A taste for charity: The cultural work of American women's benevolence literature, 1850--1910

Through benevolence literature, or writing about charity and uplift, American women attempt to declare their independence in both the literary world and the larger society. Linking charity with taste fostered greater variety in female authorship, and benevolence literature frequently uses this wider range of expression to promote cultural and social advancement for women. Texts construct women's civic involvement as compulsory and reinvent the practice of philanthropy as providing education in hegemonic cultural and aesthetic values; they also exploit associations between middle-class womanhood and morality, literacy, and taste. Using Pierre Bourdieu's theory that class mediation is the role of the petite bourgeoisie, I argue that benevolence literature's charitable women act as cultural liaisons to elevate the upward mobility of disadvantaged people. Civil War narratives by Louisa May Alcott and Mary Livermore invoke the rhetoric and conventions of sentimentality to promote women's fitness for improving the ethics and literary preferences of enlisted men, but they also mimic the style of war journalism and the visceral imagery of photography. Although benevolence literature occasionally seeks approval from male religious leaders, as we see in the Reverend Mr. Power's guidance of reformer Christie Devon in Alcott's Work (1873), the genre promotes women's autonomy through independent work on charitable projects. Benevolence literature expands female authorship by mobilizing a variety of voices, styles, and subject matter, including supposedly masculine ones, to advance a feminist agenda. The House of Mirth (1905) emphasizes the mutual rewards of Gerty Farish's charity, which could provide an escape from the compulsory marriage Lily Bart resists. Disrupting the marriage plot of the sentimental novel, benevolence literature shuns matrimony except when both partners commit to reform, as with Work's David Sterling and Iola Leroy's Dr. Latimer. More often, it features women who pursue rewarding work outside the home instead of marriage. However, working-class and nonwhite women writers were unable to enjoy social opportunities and literary success to the same extent as their privileged white counterparts: writing by Zitkala-Sa and Hilda Satt Polacheck demonstrates that fluency in the dominant culture did not guarantee acceptance into it.