Openings for Women

I think that Ruth Hall (like her creator, Fanny Fern) actually provides a good example of the cultural forces that Nina Baym writes about. The difficulty is in understanding how both Baym and Fern use terms like "education" and "profession." I remember that when I started college back in the early 1980s (not long ago at all!), I went against the wishes of my father, who said that, because I would never be more than a secretary (he had a very high opinion of clerical workers...), I did not need a college education. Once I was at school, I met other women whose parents had not wanted them to go, either; one woman told me that her parents thought she was attending in order to earn her "MRS degree"--in other words, to find a college-educated husband. Her own interests weren't important.

Let's go back 130 years, when *no* 4-year, liberal arts colleges were open to women. The highest formal education a woman could get would be in the kind of "seminary" that Ruth Hall attends: a place where a woman would learn nice handwriting, basic arithmetic, needlework, elocution (so she could recited poems to delight her friends and husband), and a few other, decidedly non-academic skills. With this kind of education, a woman like Ruth Hall had a lot of trouble competing in the literary marketplace. Fanny Fern was "lucky" because she went to perhaps the best school of its kind. Most "educated" women went to much worse schools, ones where they received no background in literature, history, or classical languages: all of the tools of the "serious" male writer.

The notion of "profession" is important here, too, because in the mid-1900s there was still some prejudice against people who wrote for money. Most of the writers whose work we are reading this semester *did* write for money (or tried to) but they did not write for newspapers or magazines--periodicals whose very nature forced them to crank out texts and limited their ability to revise or polish. Men like Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, and (to an extent) Whitman would not have called themselves "professional" writers. Fanny Fern, who depended on her writing to survive, was considered a "professional." For this reason, among others, her writing has been treated less seriously than has the writing of some of her male peers.