| This dissertation explores the rise and acceptance of an increasingly public, active and aggressive ideal of American womanhood in the first six decades of the nineteenth century, and role this ideal played in the lives of actual Americans. I have found evidence of this active vision of womanhood in a wide variety of sources, including manuscript collections, trial transcripts, newspapers, autobiographies, journals, pamphlets, novels, poems, engravings and songsters. My project focuses specifically on four types of publicly active and aggressive women: murderesses, "fallen women," public-speaking female reformers, and women who worked on or near Civil War battlefields, most often as nurses, but also as teachers, soldiers, or doctors. It examines a broad spectrum of these transgressive women, black and white, poor and well-to-do. If African-American women and working women were seldom the focus of the mainstream press's obsession with murderesses, white working women were at the center of debates on prostitution, the propriety of female public activism and war work, and so also were African-American women in the latter two cases.;Because historians have constructed "true womanhood" or "separate spheres" as an ideology that limited proper women to certain behaviors and physical locations, as well as values, the publicly active and aggressive female subjects of my study appear anomalous. My dissertation introduces a new concept, "redemptive womanhood," to account for the large numbers of women, both inside and outside the white middle-class, whose actions and ideals make little sense in terms of "true womanhood" or "separate spheres." The key to redemptive womanhood was that Americans believed women were more moral, pious and nurturing than men, and that these qualities made it women's duty to redeem the nation from sin or immorality. I argue that gender ideology, then, did not contain or define women physically or geographically, as historians have asserted. Nineteenth-century Americans knew their gender ideology placed no clear boundaries on specific women's actions and locations: rather, it established women's position as the ethical and religious foundation of American society. If redemptive womanhood constrained women to be pious and ethical, it also freed them to do virtually anything---including, for example, dressing up as men and going off to war---as long as they asserted their motives were pure. |
