“A Phrase Seldom Heard”: Defining the Self-Made Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Abstract
It is practically a commonplace to note that “Americans love a Self-made Man,” invoking an idealized, and perhaps even idolized, cultural myth that has figured prominently in American cultural, political, and economic history since the nineteenth century. But what of the Self-made Woman? In 1881, Emmeline B. Wells wrote that “self-made woman… is a phrase seldom heard,” though qualified candidates did exist. Wells’s desire for such acknowledgment reflects the enduring allure of the self-made myth, which offered an adaptable and nonspecific narrative about the attainment of social power and cultural influence through individual exertion of personal traits rather than by recourse to tradition or inheritance.Animated by the self-made myth conceptually rather than literally, the Self-made Woman I discuss rejects her cultural “inheritance”—the ideal of True Womanhood—and looks beyond the outward displays of virtue and strict adherence to domestic ideology that defined the True Woman to find alternative ways to be moral, socially active, and religiously engaged while also forging a strong sense of autonomy, self-sufficient, and personal fulfillment. In so doing, the Self-made Woman lays groundwork for the rise of the New Woman at the end of the nineteenth century.“‘A Phrase Seldom Heard’: Defining the Self-Made Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature” examines works by three women authors, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to highlight an unexamined womanly “type,” the Self-made Woman, which I argue provides a literary context to bridge a gap in scholarly accounts of the transition between the True Woman ideal and the New Woman ideal. Informed by a new historical approach to literary analysis, my research also draws upon the fields of disability studies (chapter one) and book history (chapter three) to describe the Self-made Woman and to discuss her relationship to her contemporary society. Through analysis of both fiction and nonfiction works, I demonstrate the authors’ reimagining of certain core virtues of True Womanhood through the lens of key values of Self-made Womanhood including independence, community, religious belief, fairness, service, and empathy.
Subject Area
American literature|Womens studies|Literature
Recommended Citation
Cosacchi, Julia Lynn, "“A Phrase Seldom Heard”: Defining the Self-Made Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature" (2020). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI28314304.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI28314304
