Abstract
In this dissertation, I consider how the ideology of true womanhood functions in three texts written by U.S. women during the late Antebellum and Civil War eras: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Augusta Jane Evans’ Macaria, or, Altars of Sacrifice (1864), and Harriet Ann Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Contrary to the longstanding popular view of true womanhood as a monolithic “cult” which worked to oppress women, my readings prove that it was a living, contested ideology which held many contradictory possibilities within it. In the chapters that follow, I analyze the ways in which Stowe, Evans, and Jacobs use true womanhood in support of their political arguments on the one hand, and, on the other, how they use their political arguments to offer support for their refined interpretations of true womanhood. While their texts all have this interplay in common, the visions of womanhood that they depict have entirely different emotional tenors as well as numerous gradations in their portrayals of the ideology’s primary virtues. In delineating these differences and exploring their origins, I show how factors like race, socioeconomic standing, sectional loyalty, and personal views on familial and romantic relationships can affect interpretations and applications of the ideology. Taken individually, my readings of these narratives show how three female authors from vastly different backgrounds each took true womanhood as a politically meaningful ideology and wielded it in support of their respective textual aims and moral matrices. Taken as a whole, they help to illuminate a series of critical tensions within the definition of true womanhood and give insight into how we might come to a renewed critical conception of the ideology that will allow for a more nuanced approach when studying texts from the era.