The Second Sex in the Fourth Estate
In the United States, "fourth estate" commonly refers to the press--particularly to the periodical press and its journalistic function--as a de facto fourth branch of government, and the historical and popular uses of the phrase associate it with the power of public opinion as a necessary component of more formal governance. The thematic cluster of essays presented in this issue of Legacy considers how women have functioned as members of the fourth estate. Our chronological range here is broad, comprising essays that begin with a study of one of the earliest women to write for the American periodical press, Judith Sargent Murray, and concluding with a review essay that surveys the work of women who wrote as professional journalists into the mid-twentieth century. Such a thematic focus is appropriate for a journal such as Legacy, for the very word suggests an interest in the daily, the contingent, and the historical (journal stems from the Latin journalis, meaning daily). Like magazines, journals' near cousins, Legacy has a heterogeneous content; in its pages, readers can find an olio of writings loosely related to American women writers and gleaned--to borrow Murray's metaphor--from the ideas shared by colleagues with similar interests. Such gleanings, brought together in the columns of a newspaper or on the pages of a journal, frequently produce fortuitous--albeit unintended and unpredicted--mutual illuminations, insights that are less the property of a single author's contribution than the result of their convergence in a shared conceptual space. JOURNALISM AND OUR OBJECT(S) OF STUDY Journalism as we have loosely defined it here (as multiply authored collections of texts that appear at regular intervals) differs from our traditional objects of study in several key ways. A book, as Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway note, has traditionally been considered to be a unique object and has been marketed as a discrete product (11-12). Books--of necessity, perhaps--have a more limited and class-stratified circulation. As Radway and Kaestle point out, "The distribution of book readers ... is not random; book reading in the United States tends to correlate with education and wealth. In fact, there were far more readers of newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than there were readers of books" (19-20). Concomitantly, it seems logical to assume that there were far more women who wrote for newspapers and magazines in these periods than there were women who wrote and published books. Most of these women journalists have not yet been fully or even briefly studied. How would thoughtful studies of such writers modify our present understandings of women as cultural producers? We might take Jane Cazneau and Margaret Fuller as a comparative case in point, as Megan Griffin suggests in her Profile of Cazneau. Why has the recovery of Fuller succeeded so notably, while knowledge about Cazneau remains relatively incomplete? The two knew and associated with each other and with other women journalists. Both were advocates of women's rights who nevertheless did not affiliate with feminist organizations; both published more frequently in nonfictional and journalistic genres than in individual books; both were intimately involved with international diplomatic and political issues; both were war correspondents. Cazneau, however, unlike Fuller, was not aligned with and supported by the literary establishment of Transcendental Boston and Cambridge, nor did she cultivate ties with European intelligentsia. Rather, she often wrote from contested borderland locations--the Southwest, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The feminist literary recovery of Fuller was a logical outfall of an American Renaissance-centered field imaginary, and Cazneau, by contrast, was embroiled in expansionist projects that have only recently begun to force a revision of that field. Moreover, Cazneau's political alignments were not those with which traditional women's histories have been comfortable. …
Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (1818–1907)
Although Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley made only a single contribution to American women's writing, her significance as a writer and figure in US cultural history should not be underestimated. (1) Her memoir, Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, recounts a childhood and young adulthood in slavery followed by several years as a high-profile dressmaker to the nation's political elite. (2) Her intimate association with Mary Todd Lincoln made her a celebrity, and her chronicle of this relationship earned her notoriety. With this profile, I hope to generate wider scholarly interest in Keckley, first by offering a brief biography and then by suggesting some future critical directions and potential contexts for teaching her memoir. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Elizabeth Hobbs was born circa 1818 in Dinwiddie Court-House, Virginia, to enslaved parents, and her upbringing was marked by family separation and constant physical abuse. (3) When she was in her early twenties Hobbs was relocated to St. Louis, where her owner hired her out as a seamstress. She worked tirelessly to establish a name for herself, noting, "The best ladies in St. Louis were my patrons, and when my reputation was once established I never lacked for orders. With my needle I kept bread in the mouths of seventeen persons for two years and five months" (45). While in St. Louis she met and married James Keckley. Her marriage, however, was short-lived, as Keckley soon realized that her new husband had misrepresented himself as free and, in her words, CC proved dissipated, and a burden instead of a helpmate" (50). Fiercely committed to attaining freedom, Keckley raised the necessary funds to purchase herself and her son by borrowing from acquaintances, and upon receiving free papers in 1855 she moved to Washington, DC. She quickly established herself as a seamstress for the city's most influential residents; a regular client was Varina Howell