish books. She also worked for causes that she believed in, such as a woman’s right to vote. She and nineteen other women made history in 1880 when they became the first women to vote for school committee members in Concord, Massachusetts. Although it was only a local election, it was a dramatic moment for Alcott and the other women of Concord. But she still suffered from the mercury poisoning. She searched for remedies everywhere, but nothing really worked. Her sickness evolved into kidney disease. She finally moved herself into a nursing home. Alcott’s health was already shaky when her father died on May 4, 1888. She had pneumonia, but she still stood in the chill air during his funeral. A few hours later, just two days after her father passed away, Louisa May Alcott joined him in death. She was only 56. Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson’s poems were a secret to much of the world when she died in 1886. But her poems now are an open book, especially when compared to the very little we know about her life. 12That’s because Dickinson — possibly the greatest American poet of the nineteenth century — stayed inside her Amherst, Massachusetts, house for much of her adult life. Just because she preferred to keep out of sight, however, did not mean that Dickinson was an old crank, or against people. She loved to work in her garden. She even liked to bake cakes for the neighborhood children (although she did not personally deliver them). Dickinson also kept in touch with people throughout her life. It was the custom in her day, before the telephone, to write letters to relatives and friends. Emily carried on relationships through letters for her entire life. For example, she exchanged letters with her sister-in-law Susan for forty years — and Susan lived next door for thirty of them. Emily Dickinson 13Dickinson did not always hide from the world. Her childhood was normal. She played with the other children and enjoyed the same things they did. But life got more difficult when she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a year when she was about 17 years old. Everyone else at the school publicly declared their religious faith. Dickinson could not do this without thinking it through for herself. “Christ is calling everyone here,” she wrote in a letter to a friend. “I am standing alone in rebellion.” So she quit school and went home. She did nothing there “for some time except ride and roam in the fields.” Dickinson's home in Amherst, Massachusetts 14She finally settled back into a daily routine. But then she had an anxiety attack without warning when she was twenty- four. She did not know what caused it. She referred to it as her “depressive experience.” Her depression got worse. She continued to withdraw from the world. But she also experienced a creative surge. The four- year period from 1858-61 was one of the richest writing times of her life. She even asked a literary expert named Thomas Wentworth Higginson what he thought of her work. Higginson told her that the poems did not “breathe.” He recognized her talent, but he advised her not to publish the poems. To Dickinson, that apparently meant never to publish her poems. So she never again tried to publish her work. A handful of her poems were published during her lifetime, but they were printed without permission. She continued to write great poetry, even though she didn’t intend to publish it. Published or not, Dickinson soared in her poetry. She dealt with religion. She also wrote love poems for a special person in her life, someone she simply referred to as “Master.” Between 1862 and 1865, she wrote more than half of her nearly 1,800 poems. But the world did not know she was a literary genius. In fact, the 1870 census simply listed her as “without occupation.” Dickinson wrote letters to a friend of her father’s, Judge Otis P. Lord. The letters suggest that she and Lord were probably in love. Lord’s wife died in 1877, but he and Dickinson did not 15marry. By the 1880s, Dickinson was ill. She suffered from kidney disease and high blood pressure. After Lord’s death in 1884, she suffered a nervous collapse. Dickinson was bedridden in 1885. She grew sicker until, in 1886, her body finally gave up. She died May 15, 1886. Her sister Lavinia went through Dickinson’s desk a few days after her death. She found the poems. Many were carefully sewn together in books of cloth. Some were unfinished. Some were scribbled on scrap paper such as grocery lists. Lavinia put the poems together and published a couple of volumes of Dickinson’s poetry before her own death in 1899. ‘Then Lavinia’s daughter published a more up-to-date collection in 1914. But it was not until 1955 — seventy-four years after her death — that the complete works of Emily Dickinson were finally published. XXVII I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? ‘Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog! Here is one of Emily Dickinson’s well-known poems. Like all of Dickinson’s poems, it is only numbered, not titled. 16Responding Think About What You Have Read What caused Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin? How did Louisa May Alcott’s family make her determined to be a success? How many of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published during her lifetime? E@ Harriet Beecher Stowe was not the first person to write about the evils of slavery. Why do you think Uncle Tom’s Cabin struck such a chord with the American public? Activity Choose one of the three women writers you found especially interesting. Write a paragraph telling how you think that writer made a difference in the world. What question would you have liked to ask the writer you chose? What do you think she might have answered?Beat oa HOUGHTON MIFFLIN