Managing Literacy Mothering America

Womens Narratives On Reading And Writing

Sarah Robbins

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780822973034
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Managing Literacy, Mothering America accomplishes two monumental tasks. It identifies and defines a previously unstudied genre, the domestic literacy narrative, and provides a pioneering cultural history of this genre from the early days of the United States through the turn of the twentieth century.Domestic literacy narratives often feature scenes that depict women-mostly middle-class mothers-teaching those in their care to read, write, and discuss literature, with the goal of promoting civic participation. These narratives characterize literature as a source of shared knowledge and social improvement. Authors of these works, which were circulated in a broad range of publication venues, imagined their readers as contributing to the ongoing formation of an idealized American community.At the center of the genre's history are authors such as Lydia Sigourney, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Frances Harper, who viewed their writing as a form of teaching for the public good. But in her wide-ranging and interdisciplinary investigation, Robbins demonstrates that a long line of women writers created domestic literacy narratives, which proved to be highly responsive to shifts in educational agendas and political issues throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.Robbins offers close readings of texts ranging from the 1790s to the 1920s. These include influential British precursors to the genre and early twentieth-century narratives by women missionaries that have been previously undervalued by cultural historians. She examines texts by prominent authors that have received little critical attention to date-such as Lydia Maria Child's Good Wives—and provides fresh context when discussing the well-known works of the period. For example, she reads Uncle Tom's Cabin in relation to Harriet Beecher Stowe's education and experience as a teacher.Managing Literacy, Mothering America is a groundbreaking exploration of nineteenth-century U.S. culture, viewed through the lens of a literary practice that promoted women's public influence on social issues and agendas.

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Literacy and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

The happiest and holiest use to which women can devote their talents and education is, to help those of the other sex with whom they are connected, their fathers, husbands, brothers, sons. And this kind of literary companionship is more needed in our country than any where in the world.

(Review of Lydia Maria Child’s biography of Madame Roland, Ladies’ Magazine)

Genre, Gender, and Political Society

In recuperating the domestic literacy narrative, we uncover a form whose muted traces in American literature, education practices, and gendered social roles still have significant implications for our national culture today. The task is complex, however, and requires using several analytical tools in concert. Partly because the genre often participated simultaneously in several related literary modes (including sentimentalism, advice literature, and protest writing such as abolitionist texts), its distinctive rhetorical characteristics have been submerged. To recover a sense of the genre in action, we also need to examine connections linking its aesthetic, political, and educational work. Consideration of this body of texts as a “genre,” therefore, includes identifying historicizable, shared reading and writing practices that gradually built a community whose members would have responded positively to elements within these texts not always easily accessible to us today. So, in this study, specific examples from the domestic literacy narrative genre are certainly interpreted as sharing internal textual traits. But rather than focusing primarily on the relative “merits” of particular texts from a formalist perspective, this analysis of individual narratives and the genre as a whole emphasizes interactions among those texts and a national identity-building process, as engaged in by groups of readers, along with the writers imagining their responses.¹ In this sense, my readings of specific narratives interpret genre in a Bakhtinian sense—as constructed (and always developing) out of dialogic exchanges involving writers, texts, and readers, with each of those three elements responsive to the other two.² Thus, I socially situate “genre” as a literary category for cultural analysis, including literacy practices associated with production and use of these narratives. Domestic literacy narratives were shaped by social forces such as changing curricula in women’s education and new venues for publishing that welcomed women’s writing.³ For this study, then, the analytical tool of “genre” is broadly conceived, situated in particular material-culture conditions and viewed as part of an array of sociolinguistic exchanges involved in culture making. To emphasize the genre’s interplay between textual portrayals and community-building actions, I examine ways that depicting domesticated literacy as socially beneficial would encourage readers to appreciate internal textual features as literary elements but also to imitate the literacy-oriented actions seen there.

The outlines of this genre’s history can be traced in episodes from an evolving ideology favoring women’s literary teaching of the nation. Initially, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these narratives advocated American middle-class women’s public influence through maternal management of children’s reading and writing at home. As the nineteenth century progressed, the genre increasingly advocated domesticated instruction in the common schools and benevolent activities (e.g., urban infant schools, training for servants). By its twilight phase, the genre was delineating the social benefits of feminized literacy management in hybrid educational sites ranging from women’s clubs to the mission movement.

Individual texts built upon a core premise—that motherly literacy management could create enlightened members of the national community. Authors intervened in the political sphere to address an array of national concerns by portraying idealized cultural actors at work, guided by literacy-centered, domesticated instruction. So, for example, these types of portraits emerged: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s empathetic consideration of Lucy Lee as a well-taught domestic employee in Live and Let Live (1837); Harriet Beecher Stowe’s portrayal of young George Shelby as a maternally molded leader in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852); and Jane Addams’s depiction of settlement house–trained immigrants’ successful assimilation efforts in Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). These celebratory stories about domestic literacy experiences ranged from extended narratives, such as Lydia Sigourney’s Lucy Howard’s Journal (1858); to short tales published in inexpensive form for children and their mothers, such as Lydia Maria Child’s Flowers for Children collection (1854) and her sixty-three-page Emily Parker tale (1827); to narrative poems like Frances Harper’s “Chloe” series on post–Civil War literacy acquisition by former slaves. Shorter forms of the narrative appeared as anecdotes about maternal literacy management woven into advice pieces for manuals such as Sigourney’s Letters to Mothers (1839).