Davis, the wife of Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. Keckley was particularly eager to work in the White House. She writes, "Ever since arriving in Washington I had a great desire to work for the ladies of the White House, and to accomplish this end I was ready to make almost any sacrifice consistent with propriety" (76). Eventually, her aspirations were realized, as she secured a position as the personal dressmaker, or "modiste," for Mary Lincoln (92). (4) In the years immediately before and during the Civil War, Keckley occupied an exceptional role as a White House insider. She virtually lived with the Lincolns on the eve of the war; consoled Mary Lincoln after the death of her son, Willie, and the assassination of her husband; and helped to craft--literally--the iconic image of the Lincolns. Her recollections of these intimate moments make up a substantial portion of Behind the Scenes. Following her husband's assassination, Mary Lincoln found herself in financial straits and sought to sell her husband's personal items as well as several of her dresses. Many saw this decision as a breach of propriety and an affront to her late husband's legacy. The press seized upon the story, which became known as the "Old Clothes Scandal." Keckley entered into this fray herself with the publication of Behind the Scenes in 1868. First published by G. W. Carleton, Behind the Scenes is attributed to "Elizabeth Keckley, formerly a slave, but more recently a modiste, and friend to Mrs. Abraham Lincoln." This authorial identification, a narrative in itself, exemplifies the self-conscious construction of identity and political acumen that made Keckley such a success. Unlike most slave narratives, which begin by announcing abolitionist motives in the preface, Keckley's offers a strikingly different rationale for authorship: I have been prompted by the purest motive. Mrs. Lincoln, by her own acts, forced herself into notoriety. She stepped beyond the formal lines which hedge about a private life, and invited public criticism. …
First Steps Toward a History of Reading
Preface (2014) by Robert DarntonThe "First Steps" toward a history of reading that I described in AJFS twenty-eight years ago have now turned into something of a stampede. They lead in many directions-so many that I cannot map them here. The excellent anthology edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, A History of Reading in the West (English edition, Polity Press, 1999) surveys much of the ground covered by the end of the century. But the twentieth century already looks like the distant past.Why so near and yet so far? The answer, in a word, or rather an acronym, is WWW: the World Wide Web, which came into existence in 1991 and has already transformed reading for millions of people. To be sure, we may exaggerate the change, because we are living in the middle of it. The printed codex is far from dead. In fact, more books are now being published than ever before. In 2012 the number of titles produced in the United States increased by six per cent, and the increase was much greater in developing countries such as Brazil and China. It comes in the form of books composed of printed paper, books to be read by turning pages rather than by scrolling, as the ancients had done before the invention of the codex at the beginning of the common era and as moderns do today when they read texts on computers. Having survived two thousand centuries, the codex will probably continue far into the future. And yet...Yet readers everywhere sense that reading is being revolutionized. They sense it through the tips of their fingers when they touch electronic screens - a Fingerspitzengefuhl unlike the tactility of books held in one's hands. They hear it with the click that takes them instantly from one text to another. They see it as they connect cursors with icons and when they search for information stored in clouds rather than libraries. The physical foundation of texts and the sensory experience of deciphering them are undergoing a transformation greater than anything since the time of Gutenberg.I think it can be called a "revolution". The word is often overused. In "First Steps Toward a History of Reading", I objected to its overuse in the argument, first developed by Rolf Engelsing, that a "reading revolution" took place in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. I did not dispute the importance of changes such as the increased availability of journals, magazines, and a wide variety of light literature; but they struck me as less profound than changes in many Western countries during the nineteenth century - the development of nearly universal literacy and inexpensive reading matter produced by new technology for a mass public. I may have lost that argument, but I find it symptomatic that ,4 History of Reading in the West, which endorses the concept of a reading revolution in the eighteenth century, ignored the revolution that was taking place at the time of its publication. It never mentions the Internet or the Web, not even in the final chapter on the future of reading. Has the history of reading failed to prepare us for comprehending the changes that occurred under our noses?We should not expect historians to be prophets. They have enough difficulty in sorting out the past. But they have identified one tendency that may help us to make sense of the current confusion. In the history of communication, they argue, one medium does not displace another, at least not in the short run. Manuscript publishing continued for centuries after the invention of printing by movable type, and similar continuities can be seen in the history of journalism, cinema and television. The sustainability of the codex in a world of computers, iPads and smart phones should not come as a surprise. Reading has become more complex and varied, not shallower and shorter. Streaming, texting, and tweeting do not signal the extinction of books and libraries. The digital is not the enemy of the analog. They live together in an environment where new possibilities constantly open up without closing off old ones. …