A Glimpse of Female American Authors and their Writing

While it is no secret that the past is fraught with prejudices, literature gives readers a unique glimpse into the realities of being an early American woman, but only through careful analysis. Women were not permitted to publish merely to express their own thoughts or sentiments at the time, so understanding the true emotions and motivations behind early publications can be a challenge. A moral or religious lesson could be used to excuse the breach of etiquette incurred by publishing their works, but even with moral lessons for their readers, female authors needed to justify their writings and maintain their ‘proper’ place of subservience to the will of men, God, or social order.

In an effort to conform to social order, Anne Bradstreet was pressured into subverting the value of her own poetry. In “The Author to Her Book,” Bradstreet speaks of her poetry like her child and belittles it mercilessly. She declares it unfit for critical reading, deciding that “’mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.” (225). Bradstreet derides her poems for their imperfections and emphasizes her dissatisfaction with them – all in the book in which they are published. Her guilt over and justification of her publishing are exclusively feminine, as no male poet of the time would feel the need to apologize for his publication. Bradstreet also remains carefully obedient to social norms by using feminine-coded imagery to describe her work. In addition to the obvious metaphor of a child, Bradstreet writes: “In better dress to trim thee was my mind / But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.” (225). These images of her mind as a house and the finer points of her poetry as clothing are strongly feminine. If Bradstreet’s mind is a home, she has some claim to...

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... express their true intents, these fetters serve to give modern readers an accurate glimpse into the condition of women at the time. Their literature lacks directness, as women were restricted by social conventions that bound them into certain codes of conduct, and their literature is constrained in the same way - the literature of these authors serves not only as art but as a portrait of their lives, controlled by maintaining status and imparting the proper wisdom. Whether direct tales of a woman’s life filtered through the lens of Calvinism, or self-referential and self-deprecating poetry, or fictional caricatures of the gender stereotypes of the time, the works of these four women act as reflections of their experiences and allow modern readers to reach a deeper understanding of the conditions facing women in a society learning what it meant to truly be American.