The genre was highly gendered. With that in mind, the overarching goal of this study is to write a feminist cultural history of a nineteenth-century genre closely associated with feminized constructions of literacy, literature, education, and nation building.⁴ Donna Landry describes a “feminist literary history” as necessarily involving archival recovery—as in this study of “historical figures who were women, and sometimes men, but also figures of femininity and masculinity as they structure textual systems.”⁵ The development of the literary genre under review here, in fact, was often implicated in questions about the proper place of women (and men) in society. For instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe did not come under criticism for her 1830s–40s parlor literature—even when she began to write in support of the temperance movement. But in the 1850s, the most vehement attacks against her extension of the domestic literacy narrative into the highly charged political arena of slavery framed their condemnations as questions about her sexuality, suggesting she was absurdly trying to act the part of a man. Although the authors and women readers of domestic literacy narratives certainly cannot be classified as feminists, they were fully engaged in consideration of woman’s place in society.⁶

Tracing the genre’s history requires taking an extended view of the nineteenth century and situating the narrative form in a political context. We can locate its beginnings in the years just after the Revolution, when civic rhetoric’s vital position in the new nation raised questions about the specific goals of women’s reading and writing.⁷ In 1789, when adoption of the new Constitution signaled the continued exclusion of women from suffrage, alternative routes to political influence gained heightened importance and so became the focus of many middle-class women’s texts. The genre faded as an explicit form around 1920, when American women’s increasing access to higher education and the professions was broadening their opportunities to exercise management-oriented roles beyond the home. Also, finally gaining the vote made the effort to guide others’ politics through literacy management seem less essential than before. Overall, such a time frame foregrounds the political context of the genre’s development to affiliate this study with Fredric Jameson’s conception of “narrative as a socially symbolic act” and Larzer Ziff’s view that literary and political culture are always interacting.⁸

One risk of constructing this roughly chronological narrative of the genre’s history is giving the impression that its development was teleological. In fact, its growth and decline were both uneven and recursive. Another limitation to this chronological presentation is that, given my focus on the genre’s stages, individual authors’ simultaneous activity in other related literary modes cannot be elaborated, so productive interactions like those between the domestic literacy narrative and Lydia Sigourney’s poetry or Frances Harper’s abolitionist speeches may be obscured. Nonetheless, by stretching the boundaries for women’s nineteenth-century literature in both directions, we can avoid a compartmentalized sense of this period. On the one hand, early nineteenth-century writers developing the domestic literacy narrative drew from sources situated in the eighteenth century, yet forward-looking in their views on gendered literacy. On the other hand, women writing in the early twentieth century could still deploy elements from the genre to great rhetorical advantage, even if they were resisting some of the constraints associated with its earlier versions.

Taken as a whole, the period focused on here loosely matches one (1780–1920) set by historian Paula Barker, and the stages she describes for women’s political activism parallel phases in the history of domestic literacy narratives.⁹ Thus, where Barker describes a first phase in American women’s political involvement as represented by the republican motherhood ideal, I see nascent equivalents in literary texts such as Hannah Foster’s The Boarding School (1798) and Judith Sargent Murray’s The Story of Margaretta (1798), as well as in full-fledged domestic literacy narratives by Lydia Sigourney, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child. Barker characterizes a second phase, around the middle of the nineteenth century and through the Civil War, when women’s domestication of politics extended the republican mother model into the community by way of benevolent activities. In that vein, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a second-stage domestic literacy narrative. Finally, where Barker outlines a third historical stage when women moved to more direct action in politics, I interpret narratives reconfiguring the domestic literacy narrative to represent mission and settlement teaching as professionalized yet still domesticated literacy management.

Literacy in the Domestic Setting

While taking a literary tradition as my primary subject, I foreground literacy to stress how, for authors and audiences involved in the development of this genre, the role that social reading and writing played in molding public culture was considered crucial and therefore necessary to control. In particular, how and why Americans interacted with literature were questions of great political importance. The word “domestic” in “domestic literacy narrative” both locates the social acquisition of literacy in a feminized, home-oriented context and constructs that process as reaching outward beyond the home by suggesting that American literacy itself was being domesticated. So, in cultural terms, domesticating literacy represents both the subject the authors using this genre wrote about (feminized management of reading and writing, especially reading and writing of literature) and the related sociopolitical process they were trying to carry out discursively (taking control of the public’s reading and writing by “domesticating” these activities). The characteristics of this national teaching enterprise, meanwhile, were shaped by nineteenth-century assumptions about literacy itself.

Significantly, recent research in literacy studies has indicated how the conception of literacy that guided the production and reception of these texts was very different from familiar ideas about literacy at today’s turn into the twenty-first century. Our own everyday assumptions about literacy are closely tied to a twentieth-century phenomenon: the mass public-education system shaped by industrialization’s factory model of goods-making and of schooling (itself geared to “producing” effective goods-makers).¹⁰ But in the nineteenth-century United States, educational theorists—as well as leading political thinkers and women writers working in the domestic literacy genre—conceived of literacy in more creative, interactive, and moral terms. Furthermore, literacy-based civic nurturance was seen as a key responsibility of middle-class mothers in the home. As Catharine Maria Sedgwick observed in Means and Ends (1839), for example, “reading families” “cultivated” not only a “taste for reading” in their children but also a knowledge of “how to read”; and the agent specifically assigned this important teaching task was undoubtedly “the intelligent mother who understood the history and condition of her country” because of the “attention” she gave to her own well-managed reading program.¹¹ Texts like Sedgwick’s help show that the view that current public-education policies such as standardized testing promote today—that literacy is a neutral set of skills related more to the ability to perform tasks in the job market than to a set of ideologically charged social practices—did not yet dominate in the nineteenth century.¹² Instead, social links between literacy learning and proactive citizenship were more explicitly valued then than now. Though writers producing domestic literacy narratives did not employ a phrase exactly like Theodore Sizer’s “public literacy,” they often theorized as self-consciously as today’s progressive educators about the cultural aspects of language development and about the national political implications of communal literacy practices.¹³ Specifically, many nineteenth-century writers advocated a national literacy nurtured by maternally managed literature study that generated a moral sense in readers and therefore encouraged appropriate social actions for the polis.

Sedgwick’s 1848 preface to The Boy of Mount Rhigi provides an apt example of this conception. Situating her text as “the first of a series to be published by Mr. Charles H. Peirce for the young people of our country,” Sedgwick explains that the narrative had been written “to awaken, in those of our young people who have been carefully nurtured, a sense of their duty.” Declaring that “the safety of the republic depends” on “the young” acquiring “goodness” and spreading it to others, Sedgwick hopes that “after reading the following story” her audience can enact a generous form of civic responsibility.¹⁴ As Sedgwick’s preface suggests, nineteenth-century women who developed the domestic literacy narrative were fostering a view of literacy similar to Charles Schuster’s recent definition, constructed partly to refute narrow, skills-related conceptions of literacy. Schuster posits a broadly proactive brand of literacy. He declares that being literate is having the “ability to make oneself heard and felt, to signify,” so that literacy can be “the way in which we make ourselves meaningful not only to others but through others to ourselves.” Such a vision, Schuster says, conceives of literacy as “socially constituted meaning-making” rather than simply as decoding print text, with a literate person being able to use language “to organize experience” through “speech genres,” as described by Bakhtin.¹⁵

Schuster’s invocation of the inclusive Bakhtinian “speech genre” is, in fact, particularly relevant to this study. Setting Bakhtin’s formulation of the “speech genre” (as any purposeful utterance aimed at an anticipated audience) within Schuster’s even larger framework of literacy as the ability to make socially significant meaning, we can position both of these ideas next to Sedgwick’s description of the reading process she desires to elicit from her audience. Sedgwick’s hope for enlightened behavior as a result of reading, then, becomes more complex than acknowledged by the dismissive view of didactic texts’ goals that has been dominant in literary studies. We can see how, for writers and readers of such teaching narratives, the traits linking genre conventions within print texts to literacy practices and shared beliefs were often more purposeful than we might think today. Further, we can draw on social literacy theories like those of Brian V. Street to demonstrate how these narratives affirmed a view of literacy as ideologically charged yet still allowing for individual agency—by both writers and readers.¹⁶

One approach for recovering a clear picture of how the genre represented a social view of literacy is to note how particular texts portray occasions of shared, home-based reading and writing as recurring practices with results that could be anticipated by readers. For instance, the narratives often use a scene of a maternal figure asking her naive charges (whether children in a Sigourney story or immigrants in an Addams essay) questions about a reading designed to lead them toward appropriate behaviors. A nineteenth-century reader would have recognized this oral literacy exchange as a frequent activity in properly guided American homes. She also would have recognized particular linguistic techniques depicted in the scene—for example, using figurative language or Biblical allusions for explanations—as teaching models she could replicate in her own management of domestic reading. One reason this response to such a scene would have been possible is that the genre reinforced views of what Shirley Brice Heath would call “literacy events” (or particular occasions of literacy being used) as potentially becoming what Street would call “literacy practices” (regular patterns of literacy use linked to shared beliefs about social action).¹⁷

A brief narrative essay from the 1831 Ladies’ Magazine, “Social Lyceum,” provides an apt window into the kind of social literacy practices that the genre both reflected and promoted. This submission narrates the history of a parlor reading-and-writing club. This group’s shared applications of literacy...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Domestic Literacy and Social Power
• 1. Literacy and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America
• 2. New England Authors and the Genre’s Social Role
• 3. Cross-Class Teaching and Domesticated Instruction
• 4. Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a Domestic Literacy Narrative
• 5. Frances Harper’s Literacy Program for Racial Uplift
• 6. Missionary Motherhood
• Conclusion: Jane Addams, Oprah Winfrey, and Schoolteachers’ Stories
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index